Trip to Thailand and China - 2016

   It is a disgrace, on my part, that more than six months have passed since Oki and I went on a wonderful trip to Thailand and China, and I have only just got around to writing up our story for this blog. I suppose I have been getting too much exercise and doing far less writing than I used to do, and I have got out of the writing habit.

   For Oki, it was his first time to both countries, and for me, the first time to China. It was also only the second time that Oki had visited developing countries, the first time being many years ago, when he visited Morocco. Luckily, Oki always keeps a travel diary, so I will have my memory rekindled by using his valuable notes.

   On Oki’s birthday, we flew on Jetstar (to be avoided whenever possible) to Phuket from Sydney. It was a basic, no-frills, but at least safe, flight, and amazingly, left Sydney on time and arrived in Phuket thirty minutes early – Jetstar is not known for being punctual. From my experience, it runs late 75% of the time.

   We stayed in Phuket Town, rather than at one of the tourist beach resorts, as we wanted to see the Thai people’s Phuket, with its old architecture, night markets, local cafes, traditional shops and back streets. Our hotel was clean, comfortable, friendly, and very cheap, and served the best buffet breakfast that we have ever experienced. We stayed at the Wide Suites. They provided free shuttle buses to Old Phuket Town and to the big Central Shopping Mall, and always had discounted, air-conditioned taxis on call to take us anywhere else we fancied.

   On the first day, when I was otherwise occupied, Oki decided to take a shortish walk of about five kilometres to see the local scenery, check out the local shops and cafes, and get his bearings on where the hotel was located relative to the main roads. It was a battle from start to finish, and he returned drenched with sweat and was totally exhausted. Almost every step of the way, on what was considered a pavement, was a disaster waiting to happen! Deep potholes, tilted concrete paving slabs and big cracks were everywhere, and he couldn’t take his eyes off his feet for fear of a fall. The heat and humidity were relentless, and every so often, a Buddhist shrine or other obstacle world appear in the middle of the footpath, requiring a detour onto the road, where crazy Asian drivers and cyclists would swerve unpredictably in random directions, with apparently no road rules to follow, and with a total lack of interest in pedestrian safety. It was every man for himself, and the biggest and fastest ruled the road! Oki survived, but only just!

                                     

  Soft Drink Offerings at a Streetside Buddhist Shrine / Phuket Transport for a Family of Three

                   

   On another day, we took the shuttle bus into Old Phuket Town and were very impressed with the old, Sino-Portuguese architecture that had been left behind. It was reasonably well maintained, brightly painted in an assortment of colours, and made the streets very attractive to wander around. The old shops were just as interesting, selling all sorts of goods at reasonable prices. Very few Westerners were present, so we knew we must be in the right part of town to see the ordinary people’s Phuket.

                    

        Sino-Portuguese Architecture In Old Phuket Town  / Telegraph Poles, Phuket-Style!!

              

   We ate dinner on a few evenings at a local streetside café run by a husband and wife called Dang and Yui. We took the risk, the first time, hoping our digestive systems would cope with the local microbiology, and we were lucky, so we knew we could eat safely there again. A beer and a good chicken curry with rice cost $8, and was delicious.  

   To satisfy our curiosity, we ventured to Patong Beach one day to see where the tourists like to go. It was quite a long taxi ride to get there, going up and down the hills and dales that make up the Phuket landscape. Apart from Patong’s sleek, modern shopping complex, there was the infamous and seedy Bangla Road where tourists go for their nightlife, a place full of cheap bars, nightclubs, strip joints, sex clubs and, I imagine, brothels. This amusing but vice-riddled road finally led down to the lovely Patong Beach. It was very similar to Australian beaches, with a long stretch of soft, yellow sand, spanning a gentle arc that curved around the surf. There were activities such as paragliding and jet-skiing, along with beach chairs for hire and bars to buy drinks from – all very nice, but nothing we couldn’t do in Australia.

   We had heard that Phuketans love to go to the night markets in Phuket Town, so this was a must-see place to go. One evening, we caught a taxi there, and wandered around a huge covered area full of stalls selling everything imaginable, at very good prices. I bought a few souvenirs there, but the highlight of the market was the food stalls, which sold a huge variety of the healthiest and most wonderful foods you could ever imagine. Thai food is delicious and super-healthy. We bought our dinner there and ate it at a little table outdoors, along with the rest of the crowd. It was a fun evening which I would recommend to anyone who visits Phuket.

  

               

                   

                   Phuket Night Market Stalls / Having a Beautiful Thai Dinner

   While in Phuket, I noticed Oki busily reading “Winston Churchill” by the fabulous Boris Johnson. I started to read it too, and couldn’t put it down. Boris Johnson is not only a great character, but also a very clever and well educated man, and a brilliant writer. Whatever your opinion is of Winston Churchill (and up till reading the book, my opinion of him wasn’t too great), you will be guaranteed a very enjoyable read about an interesting and important figure in modern world history.

   Then it was off to China to see my youngest son, Jack, now aged twenty-seven. Having suffered disappointment and subsequently a loss of interest in the science in which he was trained (MSc and research thesis in Neuroscience), Jack started studying Mandarin, and became very enthusiastic about teaching English as a Foreign Language to the Chinese. He studied an intensive English teaching course in Sydney, promptly lined up a teaching job at a private English college in China, and moved to Hangzhou, probably the most beautiful city in the whole country. This is an ancient city, with remnants of the old town, ancient pagodas and the famous lake which forms the start of the Grand Canal, a great ancient engineering work that linked Hangzhou to Peking. The canal was built between the 550’s B.C. and 609 A.D., and was renovated in the 1400’s and 1800’s.  Its purpose was to bring grain from the south to the north, and also to provide easy transport for soldiers who were needed up on the northern borders to fight off the Mongol invaders.  The Grand Canal, of course, also opened up irrigation for farming to feed China’s growing population. 

                                                                         

Modern Hangzhou Reflected in the Canal / Hangzhou Night Market  

   Unlike the old and incredibly slow and inefficient Phuket Airport, arrival at Hangzhou Airport was slick, modern, fast and efficient. Although I described China at the beginning of this blog as “developing”, it won’t be in that category for too much longer. Once the smaller towns and villages have had China’s wealth flow to them, China will be fully developed and, I imagine, will leave the decaying West behind. By Sydney standards, Hangzhou is well ahead of us already.

   From the airport, we caught a taxi to our Citadines Hotel in the centre of the city, and near to Jack’s flat and workplace. The air was overcast and smoggy, and the scenery consisted of vast, endless collections of tall, residential buildings, built in lots of twenty of this style and another twenty of that style. In Australia, we put up one building at a time, but in China, twenty are all built at once, from the same architectural plan. In between the tall buildings were flat, green fields of vegetables, large highways and a railway line for the 300km/hr bullet train to Shanghai.

                          

                                   Twenty at a Time!  / Tree-Lined Hangzhou With Surrounding Hills

   Our hotel was modern, quite expensive and located at a place called InTime City, a vast collection of shops and indoor family entertainment areas, selling products at Sydney prices. The children’s play areas were fantastic – so much fun for children of all ages, including my own! I would have loved to have played in these areas too! Oki and I decided that while Chinese children are still young, their parents give them a very happy time, before they are pushed into the onslaught of the intensive, rigorous, advanced and ultra-competitive education system that occupies their teenage years.

   

               InTime City Shopping Centre / High-Rise Living, Chinese Style

    Over the next few days, when Jack wasn’t at work, he showed us his flat, his workplace and his local haunts. His flat was tiny – room for a double bed and cupboard, but not room for a bedside table; one and a half square metres of bathroom, just enough to fit a loo and a hand-held shower with a drain-hole in the floor; no kitchen or space for a table and chair; just a bed, cupboard and loo. His workplace was very modern, spacious and attractive, designed to teach English to middle class families who could afford to pay for private classes, and who realised the importance of English for their children’s futures. His favourite local eating-place was interesting - although the main streets of Hangzhou are fully developed, the back streets are not, and this eating-place was in a back street! The café was small, with grease-riddled walls, fluorescent lighting and cheap furniture. Gas and water pipes linked the shop to an outdoor sink and cooking stove, not at the rear, but at the street front. A good meal of rice, meat and vegetables cost about $3, and was delicious. The owners of the café were very friendly and knew Jack well as a regular. They referred to him as “Foreigner”. Although the Chinese in Peking and Shanghai are getting used to foreigners, anywhere else in China is very Chinese, and foreigners are not a common sight. The three of us stood out like a sore thumb in Hangzhou.

   Unless you go on a guided tour or have someone who can speak Mandarin, don’t go to China alone. In Hangzhou, no-one could speak or read English. When Jack wasn’t with us, we felt like useless babies. We couldn’t order a taxi or ask anybody anything. We couldn’t say where we wanted to go. There was absolutely no way to communicate. One day, we went out without Jack, with a Chinese message he had written for us to hand to the taxi driver. We were nervous that we might not find our way home if we lost our message. On that day, we visited the beautiful botanical gardens, which were full of lovely trees, ponds, ornamental decoration and walkways. Being the height of summer, it was lovely to be under the shady trees, but the humidity finally drove us back home to the luxury of our hotel air conditioning.

   On the second night, after Jack had finished work, he took us to the evening markets in the old part of town, with its traditional buildings and pretty streetscapes. What a lovely experience it was, and what a fun place to go for souvenirs, photography and a good Chinese meal. We were joined by one of Jack’s workmates, an American girl from Michigan called Lacey, who came along for the fun.

                                                                                 

                                       The Xixi Wetlands

On another day, when Jack had a day off, we went to the Xixi Wetlands, a wonderful, large, manmade area of canals and ponds, full of trees, reeds and traditional houses and shops modelled on past times. To get around the park, people travelled by boat, and went from wharf to wharf, to enjoy the various walks and sights of each different location in the wetlands. The whole attraction was very popular and extremely well done. If you ever go to Hangzhou, this is a place we would all recommend to you.

   During the weekend, we all went to visit the great and beautiful, ancient West Lake that Hangzhou is so famous for, and what a beauty it was. Again, a must-see when in Hangzhou. To walk around the whole lake would take several hours, and in the hot and humid summer weather, this was not possible. We walked across the Broken Bridge Causeway, and were fascinated by the giant lotus lilies that China is so famous for. What amazing plants they were, with their huge leaves, their beautiful flowers and their alien-looking fruits. The lake was surrounded by several ancient pagodas, cafes and stalls, and, in cooler weather, it would be worth spending an entire day there.                                        

                    Path Beside West Lake  / West Lake with Lotus Lilies

During the days when Jack was at work, we often just wandered around the local streets, and were surprised to see that they were all tree-lined, very clean and uncrowded – not at all what we would have expected in China. The enormous residential blocks of flats that towered over us in all directions were softened by the greenery below. The shops and cafes were modern, clean and quite expensive, and the streets were full of people buzzing around on their electrically-powered motor scooters. We noticed that the women and girls looked so feminine in their pretty dresses. Long gone are the drab and uniform Chairman Mao suits!

   Jack has a beautiful Chinese girlfriend called Luna, and we had the pleasure of meeting her one evening. She was very shy about meeting us because, in Chinese culture, it is not normal to meet your boyfriend’s parents until you are about to marry. Jack finally managed to talk her into meeting me, and I made sure to put her at her ease. She couldn’t speak a word of English, so Jack was our translator. Luna is twenty-two, and is a trained midwife, a scary job for such a young woman. She is totally Chinese, meaning that she knows almost nothing about the outside world, and Jack is fascinated to talk to her and ask her about her world, compared with his. Luna, in return, is fascinated by her strange, alien boyfriend, and about the vast storehouse of knowledge he seems to have about the world and its history.

             

                    Jack and Luna  / Jack Learning the Traditional Chinese Art of Seal Making 

                                                                                         

Jack sometimes enjoys a dose of Western life, after work, when he visits a great restaurant called The Vineyard. He took us there on a couple of occasions and we loved the place too. They served great Western food and drinks, at reasonably cheap prices, in a relaxed and friendly atmosphere. Although we loved the Chinese food in Hangzhou, we also enjoyed having a change of scene too.

About to Board the Bullet Train

                                                

 I have a lovely Chinese friend called George, whom I met in Hobart, and he was on holiday in China at the same time as we were. We travelled for fifteen minutes by bullet train from Hangzhou to meet him at a town called Tongxian, and from there, we drove to a beautiful, historic village called Wuzhen. It is the Chinese equivalent of a small Venice, with canals, ancient Chinese bridges crossing the water, and traditional shops and homes along the waterside. It is now very much a living museum, with people still living and working in the village, but with most of their income gained through tourism. If you visit China, and are not too far from this beautiful, little town, we would recommend a day here.

                                              Wuzhen Scenes

  















Looking at Oki’s travel notes, here are a few downsides to travelling in China:

  1)    Very few people speak English, especially outside Peking and Shanghai.

 2)    Trying to cross the enormous roads with six lanes of traffic is hair-raising and dangerous for pedestrians, just as it was in Phuket, and I think in any part of Asia. Having experienced crossing the road in Turkey and Iran last year, I would say that China is just as dangerous.

 3)    There is no Google, Gmail, YouTube or Facebook. However, there is Skype and WeChat.

 4)    Asian people don’t seem to use automatic teller machines very often, and there is a risk that your card number will be illegally scanned, so it is best to bring cash with you and wear a money-belt.

 5)    Coffee is very expensive to buy, almost the same cost as a whole meal.

 6)    Milk, cheese and yoghurt are hard to get, as the Chinese are lactose intolerant.

 7)    Foreigners must carry their passports with them at all times. We were interrogated by police when buying our railway tickets for the bullet train, and although China appears to be capitalist, the severe hand of Communist totalitarianism lies just below the surface.

   On the plus side, apart from all the lovely places we visited on our trip to China, we would say that the Chinese people are very friendly and polite, we felt very safe with the police presence everywhere, crime rates are very low in China, and the absence of political correctness and the curse of Western political extremism that has raised its ugly head in recent years in the West is completely absent. People have better things to do with their time than to waste it on telling people what words they can or can’t say, and what opinions they must or must not hold. There are no Social Justice Warriors or Global Warming Alarmists. There is no attack on people’s right to freedom of speech or thought, and this, in a country that is still controlled by the invisible hand of a Communist Government, was a breath of fresh air to us all. Chinese people are free to discuss and criticise their government in cafes with their friends, and they are allowed to express their opinions to each other about any topic they wish. They have more freedom of speech than we now sadly have in the West. What an eye-opener! This aspect of life in China is one of the characteristics that has helped Jack to fall in love with the place. For the first time in his life, Jack feels freer than he ever did in the nanny-state of Australia.

   We flew home on AirAsiaX, another budget airline. It was adequate for the price. It was great to get home to the cool, winter weather after three weeks of heat and humidity, but what a trip it was! 

 

Tasmania in Winter