Wednesday, January 20, 2016

Bad Luck Travels with Stevo

Bad Luck Travels with Stevo

Your name is Stevo and you get off a plane in Guangzhou (from London via Hong Kong) at 9.30 a.m. and are met by your trusty guide who gets you into a taxi to his flat. Do you want a kip? No.

So you and your trusty guide head out on the metro. You are not too well travelled, the Mediterranean and North America - yes but the less western parts of the world – no. You have seen on the way from the airport that Guangzhou (GZ) is a big, modern city but you haven’t seen the commercial side. Lunch (with a couple of San Miguels) is obviously a good idea to fortify you at the local Vietnamese restaurant. You see an interesting looking building, wander a few back streets where they are selling stuff – lots of stuff. In this case stuff is largely tools, lights and electronic components. Stocks are ample – you can buy by the hundred or thousand should you so wish.

However, you then arrive at a real shopping place. Here they have seven floors of complete and utter shit. If you can think of anything in your life that you don’t need they have it. Or perhaps you need a glittering life-sized painted plastic horse?

A reviver at the local German bar (closed forever three weeks later – things move fast in GZ), an examination of the wholesale shoe market (there are definitely less than 1,000 shops there) and you are fit for a stroll to the BBR (Bar By the River for the ignorant) – the best bar in the City? Country? World? (Soon to be closed).

An incident on the way. Your guide appears to bump into somebody and the man drops something. Your guide apologises but the man starts to put his hands all over the guide talking some shit about “Japanese Kungfu” or similar. Your guide realises that he is a pickpocket and quickly puts his hands on his wallet and phone. So the man transfers his attention to you and, not hearing your guides warning (it was crowded and noisy) proceed to have your wallet lifted.

Welcome to Guangzhou!

However, you have a bit of luck and a local has spotted this and takes the wallet back off the thief and returns it to you. Phew! Of course there is no attempt to report this event to the police.

Into the BBR where there is no San Miguel just some crap imitation German beer. However, you do learn the dice game including the first few numbers in Chinese. It is a pity that you never get chance to use this new found knowledge and skill again on the whole trip.

We got up fairly late and went to the airport. Obviously after I, the guide who has taken a year to marry my pearls of wisdom with Stevo's photos and get it on the blog, had drunk the half bottle of champagne that had not been consumed the night before. We had a 2.30 flight with China Southern, who I know to be shit.

There isn't much to do at GZ airport so we went through into the waiting area and – waited. 2.30 came and went – it was still “Go to the gate”

By about 4.30 I was getting pretty annoyed and went off to investigate. Naturally I went to the executive lounge to at least try and get a couple of free G&Ts. She was having none of it so I went to the “Information Desk”  I asked simple questions like “When will we take off?” “Where is the plane?” etc. He just ignored me and talked to everyone around me. I was getting properly annoyed and picked up his computer screen so that he couldn't do anything else. He picked up a phone and dialed. Hmmm.... As most of you know I am a true coward and thought “He is phoning security” and left.

At 7.30 the status changes to “Flight Cancelled”. No apology, no instructions what to do – nothing. I know my way around well enough to go and hassle and we duly get put up in this rather grotty hotel.

Before breakfast we checked at reception what was happening – no news. We went back twenty minutes later at 8.20 to be told the bus was leaving at 8.20! It left at 8.45 but after that the flight worked. Don't fly China Southern.

When we finally got to Guillin we found out what the problem had been – fog. Why we couldn’t be told that in GZ is beyond me. This information was provided by our guide - Sophia. I first went to the area in 2001 when I was cycling along and suddenly I had a schoolgirl on either side of me offering guiding services.  One of them had been Sophia. I hadn’t seen her for 12 years and she had changed from a rather quiet schoolgirl into a confident mother. Her odd cycling style hasn’t changed though and she hasn't grown.
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Naturally things didn’t go well. I wanted to show Steve water flowing up hill. Wrong time of the year – it only happens when the river is flowing strongly – late summer or autumn, not February. We went to check but Sophia had told us already.

We went for a boat ride – just Steve and me.  The “boat” was eight bamboo poles bound together with the front ends bent up. We had a double seat and the motive power was provided by a man with a pole - like a punt. Steve and I have similar builds so the seat was cosy and when we came to the first weir we got stuck. Poleman had to get off and push – tipping us over the weir.  There were loads of other boats and occasionally we saw some other boats getting stuck on the weirs. However we managed a “stuck rate” of well over 50%. The poleman had no hesitation in accepting a beer when we had a pause. Actually it was a very pleasant trip.

We went for a walk round a cave. Plenty of concrete, broken stalactites and coloured lights but too many people (this is China) and too much artificiality with retail opportunities in the cave itself. Steve tried his luck at throwing balls through holes – probably the highlight!

Cycling round for a couple of days was actually quite good. Steve saw some of the rural conditions, how Sophia lives and picked oranges on her farm.

 One thing that we did and enjoyed (and I hadn’t done before) was cormorant fishing. At night you go out on the river and the fishermen let the cormorants out to go fishing. When they catch a fish they come back to the boat and the fisherman forces the bird to cough it up to show the tourists. That is the theory – the cormorants were much more interested in shagging than fishing. As far as we could work out one particular specimen was so randy that he tried to have his way with all the others – irrespective of their apparent sex. I do apologise for being in the photos, Steve’s photos are better than mine. Once a cormorant had caught a fish and the photo opportunities had been taken (Stevo and I were the only ones who would do it on our trip) the fisherman dropped us off and went fishing properly. No tip given or expected.


The flights after that worked quite well. Back to GZ and the following day to Beijing.

Naturally things went badly. The Temple of Heaven (my favourite building in China) was extremely busy, the Forbidden City was as boring as ever and, despite hours of searching, I couldn’t find the “rotten salmon” restaurant.

Hire a car for the day to go to the Great Wall and the Summer Palace.  Fog. Visibility on the Wall was about ten metres.  It also snowed a bit and some of the people were inadequately shod. The slipperiness of the snow gave Steve (in walking boots) the chance to play the hero rescuing the girls on the slippery slopes. I had better explain. The Wall is level almost nowhere – there are steps, many of them very steep in many places - up to 60 degrees - coming down I went backwards down a few, with slopes everywhere else so a covering of snow can get very slippery.


A year previously Matt had taken many photographs of the sunset round the Summer Palace. With Stevo still fog. There is some interest in the Summer Palace but all the buildings are relatively modern because the British spent three days sacking the place towards the end of the nineteenth century. They wanted to punish the emperor for being uppity so they destroyed his home rather than sack Beijing. The stone boat is quite interesting though although you can't go on it. That is what the whole naval budget went on one year.It is the setting that makes the place.

On to Qingdao (or Tsingtao). One of the things I insist on when I get visitors is that we go somewhere that I haven’t been to before. Qingdao is in Shandong province – a new one for me – there are only 3 of 36 provinces plus Taiwan at the time that I had not been to. (I can't post to blogspot in mainland China - this is from Taiwan)

The main interest is that Tsingtao is China’s leading beer and I wanted to go round the brewery. Naturally we could only go round the museum, not the brewery. It was reasonably interesting but not the real thing.

Guangzhou has areas of modern buildings and areas of old parts of the city. Qingdao doesn’t do that; you get old buildings right next to the modern ones.  So lunch in a very old backstreet cafĂ© and dinner in the yatch basin with Alice. Alice is a local who is one of my student friends in GZ.

We went for a stroll up the coast which was quite pleasant and remarkably peaceful. We realised afterwards that the reason it was so peaceful was that we were walking through an army base – not something I expect in China.

Back to GZ and Stevo was off to Hong Kong to meet her indoors.


It is a good job Stevo is a very patient man.

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