Whew, that didn’t half take long! But here it is: Guangdong province from the inside:
Come with, come with. You won’t regret it.
Archive for the 'Cards' Category
Five days on the mainland feels like all the time in the world, and yet, when the last day rolls terribly around, one realises the holiday was far too short. Again.
This time we went west in Guangdong instead of north, because a weather report we happened to catch while having a foot massage, promised 4 degrees and rain in the north. As opposed to 5 degrees and a light drizzle in the west, presumably.
Yes, it was cold. Bone-rattlingly, spine-curlingly cold. But not “if you look to one side your eyeballs freeze in that position” cold, unlike for example Harbin where a lot of people are inexplicably going this year, paying to look at ice.
My friends had never been to Guangzhou, so we swung around that lovely city to find it completely empty, closed and shut down, apart from some lion dancers doing their stuff the next morning at 8.
What a contrast to Sei Wui（四 會）only two hours away, a town positively hopping with new year joy. Here everything was not only open but more open than usual. And instead of sitting at home watching tv with their families, the geezers of Seiwui were out in force, filling every available party space. We were invited to gatecrash one party in a karaoke room, where we found about seven guys in their late 30’s snorting ketamine through a bent straw.
It was just them by themselves in the room, no whores, even. I suppose they had gone back to their villages for CNY. Small wonder the guys were sucking up the “lao K” like Scarface at Christmas. They weren’t too keen on us taking photos, and we weren’t too keen on being involved in a possible police raid of some sort, so we quickly left, presumably leaving the face of the guy who had invited us in tatters.
Finding the world’s biggest motorbike graveyard the next day further made up for all disappointment some of us may have felt at a gate crashing gone awry.
And anyway, another party with younger, non drug-taking (but drinking) guys quickly made up for our miss, and Seiwui retains its title as “most intense party town in Southern China, possibly the whole country.” Just go there and see for yourself.
Oh and you must stay in “Filmcenter Hotel,” built only a few months ago but already looking like an early 80’s hotel. It proves the strange rule I’ve seen time and time again: In China, three star hotels vastly out-perform those of four.
Take the marvellous town of Wan Fau (雲浮）for example. We arrived there shivering and on the brink of death after having spent the night in a four star hotel in the nondescript town Lo Deng (羅定）- a hotel so far up its arse that the heating wasn’t working AND I couldn’t close my window properly AND the floors didn’t have carpets, only shiny white morgue-like tiles. There were no extra blankets or duvets and the teacups had no lids because they were so fancy and “European.” (The place was called Hollybay. Say no more.) For this we paid almost 500 yuan, 300 more than the well-equipped, heated, perfectly working three star hotel in Wan Fau, across the road from the bus station and two minutes’ walk from a lake and some Guilin-like scraggy crags!
It’s Wan Fau forever for me now. That town has everything. Next to the hotel: A good restaurant. Next to the restaurant: A great bar.
And the hovelage! Oh, the hovelage. I love a good hovelage, me. Actually the houses in Wan Fau aren’t even hovels, just traditional houses.
Another victorious trip!
But should have chosen the slightly bigger bag. One that could hold a down jacket and a very thick woollen jumper.
I don’t want to have wonderful Guangdong province all to myself anymore. It’s too selfish! I’ve started a new service of funky, surreal TOURS.
No carbon footprint woes, no hassle, no need to learn Chinese (although you can) and no frisking for crotch bombs! Guangdong province: Your closest holiday destination. Why not start at Chinese New Year - the biggest ongoing party in China?
Another thrilling and surreal weekend in the great hinterland, this time in a place I’d never been, Yengdak (Yingde), a little under four hours’ train trip from Shenzhen.
I travelled with P, a tall Australian man whom people, unfortunately but not unexpectedly, mistook for my husband. He certainly knows how to say “He’s my cousin! Spread it around!” in Cantonese now, as this became my war cry since the little town held an unusually high percentage of China Drool (Beautiful Dudes.)
Here’s the lobby of the best (and only?) hotel in town, the Conch. Normal rooms: 360 yuan. Suites: 480. Last Saturday was an auspicious day to get married, and the hotel was crawling with drunk wedding guests, one of whom came running towards us, gripped our hands and shook them while he went on about how he loved foreigners. All deep purple face, dark brown teeth and with a cloud of bai jiu (Chinese rice wine) wafting about him, he pulled me to him and kissed me. And don’t you think he jumped up on P and started kissing him too. Talk about good omen!
You could easily cross the town on foot in a few hours, and everywhere was covered in a red carpet of fire cracker debris because of the aforementioned weddings. We started worrying that the whole town would be busy at wedding parties so there would be no night life, but not only was the biggest, best (and only?) club in town right in our own hotel, it was also full of beautiful dudes and ‘hostesses.”
But I have to say, if you’ve come to the Conch Club for the good conversation, you may want to look elsewhere. All conversation had to be written down as the thundering drums and bass tore through your cortex like a team of insane combine harvesters and settled in your spine where they proceeded to shake all your moorings loose. We thought we were saved when this guy came and invited us to a private party upstairs because his wife had seen us on the train where I had commented favourably on her good looking baby (son, naturally) and come to the conclusion that we were “kind people.”
She was now at home guarding the baby while her husband was out trying to pick up women wife had spotted earlier … a new form of modern living? It turned out the private party, full of whores, was even louder than the club because of the inevitable karaoke. But free!
As well as having fantastic hovelage (picturesque hovels), rivers, canals and lakes, the town was also full of greenery in the shape of little patches of vegetable plots spread all over the town and in the most built-up areas. And most of all: Instead of little insect-like, underbite-sporting, nasty little yappy dogs that you just want to stomp on, Yengdak is full of real-sized, well kept, friendly dogs who, like their owners, love foreigners and like nothing better than jumping up and kissing them.
Uber-town! Groovy! Guangdong - your closest holiday destination!
Wei wei, everybody everywhere. Now I’ve been writing this blog for two and a half years and the only time I’ve really felt like I’ve interacted with “the community” is when I wrote something criticising pilots. A shitstorm rained down and I’m still reeling from the aftermath, but at least I got some reactions. So now I’m asking you, my readers, to write in on these simple terms:
Tell me ten things you love and hate about Hong Kong. Yes it’s been done before hundreds of times, but not by me.
TEN THINGS I LOVE ABOUT HONG KONG:
1. Beautiful dudes speaking Cantonese
2. Yam cha
3. Tong Lau (Traditional HK style pre-war tenement buildings, especially with rounded corners)
4. My gaff
5. And everything around it: Pui O beach, Lantau nature
6: It never snows and it’s always summer, even in winter
7: Extreme funkiness in the old parts of town pre-destruction (see point 3)
8: It’s so easy to get everything done; phone repairmen etc turn up two hours early, not three weeks late
9: Honolulu restaurant in Stanley street
10: Total freedom (so far)
TEN THINGS I HATE ABOUT HONG KONG:
1: The way everything is engineer-driven (most of the following points spring from that)
2: Property developers
3: Concrete
4: Railings
5: The incessant public announcements on the Lantau ferries
6: Screechy bints shouting “ha-lou well-come” “can I helchtio” and breathing on my arm in shops; being patronised every day
7: The government’s 1972 mindset (see concrete, railings etc) and the increasing nanny-state
8: The way the “real Hong Kong” part of Hong Kong is being destroyed, thus taking away almost all of the ten things I love
9: Signs
10: The “Hello Kitty”-fication of everything. Everything!
Please write in with your views.
It’s FINALLY December, at the end of which (the 23rd, 24th in my opinion) one should start hanging up those Christmas (or Season’s, as it’s called now) decorations, not the 3rd of November. (Still, even for an old cynic and bah humbug-monger like me, the excessive Christmas two month hysteria must be working, for during all of last month I’ve had this peculiar need to buy a lot of stuff for myself, and to socialise.)
But oh, imagine how much more Christmassy it would be if the baubles went up and the trees were lit on the 24th of December, and for one week only! One week of intense old-fashioned European Christmas feeling - so much better than the drawn out enforced shopping pressure we have in HK today.
But that would be like hoping that the government would stop putting up railings and concreting country paths; it would be like hoping they wouldn’t put up banners saying NO SITTING, NO SMOKING bigger than the areas in which you’re not allowed to sit and smoke.
As usual, IFC2 wins the competition for ugliest, most bizarre Christmas decorations. That I’ve seen. In Central. This year (re-use has never been a feature with IFC2) the management of IFC2 has come up with a novel idea: Santa Claus as Leonardo Da Vinci as a young man.
Something about Santa Claus trying out Da Vinci’s inventions … or ideas that would later lead to inventions. There’s Santa slumped over a table exhausted from making wings flap, Santa looking through an early prototype of the binocular - and some boxes of various shapes and sizes,
all even more spectacularly tacky than the displays of last year. Well done.
The worst thing, again as usual, though, is the music. The enforced jollity Christmas music blaring out of every shop and thundering through the cavernous malls; originally beautiful carols and hymns rendered ugly and meaningless by having been jazzed up to sound like mere disco background music to egg people on to buy more, ever more, useless crap.
This year I’m not buying a single present. I mean, how many extra planes must they put on each year to carry tons and tons of stuff for people abroad which they don’t need and will never use, just because some geezer allegedly was born on a certain day and whose date of death changes every year according to … the moon? A whim?
No; I’ll put on a huge party for my good friends who are actually around, not spend money on cards which will be thrown away and presents which will scream “desperate last minute attempt” and not arrive until January 15th anyway, if ever, wrapped in kilometres of rainforest.
Party, togetherness, mulled wine, salmon, laugh, talk, cards. That’s the only Christmas you’ll ever get out of me from now on, people. I will not feel pressured to spend a lot of money on useless crap just because of some bloody religion in which neither I nor the recipients of the crap believe. Consider yourselves forewarned.
Trains and mountains - what can be more beautiful?
The train, the train. Thank god for the Chinese train. It has brought me from insane fascist police state Xinjiang back to lovely Lanzhou, cradle of Chinese civilisation and the most polluted city in China. It was only when I arrived in Korla
that I realised Xinjiang had been cut off from all communication with the outside world. That’s right, not only facebook, youtube and all that, as well as most blog sites, which after all counts for the whole country. No, no internet access at all, no texting within the province, no phone contact with the rest of China. Including Hong Kong. You can call people within the province but I don’t know anyone to call. And I’m by myself. Then I was told the restaurant car was out of food, and that I would have to share a cabin with a bint whose lovely son is pictured above, asleep, and who spent the whole journey sitting with her legs apart on the bunk staring at me without stop for hours.
The province suddenly gaped rather menacingly before me. Three times the size of France, mumble mumble, only me in the world, shudder shudder, can’t blog, write emails … Naturally, I decided to press on. I knew it wouldn’t be the super-pleasurable experience I had envisioned - me blogging away in various hotel rooms and emailing my friends at leisure, but the show must go on. Why? First of all, because a friend of mine had just undertaken a week’s fasting in Thailand with intestine-outsucking and Zen; I thought if she could do that I could also do a week of being cut off from the world as we know it.
Secondly, because I had been planning this trip for months with a friend whose idea this all was, and who had suddenly pulled out a week before departure without telling me that he’d changed his mind probably a month before that but without telling me. Actually, in retrospect I now think that he never wanted to go at all; that it was just idle dreams and fun to talk about.
I owed it to myself to go through with it and carry out my mission: To see the old town of Kashgar before it goes the way of all Chinese cities: Straight into the shithole of the Chinese take on “modernity”: Six-lane highways criss-crossing a city of hastily put up second rate skyscrapers. Oh and to get some more SPORT slippers. I succeeded in that:
and true wonders for the foot they are.
So off I set from Korla, a super-polluted dump in the middle of the desert, formerly a hub on the Silk Road, now existing purely for the purpose of extracting oil. It shows that Chinese are sent here on a kind of punishing expedition to get oil for the motherland; where in Jiayuguan everybody is of a normal body shape, in Korla every fcuker is fat.
I got some good games of on the train:
The second photo showing the father and son team Li, with the father berating the son after every single game: When she played the pair you should have slammed down the pair of aces!
That was about ten minutes after they had been taught the game. You can say what you want about the Chinese but they are card brains extraordinaire.
I had a few hours to spare in Korla and tried to do the normal thing: Get a half day in a hotel to shower and do some walkabout. Then the second awful thing about cut off from civilisation hit: All hotels are off-limits for foreigners. Well, not all. The equivalent of The Peninsula (HK’s most? expensive hotel) are still going. Thank god I have my Hong Kong ID card. Although that only worked in one out of five hotels I tried near the station; a shithole which is probably 30 yuan a night for Chinese but which charged me 60 for a four hour stay and under much sucking of teeth and deliberation.
The Chinese are hysterical about being late. It can be a good thing but also leads to them standing for hours in train stations waiting for the gates to open. Why? They all have numbered seats. The hotel guy advised me to leave at 10 pm to get to the station, 7 minutes’ walk away, to catch the 11.26 train …
Having nothing much to do at 5 o’clock this morning I jumped in my clothes and raced out to Jiayuguan Fort to catch the morning sunshine. I had only planned for this day for one year and two weeks, the last two times I tried being overcast. What a cruel fate - it’s never overcast here.
Jiayuguan Fort! How many hours have I spent gazing at thee?
Of course everything is beautiful in the first light of morning: This photo hasn’t been photoshopped or touched in any way:
But the Silk Road waits for no man and this afternoon it’s back on the train. Hard sleeper this time - enough of this soft living mollycoddled and separated from the plebs! If I can’t get a good night of cards with geezers I must hang myself from the highest beam.
Not bad for a day and a half on the train! Well two nights and one whole day. But I mean if I should have walked or roller skated or whatever people do for “charity” these days, anything rather than just enjoying a hopping good journey, I wouldn’t even have got halfway to beautiful Lanzhou
Well, beautiful in a weird way, as in “the most polluted city in China” beautiful. I’m on a mission and it is to find more SPORT slippers:
These slippers are the most comfortable in the universe and beyond. 8 yuan and you can walk on clouds for several months. Unfortunately they seem to be going out of fashion in southern China (having never made it across the border to HK and if you think you’ve seen them it’s only been their flatter, less comfortable cousins “no label” slippers) so I have to find their source and buy up as many thousands of pairs as I can.
Another mission:
Playing cards with as many geezers as possible and photgraphing them. This pic is from the train and the geezers excellent - just a pity there were only two of them. But two card playing geezers are better than no card playing geezers!
Mission 3 is to photograph, possibly film, the old city of Kashgar before it’s razed to the ground. But as I dawdled several minutes between finding out that it would be razed and actually going there, it’s probably too late …
Right! So it’s into the hinterland we go …
And people: If you’re feeling a bit blah, it’s really nothing a
good, long train trip in China can’t solve !
Ahhhhhh - huge sigh of relief! Back in the bosom of the motherland at last after a dreadful amount of months of olympic rigmarole. I have my three year visa ($600) (as opposed to, I believe, $1500 for a single entry for Americans..) so now I can go to the mainland every half an hour if I want - and I want! Especially seeing the China Drool knocking around here. But an awful realisation, or rather fact, about the mainland has manifested itself again: That the further away from big cities you get, the cleaner the air and the fewer the cars, BUT you can’t get a man to massage your feet.
Here in Wai Jap (Huaiji) in the far western reaches of Guangdong province, there are huge hotels and massive karaoke bars with private rooms (I’ve never understood this private room thing. If you want to go out with friends only to sit in a tiny room belting out awful songs which they’re bound to have heard you sing thousands of times before - what’s the point in going out? Doesn’t anybody go out to meet strangers anymore? Might as well sit in your awful house and sing to your three friends) but not a single normal bar - a room with alcohol and people.
My trusty travel companion Lydia and I went to the grand total of three massage parlours they have in this joint and it was the same old story as it’s always been with my other trusty travel companion Richard who also likes men: We’re made to sit in the massage gaff’s reception and wait for a room. (Only looking for a foot massage mind you, not even a happy ending.) We point out that we’ll only let handsome boys even look at our feet. No problem, a room is provided eventually and we’re given the tea and TV treatment. Then after about 20 minutes some bints from the countryside come simpering in bearing buckets of water. Hello, where are the handsome boys?
Oh no, we don’t have any male masseurs but bints will do just as well, we’re told.
I don’t think so! we sniff, and stomp off in a huff. Wankers - how about revealing this little not insubstantial secret at once? They probably think that once we’re settled in the room we won’t mind what kind of sub-species has a go at our feet. But really, we do have our principles. As Lydia put it so well: I’d rather go without than having some bint touch my feet. Hear hear!
Still, it’s so good to be on motherland soil again and have days and days to go. The hitchhiking is a bit slow and now it’s raining. But I haven’t a care in the world. Not a bloody one.
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