April 2026
Hong Kong
It took a long time to get here. I have thought about it over the years but never had a pressing reason to visit. Friends were often surprised that I hadn’t been. It would have been interesting to see it when it was still under British rule but I just never made it. This is probably unsurprising as Hong Kong and Singapore are not the sort of places that would attract me but the latter happens to be more at the centre of travel so I inevitably have been there several times. The fact that it is a clean and tidy and very modern city was
The trip from the airport was largely uneventful. We got the train into Central and had to navigate our way to a taxi rank (not well signed) to finally get to our hotel. The flight from Sydney is not a particularly hard one but ten hours does always test the patience. The three hour time difference inevitably caused some bodily dislocation so I was up very early the next morning in a desperate search through the quiet local streets for a coffee. I did eventually find a restaurant and they offered something called “Hong Kong coffee”. It was strong and did the trick. I was unique among all the patrons in asking for it as they tucked into various combinations of noodles and other food, no one seemed interested in a pick-me-up.
The weather was cool enough to be comfortable but I’ve heard it is relentlessly humid at certain times of the year. The skies were continuously grey however and this is the sort of weather that would persist during much of the trip. There was no great list of things we had to do. We’d opted to stay in Causeway Bay as hotels in Central and Tim Sha Tsui were very costly for not much. As it was, the room we had was not cheap and not exactly spacious.
We were dying to try the famous double-decker ding ding trams our trip to Central on the first morning. They were clunky and characterful relics in a very modern city. Our idea of taking the funicular – the Peak Train – to get some city views were torpedoed as it was closed for the duration of our stay for maintenance. The harbour was great to see and we ended up taking several trips backwards and forwards in the ferries.
We rode the famous escalator system up the hill which seemed to go on forever. On the way back there were nice little bars with good beers that had a high content of expats. It was a pleasant outing in the early evening.
There was much ado online about the claypot rice dishes that are a famous thing in the older part of town. The Hing Kee (https://share.google/9K4Co399pj4rZEkGy) being the most celebrated. It wasn’t exactly the greatest experience when we did hunt it down. Not a patch on the socarrat of a Valencian paella. That experience probably set the tone a bit for the trip. With a few rather delicious exceptions the food was not as I was expecting in China. For both of us, Chinese cuisine has never been a great favourite, although I felt unsatisfied at the end of the trip that we had never really given it a proper go. We did try quite e few things but often some of the strange things on street food markets presented challenging and unknown types of food often even more challenging smells. We should probably have taken some local food tours.
We ventured over on a day trip to Macau. Its Portuguese influence was a source of interest to me. I learnt that after the coup in Portugal in 1974 that got rid of the fascist remnant of the old Salazar regime, Portugal had offered Macau back to China. Apparently, China felt it was unable to absorb it at that stage and refused. Today there is some evidence of Portuguese rule but it serves as the Las Vegas of China and much of it is quite tacky. The old town shows much more Portuguese influence and does a huge trade in custard tarts. We stopped at a restaurant for lunch and the owner was Australian who had lived there and in Hong Kong for over thirty years. As with so many ex-pats, he had a dim view of Australia which he quoted Melbourne being overrun by African gangs wielding machetes. As usual this was some distance from the truth. The rest was very much in the style of Las Vegas with huge replicas of the Eiffel Tower and Big Ben. We did venture into one of the huge casinos (we were banned from taking pictures) and it was massive with a huge gaming area and the usual swathes of gold decorations. Going from Hong Kong to Macau meant going through immigration twice. So, although they are considered part of China there is still that barrier.
We crossed another border the following day. It was quite a bit cheaper to fly from Shenzhen, which was just over the border in the People’s Republic, to Kunming in Yunnan province. Even with the steep A$90 taxi fare from our hotel. Shenzhen Airport was an impressive modern structure. Immigration was a breeze here but they seized both our power banks in the airport as they did not have a CCC certification on them. I’d missed that bit in my research. That was annoying, mine was quite a good one.
In Kunming I’d booked a characterful hotel close to the main market area. Called the Moon and Chalice, it was in an old French-inspired building built in 1944. This being close to Vietnam, the French had spent quite a nosing around this area.
This part of the city became very lively at night walking around it was a treat although I bottled out this time on eating insects. We also discovered a fabulous cake shop which I made several visits to. I bought some dumplings from a shop the next morning which were divinely delicious and cheap. Espresso coffee set me back A$6 so a Western decadence in these tea drinking parts. Kunming didn’t have a lot to see in the city but the gardens were nice. Probably many of the sights are in the surrounding countryside but we had put time constraints on ourselves.
Our first experience of train travel proved to be fairly easy after we had figured out how the system worked. Nearly everything needs your passport in China. To catch a train, you were never issued with a physical or online ticket, it was all tied to your passport so scanning it at the entrance gate was all that was needed. I did have a record on my Trip.com app which at least allowed us to find the correct carriage and seats. Wayfinding in Chinese railway stations isn’t always the greatest. A lot of signage is in English but very few people speak it. If the signs suddenly disappeared as you were making your way somewhere – as they often did as you were following them then it could throw up some challenges. All platforms like Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp etc are banned here. With an esim and/or VPN it was possible to get around it.
I was expecting a dismissive attitude from people but most were generally friendly and helpful if you asked. Translation apps were the lifesaver. All that didn’t stop Jackie relentlessly talking to strangers. Their empty and confused looks were great entertainment for me. As with anywhere, a smile and attempts at humour tended to win people over.
The train we rode on from Kunming was of a Japanese standard. A lady with a mop came through furiously cleaning the carriage frequently on the four-hour journey. It also ran on time to the minute. The country was mostly impressively efficient and modern. Despite its enormous size, the country has only one time zone so quite a bit of difference in sunset and sunrise times as we have travelled west. It would be weird in the far west of China – times would really be out of whack.
The hotel in Lijiang had contacted me saying they were giving us an upgrade for no extra cost. This turned out to be not such a great thing. We had great confusion finding a Didi at the station and finally found the pickup point with great difficulty. This was again largely to do with the signs that guided you in a particular direction and then abruptly disappear. When we finally did get in a car it appeared to be heading in the wrong direction. All attempts to point this out to the driver were in vain. I even offered cash to take us to the place the map was showing. In exasperation we got him to stop the car and let us out.
We were stuck on a road with little but industrial buildings. The hotel had been in contact with us and they appeared to have very good English. When we explained the predicament over WhatsApp, he said he would be there right away and arrived soon after, he was a fairly eccentric character but he was on a motorbike so had to summon yet another Didi. When we did get to the hotel it looked entirely different from the Booking.com app. It turned out the “upgrade” was in a completely different hotel. It was on a main road and some distance from the attractive old town. This may have been part of the confusion with the original driver. After some debate we negotiated going to the original hotel which was in the old town. That was an entirely better option.
We met chatted with a bloke from Birmingham who had been living here for a few years in Shenzhen. There are certainly foreign travellers but tourism in China is overwhelmingly made up of domestic travellers.I had been looking forward to coming here as it is at the foot of the Himalayas so I thought it would be a Chinese version of Nepal. It was not quite like that but quite attractive all the same. The town was full of small and inevitably confusing small lanes. We did manage to get lost at least once but during my morning coffee on the first morning I did not get too ambitious and made a careful note of the landmarks. I was a bit shocked how badly I acclimatised to the fairly moderate 2400m altitude. Time and past smoking had taken its toll.
One of the reasons we had come here was to visit the famous Tiger Leaping Gorge. This was a fast flowing point in a the Jinsha River which is a tributary of the Yangtze River. It was quite a palaver getting there and, in the end, it was easier to get our own driver. He took us to a point where all tourists were assembled and ferried by buses to another point where a series of escalators took us to a viewing platform. This was crowded with tourists. It was a spectacular sight but probably more so in the rainy season when the river would have swelled even further. It was not the most interesting part of our journey and the sheer number of tourists was quite different from our experience up to the point.
Nearly everything is digital in China and it’s necessary to use Alipay and WeChat for payment. They were relatively easy to set up and use. Alipay is accepted in many places in Australia so I got to set it up and test it before I left. I had more of a hassle setting up the paying part of WeChat but we used that app mostly for messaging. There are some cash transactions but every little store handles digital payments by scanning QR codes. Credit and debit cards are effectively useless. WeChat is also an alternative messaging (and calling) platform but with a VPN it was easy to use WhatsApp which seems to be popular in much of the world.
The Alipay app actually had a sub app (f that’s what you call it) that connected to Didi. I already had an account with them. Like the ridesharing services in many countries these days, it was a great help. We never had to wait long to get a car, China after all has one of the biggest gig economy sectors in the world so there are plenty of drivers. The great thing is that money never changes hands and there is never an argument as there always is in a taxi when the driver decides the price agreed at the start of the journey is no longer valid for some dodgy reason and has mysteriously doubled. Getting the pickup location can sometimes be troublesome but these services are an absolute blessing for travellers in unfamiliar territory.
The younger Chinese were noticeably taller than older ones. I worked with a lot of Chinese in Sydney and was often surprised by how tall many of them (men and women) were. Apparently in the north they tend to be tall but short in the south. Standing in the Hong Kong metro I realised I could see almost four carriages down over a sea of heads and the ones that stuck out were usually foreigners. People rarely stared at us but my blue eyes and white hair seemed to be a greater source of curiosity.
We had some confusion getting a Didi to Lijiang airport which it turned out later we realised that my location services had been switched off on my phone. Getting on the flight and flying to Guilin was a breeze but we did get a bit of turbulence on the way.
Guilin was a pleasant city and in the centre of it we found a few eating places where people unexpectedly spoke English. I think most foreigners and Chinese when confronted with how completely different and difficult each other’s languages are, they don’t even bother and resort to translation apps. Our conversation was largely limited to nǐ hǎo and xièxiè (hello and thank you). Jackie added her own special pronunciation to the latter which sounded like zing zing. I guess they got the gist.
We did a few touristy things in the city and stayed in the Aroma Tea House Hotel. This hotel had a bit of character and interesting artworks on display. There is a nice lake in the city and home to the famous Sun and Moon pagodas. I climbed the very steep 300+ steps up the interesting Solitary Beauty Peak – Jackie preferred to wait in the café below.
Probably the main attraction here however was the boat trip on the Li River to the pleasant town of Yangshuo. There were a lot of boats on the trip that day as this is a major tourist attraction. There were quite a few foreigners as well. Things were done in an organised manner and it was clear in many places that we visited that the tourist infrastructure was geared up to take far greater numbers. The definite conclusion here is that you should never visit China in local holiday periods. It would be unbearable. The weather, which had remained steadfastly grey since our arrival in Hong Kong, added a bit of intermittent rain to the mix on this day trip. The karst mountains on the sides of the river were spectacular but they would have been more so in fine weather. We strolled around the laid-back town of Yangshuo before getting a Didi back to Guilin.
In Guilin we visited a specialised goose restaurant part of a chain called Chuji Roasted Goose. It was enormous and they had to explain to us how to order using their own electronic system. When we arrived, they put an egg timer on our table which we at once thought was marking how long we were supposed to stay there. Fortunately, it was how long the wait staff had to take our order. I am fairly good at using chopsticks but the way meat like this is served, as it was here, is that the cooked bird is diced up bones and all and put on the serving platter. Trying to extract the bone from the meat was at the limits of my ability with chopsticks and we were forced to use our hands at times. One memorable part of the meal came early when we were served a small tub of what was something between frozen yoghurt and ice cream. Apparently, this was to be eaten before any of the main dishes. Weird we thought but it was divinely delicious. All attempts to find it again on our whole trip were in vain.
Our last excursion here was to the Reed Flute Caves. A rather large cave with stalagmites and stalactites. It was pretty good but very contrived with lots of lights. We opted to take the miniature railway up the hill. This was probably a mistake as it took a while to get to our stop and travelled at a speed probably similar to the walking pace of an 80-year-old. It was amusing anyway.
Zhangjiajie
The train trip to Zhangjiajie took over seven hours. We talked with a Polish couple, one of whom had near native English. It was late in the conversation when it touched on the grey weather that they said they lived in Nottingham! Plenty of grey weather there so they were used to it. There were more foreigners in our carriage. Two Russian women who sat apart but were in fact travelling together. I’m not sure if they were having an argument. One was clearly not that interested in talking to the other. We spoke briefly with one of them who lived in Russia and when we said where we were from, she pointed to the other woman (who was snoozing in the next row) saying; “Oh she lives in Australia or Auckland or somewhere like that.” This train was a bit more crowded than our previous trip and I had wanted to get a first class ticket but they were booked out. I’m not sure if there was much difference between the two. We passed through large cities that I had never heard of. The scenery was occasionally interesting but I remembered more the nondescript places with there their huge blocks of apartments. The train speed was illuminated in the carriage. We tended to travel around the 200kmh mark but oat one stage hitting 250kmh. Faster and more efficient than anything in Australia.
The greyness of the sky persisted when we got to Zhangjiajie. It wasn’t ruining the trip but it would have been nice to see some sun. Our hotel (a Hilton it turned out) was one of the nicest in terms of facilities I think I have stayed in. It had a grand panoramic window that you could see Heaven’s Gate which is an archway that you can see through the mountain. We managed to organise our visit though the travel desk at the hotel which included the visit to the Karst mountains that inspired the backdrop to the Avatar movies. It was all a bit more costly than I thought but it would no doubt be the last time we visited.
The trip to Tianmen Mountain involved walking up 999 steps that were rather steep. It was quite an effort for an aging body but we made it. It was only on the way down we realised that there was a system of escalators that ran up and down to the area where buses bought in the tourists. The infrastructure in these places made you realise that at times a lot of people would visit. Coming here on Chinese holidays would be nightmarish as there was quite a crowd as it was.
That night we went to a large show called the Fairy Fox. It was set on the mountainside and was a large production in a huge natural stage and impressive for that but the story struggled at times to hold our attention. Something different anyway. The rain had poured beforehand and threatened to put a dampener on it but luckily held off during the show.
The next day we had arranged a guided tour in the main park which was good but the guide only spoke Mandarin so all communication with her was through a translation app. Doing this for hours was sometimes a bit strained. The park was quite amazing to see from some of the high points. Interestingly there was a part of it that was almost identical to the famous Three Sisters in the Blue Mountains east of Sydney. It had exactly the same name at this park. Translation apps are a godsend in China as English and Mandarin are so different that the effort to learn each of them is just too much to imagine. Very few Chinese speak English and have no great incentive to do so. For most people China is the beginning and end of the world, it’s just so big and for many Chinese, overseas travel is a pipedream. In some ways that’s how I found the United States, most people don’t have a clue or care about the rest of the world.
During the course of touring the park I received a notification from the hotel we had booked that they had cancelled our reservation only two hours before we were due to check in. Our guide helped us sort out another one for the night on short notice. We stayed at a town north of Zhangjiajie as we were visiting another part of the park called the Grand Canyon. It seems there are a few of these in the world. The town which I believed was called Wuylingyuan, was quite lively at night and pleasant to walk around.
The glass bridge over the Grand Canyon was quite breathtaking. I had threatened to jump up and down on it but had been warned not to do this as it would not be amusing. As it was, I did not do it and walking over glass when there is a 300m drop below was intimidating. More so that the flying fox we took back across the canyon before descending to the river below. We walked along this for two or three kilometres before getting a boat back to the park entrance.
We had arranged a driver to take us to the airport back in Zhangjiajie to catch a flight to Shanghai. We had a good conversation with the driver (via the translation app) on the way. It was interesting to get some insight into everyday lives of people. He spent a bit of time complaining about how expensive and time consuming it was to have a kid. That was interesting. As China’s birthrate declines there seems to be the same cost constraints with having kids in China as it is in western countries. It doesn’t seem the government is doing much to help them.
Shanghai
Our original flight to Shanghai had been due to leave at 10 at night and get in early the following morning. Fortunately, they changed that and we arrived at a more civilised 6pm. Pudong airport was huge and we had to walk quite some distance to get out of the place. Our hotel was in the Bund area of Shanghai which had many buildings from the 1930s and was nice to stroll around. I was a bit surprised that many of these had survived the Cultural Revolution as they did represent some of the era of unwelcome foreign influence in China. Clearly expedience got the better of the rampaging cultural warriors of that time. Strolling out of that area brought you to an ultra-modern city with a huge lightshow at night around the river. We avoided the expensive trip up the modern tower and visited the wonderfully brutalist old slaughterhouse. It was wonderfully preserved and now home to cafes and shops. Luckily not swamped with tourists, however.
The shopping street in the central city area was huge. At night it teemed with people and there were huge food courts. I finally went through on my threat to eat locusts. They were on a skewer, dipped in some sort of spice mix and quickly deep fried. They were decidedly underwhelming. The wonderfully preserved Peace Hotel was a treat with its beautifully preserved 1930s interior and quite divinely delicious (but expensive) desserts.
We went to an evening circus show which was impressively entertaining – nearly all the punters were foreigners. Getting to and from the show gave us an insight into the sheer size and chaotic traffic of the city. No doubt there is a fair bit of air pollution from various sources in Chinese cities but it doesn’t seem so bad at street level. The sheer number of electric cars make quite e difference. Traffic is much quieter and there doesn’t seem to be bad noise and air pollution when you’re standing in the street.
Our days were spent visiting the museums and parks but our time outside was dogged a bit by rain. On the final day we visited the Yu Gardens which were pleasant but had a lot of tourists. I had wanted to visit the nearby city of Suzhou, famed for its canals and gardens but poor planning on my part put the kybosh on that. We visited the charming French Quarter which had modern cafes and restaurants and some lovely old buildings. The narrow lanes were charming, the narrow streets less so as they were cramped with people and traffic.
Our last act was to take the maglev train to the airport. As someone who has worked in the transport sector at platform level and in the research and planning area, various forms of public transport are always interesting to me. The use of magnets for a train that effectively floats has often been talked about so it was interesting to see one in service. Apparently, it used to reach speeds of over 400kph but they slowed it down, maybe for safety reasons. They did display the speed in the carriage and it went over 300kph – it was very smooth and certainly didn’t take long to reach the airport.
Xian
The main reason for coming to this city of over thirteen million people – quite modest by Chinese standards – was to see the famous terracotta warriors. We stayed in the centre by the Bell Tower. This was an impressive building that was beautifully lit at night. There was metro stop (or maybe two) underneath the tower. These among other things were in various exits. There were around 9 of them and picking the wrong one would mean having to backtrack. Crossing the busy roads around them was an even bigger odyssey. Once you learnt the correct number of the exit you were supposed to use for each location, it became a lot easier. It was a lively part of the city that really buzzed after dark.
Trying to get to any major tourist attraction in China is usually much easier done on a tour. We were with a group of Irish travellers on our minibus who were unusually reserved but not unfriendly. We had an English-speaking guide who was very good and a visit to the museum first with him showed a lot of detail of several of the warriors which was fascinating. Each of them had unique faces. The story of their discovery in 1974 is the stuff of legend. Some farmers digging a new well during a drought found fragments of pottery. A local museum curator was alerted and so they excavated quite an amazing monument. It’s estimated that there were up to 8,000 warriors although not all can be effectively excavated. There are also chariots and horses.
Naturally there were large crowds but again, the size of all the queuing infrastructure made us think that the numbers would be even greater in local holiday times. Never, ever visit China during the Chinese New Year.
There were several different pits with only two of them really being of interest due to the success of the excavations. Once you were in these you had to fight your way to the front but at least there were thinner parts of the crowd that made that slightly easier. Each pit was housed in a hangar type building. We certainly managed to get a great view. They were breathtaking when you considered the magnitude of the task it must have been to make them. The streaming sunlight made for great photo opportunities. You couldn’t help but be mesmerised by them.
Our other city excursions were undertaken on our own. First to the Small Wild Goose Pagoda another monument that has survived much and the ancient trees that surrounded it leave you wondering what they have seen in their centuries of existence. Unfortunately, we were timed out in our trip to the Giant Wild Goose Pagoda, arriving when it was closed to visitors. My own later attempt to see that city walls were stymied by an inability to navigate an obscure set of confusing signs. At one point I crossed a ten lane road in an almost unheard-of break in the traffic. This was a big mistake. I managed to entrap myself in an impenetrable fenced area and with the trip back across the massive road being certain suicide at this point. I had no alternative but to walk on a disappearing sidewalk and was hugging a fence that was in the same lane as the traffic. I thought people would be cursing me (they certainly would have been at home) but they mostly ignored my mistake and my only opportunity came for me to escape by climbing through a loosely chained gate to gratefully get to a metro entrance. I felt if was going to be arrested, this would be the time. Luckily my actions seemed to escape any of the uniformed guards anywhere.
On our last morning, we finally entered the Bell Tower. It was more impressive from the outside but as our hotel had been just across the road, we were constantly confronted with its presence and simply had to go inside. The place had faced various rebuilds and refits. It has been on the current site since 1582. We also took the remaining time to see the nearby Drum Tower which has stood since 1380. It has a large drum (a replica of the original) and a series of smaller “solar” drums to sound out different times of the ancient calendar signifying the different seasons and planting times.
Beijing
Our arrival here at the Inner Mongolian Hotel was heralded by a band seated in the huge lobby playing traditional Mongol instruments and in swished up national dress. There seemed to be few western guests but there were the usual Russians to be spotted and heard here and there. I couldn’t but like it. The rooms were functional rather than interesting but had a great view with hutongs below and larger landmark buildings in the distance. At first much of this was shrouded in Beijing smog but it did lift at various times. The city is largely dominated by huge, wide sweeping avenues.
I had planned to visit Tianmen Square and on our own and then joining a guided tour of the Forbidden Palace. Getting into the great square proved quite an effort. You need to register in order to be put on their system etc etc to actually enter the square. I had done so through a third party app as it wasn’t worth the effort to try and navigate the Chinese system. We found it very hard to actually get to the vast queue to the entrance. Signs in China are usually in English as well which is great but there are times when they just run out. In such circumstances, simply asking directions proves to be a challenge in itself and usually involves translation apps.
We were told Google maps did not work in China and that Apple was better. Google sort of worked but I found Amap to be better. Similarly, Google Translate was also said to be virtually useless but I had a couple of alternatives but Google worked most of the time but I relied more on the Microsoft Translator.
So, we waited and waited it took about an hour and twenty to reach the ticket inspector. He demanded to see the receipt on my phone and I had to let several people past as I fumbled to find it. When we finally got in, it was pretty much too late to look at any of the museums there. We wandered around a built but had to meet our tour for the Forbidden City and that was a twenty-five-minute forced march to the meet up point. The place is huge and you could make several visits. We did have a slightly eccentric guide who seemed to be constantly counting the number of heads out loud. The hugeness of it is ever present. There are bits that are closed off but it still took some time to get round on the tour. It was impressive as usual but I struggle to think of anything that was stunningly beautiful. The sprawling complex had a vast array of statues and mosaic style dragons on walls along with some lovely artifacts. It was the usual confused (for me) history of emperors and concubines. I had read a couple of fairly brief histories of China and the Mongols – the various dynasties need constant reference to remember the years that each one had existed.
We had a painful experience getting out to the place. Public transport was overwhelmed and Didis were unusually short on the ground and vey expensive. Trying to walk further away just seemed to lead us through roads where cars couldn’t stop. We were eventually approached by two young women who heard our difficulties and helped us out. They were from Singapore but on further discussion it turned out they were originally from China. One of them was quite tall and more Mongol looking and true to form it turned out that she was from the north near Harbin. I was pleased with myself that I had already guessed that she was a northerner. North Chinese = tall, south Chinese = short. They soon figured out I had somehow managed to switch off location services on my phone which made connecting with rideshare services inaccurate. Eventually we were able to get back to the hotel.
We’d loaded ourselves up with tours here in the first two days. The second one was to the Great Wall. It was efficiently organised and we got off early. We walked past a frightening number of empty buses clearly waiting to bring huge numbers to the Wall. At the Wall itself, the crowds were relatively light. This part of the wall had clearly been rebuilt no doubt as much of it has crumbled over time and the remains repurposed by farmers living nearby. I walked up one of the steep climbs which I always cannot resist. As usual it was a bit of an effort. The steps were supposedly purposely designed as unevenly as possible to tire out attackers. It worked on me. The last staircase was particularly steep and I spent my time wondering how I would get down. I needn’t have worried as there was a pathway alongside the wall that descended at a gentle rate. AS we left the crowds were starting to build up alarmingly. We congratulated ourselves on an early start.
The rest of the time in Beijing was spent wandering through the hutongs, the narrow lanes of the older city. It was quite characterful and pleasant but also a bit touristy in parts. I went to one of the weird shops and bought a skewer of scorpions. A Russian girl in front of me went for the centipede on a stick. The scorpions were not in anyway special. One thing I don’t think I could really stomach were the large spiders. That would have been a step too far. We went and had Peking duck at the Home Town Palace (https://www.trip.com/restaurant/china/beijing/detail/home-town-palace-110962138/) restaurant. The duck is marinaded with Madeira wine and was fabulous. Everything here was nice including the cigar style spring rolls. Unlike most establishments like this in China, it didn’t have a website or online booking. It wasn’t very easy to find as it was hidden off a main road.
So, our trip was nearly finished. Our flight back had been booked through Qantas but code shared with China Airlines. It included a long layover in Taipei. In a piece of gratuitous country bagging, we went into the city. The train trip in went through some lovely green areas that were quite large. I think this might be one of the aspects of Taiwan that would be great to explore. I have read that it has some lovely rural and wilderness areas. The first hurdle came when we stopped for a beer in a small bar. Having become so used to paying for everything with Alipay we had presumed we could use this here. No such luck. I had to find an atm to settle the bill. We wandered through one of the lively night markets that presented more eating opportunities. Again, the weather was grey and as the darkness fell, we were reminded that it was time to get back to the airport for our late-night flight.
As we went to catch the train, I was surprised to see people queuing to get on. That’s not how these metro style trains worked in China or, for that matter, Australia. We managed to get a reasonable amount of sleep on the crowded flight back and only a three hour time difference meant we arrived in a less dishevelled state than usual.
All these things were a reminder of what phenomenal place China is. Its history touched Europe at times but otherwise the sheer size of the place and its large population meant it was probably the most powerful and dynamic place in the world until the “century of humiliation” where it was overwhelmed and bullied by the industrialised Europeans and Americans and considered an impoverished backwater. I had not visited China before so hadn’t seen with my own eyes the transformation of the country in the 21st Century. But the sheer scale and determination to develop it into a superpower, for all its potential side effects, is an amazing achievement. Millions of people were brought out of poverty in that time. We were in cities all this trip so the flashy high-speed trains, whoosh of the electric traffic, the bright lights of the futuristic buildings and towers made it seem at times that we had travelled forward in time. No doubt there are still swathes of poverty and rural areas that have been left behind.
To see these things at first hand and to grasp the scale of the place is to see it differently. For Australians there has been something of the menace and the bullying that went on in the early 2020s reinforced this potential fear of weaponizing of its economic power but the coming of Trump has certainly shifted thinking on that to a degree for many people. The notion of China as enemy but main trading partner begins to look far less obvious.
The AUKUS deal which has had little public scrutiny looks even more spurious in this context. Australia will spending untold billions to buy aging second hand nuclear submarines to defend shipping lanes against er China. The logic doesn’t add up. The whole concept has never been properly explained to the Australian people. The navy guys love the prospect of new toys – albeit hand me downs. Despite been finalised under Biden, it starts to look more like a handing over of money to a transactional Trump administration. It makes the Australian military a subset of the US complex. Is this the best course for Australia when disruptive technologies appear quickly and could quickly make existing expensive technology suddenly useless? Set against the way the Houthis, Iran and Ukraine have managed to fight against much greater forces with some success, all on a shoestring budget, can’t help but make you think that maybe alternative strategies may offer Australia and other smaller powers more effective protection and better value.
For all this China seemed, to the tourist, a fairly open place. India, the largest democracy in the world, seems oppressive at times with red tape invading all aspects of life. To the traveller the Indian obsession with photography and trying to restrict it at every turn. I have been told off many times in India for taking photographs of beautiful public buildings because it’s not allowed for some reason or another. I always steer clear of the obvious – miliary bases, port infrastructure etc – but in China it was possible to wander anywhere in the city and point a camera at anything without official molestation.
For all that it is clear that China is a controlled society and heavily surveilled. Cameras are everywhere and once you are photographed and fingerprinted on arrival, you are on their system. No physical ticket area used for trains and planes, you must show your passport and you are clocked in. In some attractions, facial recognition was used so your face was your ticket. China’s Social Credit System seems like it is out of Black Mirror even though it is a more fragmented and complex beast than that. There is a price for all that organisation. I believe there is a cultural imperative in western democracies that value individual freedom and expression more than anything and this is what China is held to. China’s system is dominated by the collective with the philosophical emphasis being on stability, harmony and an all powerful state.
The issues of an all-powerful one party state has had policy failures, such as the one child policy, have flowed through and exacerbated China’s demographic decline. One of our drivers spent a long time complaining how expensive it was to raise a child and the lack of any significant social safety net especially for the elderly. Hardly a representative sample but an insight nonetheless into an issue that causes wider economic problems. While the Party wants consumers to spend and take the economy onwards beyond the high reliance on exports. It’s difficult to spend when you are faced with potential uncertainty. Consequently, people save their money.
China is an unequal society despite its supposedly communist roots. Elites are entrenched and with no inheritance taxes this will only increase over time. China’s real estate bubble threatens the aspirations of many and the credibility of the Party. The admirable infrastructure in the country is diminished by a widespread local government debt crisis amid a mad dash to expand throughout the 21st Century. A reckoning of some sort will eventually happen.