That's all folks

That's it, I'm back in Australia now. I'm going to start a couple more blogs, but I haven't decided quite what to call them yet. Details here when I know.

Thanks to all the readers, especially those who commented.

Take care.

Not just the main bits

It seems to me that every time I get to HK I spend a few hours in or around Kowloon-side's Tsim Sha Shui and or Central. Central is a dystopian pre-mall, where only the poor and the labourers actually walk on the streets. The rest of the population, which in Central is very white - not exclusively, but very - travel through air-conditioned passages from lift lobby to shopping centre. It's not quite possible to avoid unmediated air yet, but that seems to be the common vision behind the architecture & urban planning. It's the weather.  Like many of the colonies, it's a good place to make money, but you wouldn't want to live there. I don't know how long it will take HK to stop being a colony - but ten years hasn't made much impression.

Although, to give HK it's due, it's not alone in wanting to create a perfect synthetic world. it seems to me that the underlying vision of all the marketing/advertising departments in all the world is that the perfect life is one that is conducted via electronic communications device in a fully designed space. It's a touching unanimity, given that a conspiracy theory probably isn't a reasonable explanation. 

This trip I was determined to see more of Hong Kong than the tourist-in-transition bit.

I sort-of succeeded. Anyway, I saw a bit more than I had previously managed.

 Being, as you may have noticed, a bit of a sucker for boats, I was keen to see Aberdeen which is famous for retaining a chunk of the old-fashioned live-on-a-boat ambiance. As you can see, it  should be famous for adapting brilliantly to the consumer age. Once, dinner on a floating restaurant was a something to be negotiated in a fairly ad-hoc kind of way (and I'm sure it's still possible to do it that way, although I doubt any of the boats see it as a sideline these days. Even on the small sampan restaurants, it's pretty clearly their main business. Not that I am complaining, it's just that what looks like a scene from 50 years ago ago is in fact uniquley touched by its current age) But now the main game is this floating restaurant, which has taken over the centre of the harbour. Well, this bit of the harbour anyway, Aberdeen ahrbour is not a simple place. In a triumph of pragmatism though, you can see the 
rear of the restaurant here. No use wasting paint on what the punters can't see. That may have to change though, because residential developments are starting on the shore opposite the backside of the Jumbo floating restaurant, and I'm assuming it won't be good business for them to antagonise the potential clientele residing in that building with a view of the water.

You can also see, in the top photograph, the three crossections that define hong Kong island - the water, the high-rise, and the hills. This is part of its undeniable charm in fact, because no matter how much I might mock, there is a great buzz in stepping off the Star Ferry, and passing through the lobbies of the skyscrapers to emerge into a mountain. OK, no Star Ferry around this side, but the rapid transition from water to mountain via construction remains the same. Well, the Chinese invented landscape painting about 1200 years before the Europeans (strange but true),, and it's called "mountain-and-water" painting still (and considered to be the most difficult painterly skill)  so I guess the fascination with the relationship between the water and the land is not unique to me.
Wanchai looks a bit like Central, and in fact it is pretty much adjacent to Central (the Admiralty subway station intervenes) but the difference is that the walkways aren't so polished as Central, and they largely take you down to the street where you find yourself in the kind of streetscape popular with Jackie Chan chase scenes; lanes, stalls, lots of people, neon lights, bars, a sex industry, small shops, crowded restaurants. In fact we had lunch in a crowded Vietnamese restaurant where the proprietor correctly identified as tourists (was it the three cameras?) and provided specific, clear and correct instructions on how to catch the bus - HK $10 - to Aberdeen rather than wasting Hk $70 on a taxi. We didn't manage to find the bus depot though, which is how I know the cost of the taxi. We DID catch the bus back, thus confirming our restaurateur's expertise.

I pretty much couldn't have said anything good to you about Tsim Sha Shui, which is the pointy end of Kowloon, until I found this park. In point of fact, I have walked past the sandstone walls of the park - raised about 10 metres from street level - about ten times in my life, each time too busy to stop and investigate, and each time promising myself that next time I would. Along with water, I'm quite partial to secret gardens. (More influences of childhood fiction consumption).

If you are in Tsim Sha Shui, don't do anything except visit the park. Don't shop, don't eat, don't talk to strangers. But do visit the park. The flamingos were the most unexpected nice feature of it, but the expected features (trees, lakes, walkways, flowers, seats, people) are just as nice. And I'm using nice in a very positive way here - oasis/refuge nice.

We visited a couple of other places, Mongkok (need a hotel room for an hour?) and Sham Shui Po (mahjong clubs with the swish-click of the shuffle penetrating through the smoked glass windows to the street), but primarily with shopping in mind, so no cameras which was possibly an error, since they were interesting places and we didn't find anything to buy. After China, what the HK tourist brochures call a "retail market" is a distinct anti climax, perhaps one or two smallish floors of stalls. In China there would be 4 adjacent buildings, each bigger than the last and each with 8 floors of stalls and things smaller than stalls (is there a word for that?). The effect on us was that we would walk through a HK market waiting to see more, and there there wouldn't be any. So we'd set off for the adjacent building, but there wasn't one. So then we'd give up. Of course, maybe we misread the guides, but I don't think so. It's just that Hong Kong is actually a small place, something that I never noticed before because coming the other way (from Australia) Hong Kong puts more people in front of you in ten minutes than you would ordinarily see in Sydney in a week of Chinatown restaurants, and that tends to make you think it's a big place, contrary to the map.

Pearl River journey

It has been a significant desire of mine to travel from Guangzhou to Hong Kong by boat. This has been ridiculously hard to organise - none of the locals seemed to know anything about it (note to self; how much do I know about Sydney?)

Anyway, after many false starts I finally tracked down 2 TWO! options. One from Nansha (which is in Panyu, the southernmost region of greater Guangzhou) and the other Lianhuashan, also in Panyu. Internet research turned up booking numbers for the Lianhuashan option, so that's where we left from. Subsequent research in Hong Kong revealed that it would also have been possible to come from Nansha, and in fact that there are several other destinations around the periphery of Guangzhou that also run ferry services down the Pearl. As originally expected, the Pearl is still, despite trains and highways, a pretty serious avenue for commerce.

Thinking about all this, I realise that Guangzhou has an official population of 12 million (estimated 16 m) and that that probably doesn't include the population of Foshan (West) and Zhongshan (South0, which are the two adjacent urban areas. I say adjacent and I mean exactly that - if you weren't armed with a map you wouldn't be able to spot the borders by any visible change in topography. So potentially that's 36 (48) million people, still in a geographical area not significantly bigger than Melbourne, and I still haven't included Dongguan, which occupies most of the space between Guangzhou and Shenzhen on the East side.

So maybe, with 60-odd million people in 6000 square kilometers, it's not surprising that I didn't quite find everything out about it in 12 months. In fact, it's not surprising that most of the people who live there don't know everything about it. It's almost surprising that they know anything about it. (Mind you, I probably need to check those population estimates out. They may be a bit on the high side.)

Anyway, HK by boat. A dream come true. It was, alas, a bit damp & a lot foggy, and the windows of the ferry were extremely dirty/salt-encrusted, so I don't really have photographs. In fact, by far the vast bulk of the boats we saw were fishing boats, ranging from 2 person outfits being rowed to massive multi-crane combination fishing & processing vessels. Quite a few dredges, also not surprising in a delta - if you look at aerial photos it's striking that there is in fact usable land in the region, and I'm guessing that managing the course of the river is a serious occupation for quite a bunch of people.

There were a lot of empty general cargo boats as well; I don't know if anything can be read into that because I don't know what the river looks like in good economic times. The boats we saw looked mainly like local cargo - either single container or small general cargo - so I'm not sure how they would be influenced by the export industry downturn. The internal Chinese economy is said to be holding up reasonably well. We did see a couple of international container ships though - one so big it seemed to take minutes to motor past it. It was colossally long.

Ancient city of the great eagle

Last month of the job has been a madhouse, scrambling to tie up loose ends created over a year of never having enough time. It should be clear, shouldn't it, that if you couldn't finish it in the previous eleven months, it isn't going to be finished in the last one. Still, never stopped me trying. (And indeed, I did finish some things)

Liz & I still managed to get out for a few excursions though, this one to yet another of those things Shenzhen notionally lacks, to wit, places of historical interest. Admittedly, this particular place is 40 km outside of the city itself, but it is still inside the special economic zone that is Shenzhen. It's also true that Guangzhou friends claim it is in Dongguan, not Shenzhen, and that 30 years ago this would actually have been true - and for the previous 1200 years at that. But as of this moment in time, it's in Shenzhen. The map says so.

Welcome to Dapeng. More specifically, for the touristically inclined, welcome to Dapeng Gucheng (The ancient city of Dapeng - see the "pin" below).

On the greater peninsula that terminates in Hong Kong are a number of lesser peninsulae - there's probably a technical cartographer's term for these - and on one of these on the east side of the greater peninsula (SZ is on the west) Dapeng, the 'new' city occupies the north of the lesser peninsula and Dapeng the 'old' city nestles on the south.

'Dapeng' means 'great/noble/old/rich roc' - I can see this will need more research. I'm 99% sure that when the Chinese invented the word 鹏 they weren't thinking about a Euro-Persian mythological bird, despite what my dictionary says. Lucky we don't have to translate place names, but there is resonance in the literal meaning of place names, even if it is a purely imaginary resonance. 'Beijing' - 'Northern Capital' - hints at the complex and dynamic history of China. In the case of 'Dapeng' it's not hard to imagine eagles/ospreys/albatrosses drifting on the thermals and updrafts provided by the beaches and cliffs here. No need for mythology - around here fish turn into birds through the process of digestion.

There's a lot of development of recreational housing for the rich along the east coast, so there are numerous expressways being laid down to get their owners back and forth from the city in good time. However the development hasn't reached anything like the eyesore stage yet - it's a very pleasant part of the world right now. There's also a scenic - bumpy - coast road, taken by the bus we came back on.

(The above copy courtesy of my attempt to get hired as a consultant to the real estate industry)

Back to the ancient city of Dapeng...It was a day of failing camera technology (note to self, buy more spare batteries). If you run out of film, you can buy more anywhere, at least for the time being, although the boxes of film are starting to fade in the sun. There are a lot of film cameras in China still, but people who can afford tourism sufficiently to come to the distinctly unfamous venues don't have them. All my cameras now have proprietary rechargeable batteries - devices using double AA's suddenly looking like a useful alternative (but not an environmentally sound one). And I suddenly realised why I need to upgrade my mobile phone to get a decent camera in it - these picture come from my current mobile which is about three years old and hence the resolution is pretty rubbish. But maybe better than nothing?

Consequently, I don't have many pictures. I'm still squeamish about photographing people too, so one of the best pictures I saw I wouldn't have been able to photograph either. Still, apparently writing about it doesn't have the same effect. 

DPGC is another (like Zhaoqing that we've seen, and doubtless others) small former city of sufficient significance to have had a wall and a mixture of sufficient insignificance and prosperity (no-longer-required walls make excellent sources of building materials for the not so prosperous) not to have lost it through expansion, invasion or modernisation. 

This is a view from outside the South gate - no cars inside.

DPGC was a naval base, whence the local navy fought the first skirmish of the Opium Wars (opinions on who was victorious depend on which side of the HK /SZ border you are buying your books, because the British still exercise  significant control over the story of Hong Kong despite their political departure). Victory by the local admiral (SZ-side history now) saw him elevated rapidly in imperial prestige, and saw his family similarly prosper over the next three generations. His house, a 40-room mansion, is here. 

One of the things I like about these small cities is that I can grasp their scale without too much trouble. This is a walled city you can walk around in an hour. A 40-room mansion sounds like a big place with a lot of rooms, but actually the rooms are very small and the layout very simple, so I feel able to understand more about it. For instance, there are courtyards about every two rooms, in every direction. They're not for decoration, I finally realised, they're for light. They are really light wells. Of course, in the massive mansions that constitute the average tourist destination, the light wells have expanded to such a size that they are decorative courtyards first, and light seems to be not a problem. Maybe it's possible to extrapolate the principles of architecture from Windsor Castle back to a terrace in Marrickville, but not for me. Tourism is (usually) a wealth of information about a very small minority of people. That's possibly dawned on other people before now, but I'm a bit slow.

Still, I wondered what principles could be extrapolated from a 40-room admiral's mansion to the single room of an, say, AB's single room? But almost immediately I found one - light is still an issue and I saw two kids sitting at desks in an alley doing their homework (with all due diligence) to prove it.

Most of the houses inside the wall were very small, and not particularly private in that the one room is the room into which the front door opens, and it needs to stay open to get light in. So it's almost impossible not to see that life for a lot of people is pretty stripped down. I'm reminded of the comment by one of my colleagues who said that when he and his wife moved into a 45 meter squared flat they couldn't believe how much space they had.

I passed one half open door - it was so dark that it was almost impossible to see inside, but there were clearly people inside because there was a very curious noise coming through the doorway. Actually, I had to walk past a couple of times until I worked out what it was (not squeamish about eavesdropping) but then I realised it was the sound of mahjong tiles being shuffled. This was fantastic, because in stories of China that sound is extremely famous, and so little mahjong seems to be played around Guangzhou these days that I hadn't heard it previously. It is a fantastic sound, well worth its storied reputation. (There's a Chinese idiom for it but I can't remember it)

Apart from admirals' mansions & temples, there's been a very good restoration of the granaries in the centre of the city. Again, these are something that doesn't usually get restored (lacks glamour), but are actually the sine qua non of the walled city.

This is the view North from the top of the centre of the city, which is where the granaries are located. It's a location that has protection on all sides except the ocean, really a quite neat piece of siting. Although ultimately rendered irrelevant as maritime technology meant the local harbour was not big enough to support boats useful for naval warfare.

I'm guessing there was a fair bit more here, both to be seen and possibly deduced, but it probably needed research beforehand, because it's a site in progress as far as tourist information is concerned. If I come across any, I'll post it. 

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.

Jinan university

This is Jinan University. In fact, this is the main teaching building where all/most of the undergraduate classes (on this campus) are scheduled. it's too big to fit into the picture (and I couldn't be bother ed walking backwards). It actually goes up about another six storeys.

I actually gave a lecture here (as a guest speaker) on translation theory in Australia. Sadly, they didn't invite me back, but I think they have pretty strict views on academic hierarchy. If I get my Ph.D, then I can come back. It would be a nice place to work. Not a very likely one, though.

This is on campus student accommodation. I was talking to one of the students here - there are 15,000 roughly & accommodation is the big problem inhibiting growth.

Jinan University is a university anyone in the world can come to based on their native country's university entrance exams. That makes it pretty rare in China, where most of the undergraduate entrance (for international students) would be by university exam. Mind you, this particular Sunday I didn't see much sign that anybody was taking the offer up.

This could be called "paperbark drive". I don't know why the white paint, but either white paint or rope winding is very common on Chinese trees. I don't think it's related to visibility, because I've seen it on many trees that were nowhere near a road.

It's a very pretty campus. Elsewhere there are ornamental ponds with pavilions, a couple of large fountains, lawns, all that you could reasonably require. Another thing I like about the campus is that it peters out into the rest of the world towards the back - the front is an imposing us v. them, but at the other ends it's not easy to say where the university ends and the city begins.
So far as I could tell, this was not actually part of the campus (although I'm deducing that as much because I don't think academics are so well paid that they can afford to create this streetscape as from anything else). It was an absolutely perfect winter day, about 15 degrees and sunny at around midday - I actually thought Spring was coming (but the weather this week has disabused me).

It's not all hubbub.

The Hill

Behind the East railway station is a hill, and I've been wanting to climb it since I got here. I made an abortive foray once before, but this time I enlisted some moral support from one of the teachers and we jointly summitted. Which is a somewhat grandiose claim, although the hill was sufficiently steep to make me realise that it's not enough to give up smoking. You also have to exercise.

Regular readers will recognise the top of the Communications Bank building - this picture is taken looking south, on New Year's day. It's still hazy.

There's a kind of feeling that Guangzhou ends at the railway line - mainly because from where I live in Tian He, you can't actually see past the hill that I am now standing on. Here is some of the northwest unseen Guangzhou - if the day was clear you could probably see across to the foothills of the Baiyun mountain - they're over there somewhere. The green building in the middle foreground is actually a shell under construction, wrapped in green gauze to minimise the dust escaping out from the construction. It's not so easy to tell from this shot, but the trees/undergrowth are almost indistinguishable from the Sydney surrounds.

Just for orientation with other photographs, this is the view south again, at a wider angle. Low to the right rear you can see the railway forecourt - looks different during the day, doesn't it? The IKEA building is under the yellow cupolas. The buildings towards the left rear are the rear building in the Concordia compound where I live. The large building to the right of that (behind the pinkish thing) is the Westin Hotel. Note the eucalypt in the extreme right foreground.

This is the view directly North - it is actually possible in reality, maybe not so much in this picture, to see that human habitation is thinning in this direction as you finally reach the outer edges of the city. 

There is a building on top of the hill (actually I'm standing on it), which has been demolished in the not too distant past, but also a few signs of other, older buildings/constructions that have fallen into decay over time, rather than through direct intervention. Something that was probably a water tank. Maybe some old fortifications - although if they were of historical military significance, they'd probably be signposted, and they weren't. The most common sign was "Don't dispose of lighted cigarette butts or firecrackers" - good advice, because in summer it would be a tinderbox.