Boats

Every since I got to Guangzhou I have been deeply puzzled by the absence of boats. One of the worlds great commercial cities (and I'm completely serious about that, it may look a bit battered but it's not altogether easy to comprehend how much of the world's trade goes through Guangzhou - thinks to self, I wonder where the statistics on that would be?)  and a bloody great river, and no boats? There must be boats! But one thing is for sure, the boats have been exiled from the main part of town.

Anyway, I thought the Spring Festival would be a good chance to go boat hunting & I combined it

with an excursion to the old military academy - of which more later. Obviously the first picture doesn't look much like a boat picture, but in fact, I caught a bus to the end of the route along a road which appeared to contain nothing but warehouses and factories and it ended here with a railway line next to a massive highway next to a river. Railways next to roads mean freight. Freight and rivers mean boats. 

Hah!

Possibly not the most impressive looking boats in the history of the universe, but to be frank, it's 

exactly the kind of boat I've been looking for. You can hire these kinds of boats (Liz and I did it in Harbin in 2002) and go on excursions undreamed of by travel agents.

Now these boats on the other hand, are serious working boats, and also living boats. Maybe you can see the tree-in-a-pot to the right of the flagpole? Fantasy #2 - travel on one of these boats for a few months up and down the rivers of Guangdong. There are a lot of rivers - it would keep you going for a long time.

And these are the guys that tell you that from time to time there are seriously big boats around. The main two industries that I saw coming along the road today were timber & car parts, and the raw materials coming off these boats are mainly timber and steel. This is the blunt end of town (Actually, all ends of the town are blunt, it's just the middle where a certain delicacy tentatively rears its head). 

Note the air quality - those derricks aren't more than 100 meters away, and this is a day, which, back in Tian He when I set out this AM, I would happily have called clear. I wonder what it's like

down here in the middle of a booming global economy in mid summer before the wet season comes along?

This is a military boat, one of a large number at the naval academy which is what the old military academy has metamorphosed into. All very decorative - I don't think these boats have any significance other than decoration and perhaps training for extreme beginners. They looked a bit old and relaxed to me - not that I know much about naval vessels.

I don't know why the fascination with boats - it's been with me for a long time, but on the other hand, I've never been so obsessed as to go out and actually buy one, or even learn to sail one. Really, I know absolutely nothing about them at all (OK, they are damp). Maybe it's a Swallows and Amazons complex. Mind you, I may not know why I'm barmy about boats, but I can have a shrewd guess about why I don't actually have one. I bet when it's your own boat, and not somebody else's, that there's a lot of hard work involved in looking after it and making it work.