THURSDAY 3RD MAY 2012 – BST +7HRS - Shanghai – Yù Yuán ( 豫園) Garden of Peace

An excellent evening meal in the Hotel Restaurant followed by a good night’s sleep and I am ready to meet up with my fellow passengers. On returning to the hotel yesterday afternoon I had beenphoned by Paul Liang who is to be our Viking Escort for the duration of thetrip.  He tells me that there are 239 guests on this particular trip and we are divided into smaller groups of 38each with a dedicated guide.  This proved to be a very well organised journey with no hitches at all either on the daily tours, the river cruise or the internal flights.

 

The evening meal also proved to be very enjoyable.  I arrived to be greeted in what was by now becoming a very familiar friendly and courteous manner.  The buffet was enormous with all kinds of cuisine available – Chinese, Japanese Sushi, India, Western and many more.  I must have been looking a little mesmerised since I was soon approached by a friendly waiter who escorted me round the entire buffet explaining all the dishes on offer!!  He then offered to select the best of the Chinese dishes all of which proved to be excellent especially when eaten with chopsticks.  The lemon chicken was the best for me!

 

The meal was accompanied by local beer and the China Times an English daily newspaper and very good it is too.  It made interesting reading to find that the Chinese Government is worried by a slow down in GDP from 8.3% to 8.1% but the problems in the US and Europe reduce demand for Chinese goods.  At the end of the meal the Restaurant proprietor came to settle my bill and once again I was made to feel that my custom was much appreciated and my visit to China of genuine interest!

 

We left the hotel early at 7.45am primarily to miss the rush hour traffic, and to get to our first destination the Garden of Peace before the crowds and the other 6 Viking groups.  This is a classical and extensive Chinese garden located beside the City God Temple in the northeast of the Old City of Shanghai.

 

Chinese gardens (Source Wikipedia) traditionally recreate natural landscapes in miniature. The style has evolved for more than three thousand years, and includes both thevast gardens of the Chinese emperors and smaller gardens built by scholars,poets, and former government officials. The classical Chinese garden is enclosed by a wall and has one or more ponds, a rock garden, trees and flowers, and an assortment of halls and pavilions within the garden, connected by winding paths and zig-zag galleries. By moving from structure to structure,visitors can view a series of carefully-composed scenes, unrolling like a scroll of landscape paintings.

 

The Yu Garden was first conceived in 1559 during the Ming Dynasty by Pan Yunduan as a comfort for his father, the minister Pan En, in his old age. Pan Yunduan began the project after failing one of the imperial exams, but his appointment as governor of Sichuan postponed constructionfor nearly twenty years until 1577.   One of the centrepieces is an exquisite Jade Rock.

Today, Yu Garden occupies an area of 5 acres, and is divided into six general areas:

• Sansui Hall (Sān Suì Táng, lit. "Three Tassel Hall") – includes the Grand Rockery  (Dà Jiǎshān ), a 12-metre-high rockery made of huangshi stone, featuring peaks, cliffs, winding caves, and gorges. This scenery was possibly created during the Ming Dynasty.
• Wanhua Chamber (Wàn Huā Lóu, lit. "Chamber of the Ten Thousand Flowers")
• Dianchun Hall (Diǎn Chūn Táng, lit. "Heralding Spring Hall") – built in 1820
• Huijing Hall (Huì Jǐng Lóu)
• Yuhua Hall (Yù Huá Táng, lit. "Jade Magnificence Hall") – furnished with rosewood pieces from the Ming Dynasty
• Inner Garden (Nèi Yuán) – rockeries, ponds, pavilions, and towers; first laid out in 1709 and more recently recreated in 1956.

 

Each area is separated from the others by "dragon walls" with undulating grey tiled ridges, each terminating in a dragon's head.

The visit was an interesting and tranquil introduction to Chinese culture.

WEDNESDAY 2ND MAY 2012 ­ BST +7HRS - Shanghai ­ Exploring the Nanjing Road!

Throughout the trip Viking placed us in 4/5 star hotels.  My room in Shanghai was larger than many rooms in my house excluding the en suite with a walk in shower and full size bath!  The latter was most welcome after 12 hours of travel and it didn’t take me long to run a hot and relaxing bath followed by a siesta but by 1.00pm I was wide awake and wondering what to do with my free afternoon and evening in Shanghai.

Some lunch seemed like a good idea and having asked the concierge was pointed to what I can only describe as a Health Fast Food restaurant in the hotel complex.  I could have gone to Starbucks but I decided to explore modern Chinese fast food. Incidentally you may have heard recently that Starbucks has done so well that it is planning on opening another 1000 outlets in China!  Young Chinese clearly like coffee but tea of all kinds still remains the beverage of choice but more of that in another blog.

 

I did approach the restaurant with some trepidation but I need not have worried the door was opened for me by two pretty young Chinese girls who greeted me in English and I was quickly shown to a table and made comfortable.  Mainly salads with some fish accompanied by carrot or pumpkin juice!  The restaurant was full of English, American, Australian and young Chinese all with their mobiles and Blackberries and all busy discussing and doing deals – well that’s how it appeared anyway.

 

After a very tasty salad with a salmon fillet I paid with a credit card – all very efficient (I don’t know why I was so surprised after all I was in the most cosmopolitan and major trading city in China!) and left to explore the main shopping street in Shanghai the Nanjing Road.  All the main streets that run East/West in this city are named after major cities in China whereas the streets that run North/South are named after famous politicians.

 

What first struck me is the mist that veils everything, not too thick today and it is something that you get used to, especially on theYangtze and in the gorges it is something that adds a sense of drama and mystery.  The mist of course is pollution mainly from industrial and power generation sources. As I later learnt the Three Gorges Dam is already making a huge contribution to a reduction in pollution but at what price some would ask.  I’ll return to that question later.

 

You really only notice the mist because of the many high rise buildings that sit on either side of this mile long shopping paradise just packed with stores selling the top Western brands – all much more expensive because of a hefty import tax on luxury goods. This doesn’t seem to have diminished the desire of young Chinese to buy such items since the street was crowded with stylishly dressed people.  The girls in particular all seemed to be wearing high fashion that I thought was restricted to the cover of  ‘Vogue’ or ‘Glamour’ well not here! High fashion or not and wearing those impossible shoes they all looked extremelyattractive.

Avoiding the street hawkers selling impossibly cheap Parker pens and Rolex watches I spent a very interesting couple of hours wanderingalong this wide avenue through beautifully manicured sycamore trees with a street cleaner wielding a kind of besom brush made from reeds or a broad leafed grass every 200 metres or so – but no graffiti, no litter and no acres of chewing gum stuck to the disfiguring the pavements.  Thankfully chewing gum is one Western habit the Chinese have eschewed.

 

Every crossroads has its own ‘Crossroad Assistant’ using a whistle to stop you walking at the wrong time although you quickly learn that neither their entreaties for you to cross or a green pedestrian crossing sign doesn’t mean that you can traverse the street with priority – traffic just comes at you from the left mainly and just keeps coming!!  No good holding up your hand or stopping you just have to get out of the way.  I quickly learnt to follow the locals!!

 

Every so often a side courtyard/street opened off the main avenue offering an inviting view behind the scenes but all were guarded by security – in fact almost every building had a security guard one of whom asked me not to take photos inside a shopping Mal - so conscious of my camera I decided not to venture into these haunts so I will never know if they represented ‘the hidden China’. 

 

Having avoided the inevitable MacDonalds I did venture into Marks & Spencers.  Apart from familiar shop fittings, men’s silk ties and the odd shirt everything on sale had been specially selected for the Chinese market so conventional shirts, trousers etc. but all more colourful, more styled and tailored.  Here again I found the greeters at the doorand the old fashioned ‘floorwalkers’ anxious to help and make a sale.

 

I made it safely back to the hotel having enjoyed my first view of Shanghai.

 

The sculpture shown – and with its own minder - is a copy of Salvador Dali’s ‘Nobility of Time’ (The original is in the Espace Dali Museum in Paris) just one of a number of sculptures and fountains to be found in this district of Shanghai.

WEDNESDAY 2ND MAY 2012 ­ BST +7HRS - An Early Introduction to China!

Its Wednesday 30^th May as I write this post and at long last I have managed to download and catalogue the 1400 photos that I took during my amazing journey through China and I can now make a start in writing up this blog. The delay hasn’t been entirely due to photos – I returned to find that the wild life reserve (My garden) needed some urgent attention if I was to continue to get down my drive!

 

The journey to China got off to an excellent start from the time that I arrived at London Heathrow to board my Virgin Atlantic flight to Shanghai.  Being still somewhat of a novice to long haul flying I was relieved to be approached by a friendly Virgin Atlantic representative who assisted me in ‘Checking In’ and finding an aisle seat.  Within a further 15 minutes I was clear of security and had time for a coffee and sandwich before boarding a very smart and clean Airbus 346. I arrived at my seat to be greeted by a young Chinese man who turned out to be one of China’s leading chemical engineers who was on his way to deliver a paper at a scientific conference in Shanghai over the coming weekend.

 

During our 10-hour flight my young Chinese friend told me that he was completing a Doctorate at Oxford University.  He had developed a polymer that when added to tarmac makes it easier to lay and increases its range of uses. Having already published papers in ‘Nature’ and ‘New Scientist’ he clearly is destined to become a top scientist in China.  He was the son of a farmer from close to the Inner Mongolian border and his rise from these humble beginnings was my first introduction to the developments in education and many other aspects of China that have taken place over the last two decades.  He also wrote out and rehearsed me in some useful Chinese phrases!  His friendly approach was typical of what I was to find in China.

 

The aircraft was carrying a larger than usual cargo payload and many of the seats in economy were empty so it proved to be a very pleasant with plenty of space to stretch out and get some sleep since of course we were chasing the sun as China is +7hrs BST I arrived on Tuesday 2^nd May at 9.15am having departed LHR at 3.15pm the previous day.  I still find this ‘time travel’ intriguing.

 

The arrival at Shanghai Pudong airport proved to be as easy as the flight and after 30 minutes I had cleared immigration, collected my baggage and found the Viking Cruise rep in the arrivals haul.  There were two other couples on the flight – I had thought there would be many more but as I was to discover the majority of the 238 guests on this Viking River Cruise were to be from the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.  I thought Viking was a British company but its Swiss.

 

We were soon aboard a mini-bus on our 40-mile trip into Shanghai along a busy highway and enjoying my first experience of Chinese driving!  Pretty aggressive with plenty of use of horns but unlike Buenos Aries where horns are used mainly throughimpatience in China horns are more of warning that ‘you are coming through’ or ‘already in your blind mirror spot’!

 

The final mile or so into the centre of downtown Shanghai and the Ritz-Carlton Hotel was truly breath-taking surrounded by modern andarchitecturally interesting high rise buildings of steel and glass construction surrounding older and renovated traditional temples like the one shown in the picture but for the present

 

Zài Jiañ (Good Bye) its 11.00am and I’m off to find my room on the 39^th floor for a catch-up snooze!

Test & Apology

Sorry blog followers I'm having problems in posting from my phone and the Internet.

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Three Gorges Dam Locks Sat 5th May PM

A lazy afternoon negotiating this rise of 5 locks. The Viking Emerald is 360ft long and we were behind a large motor barge with another tender alongside it both full of bright yellow sulpher. Alongside us was a barge carrying tons of rolled steel and tube destined for car manufacture in Chogquing and behind that another barge loaded with sand. This whole convoy moved as one between each lock with only inches to spare on either side.
Each lock takes 9 minutes to fill and raise the vessels 70ft. Not quite as spectacular as the Panama canal until you emerge behind the dam and realise you are in a man made lake that stretches for 400 miles!

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Three Gorges Dam Sat 5th May +7BST

Wonderful morning at this dam, the highest in the world creating lake 367 miles long. Supplies 22400 mega watts the eqivalent of 17 nuclear & 60  coal burning power stations & saving 50m tons of coal and 110m tons of CO2.
Will be navigating the 5 largest locks in the world this PM delayed again becuase of heavy fog. Dam creates its own micro climate.   Very hot and sunny now.


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Aboard the Viking Emerald

Embarked Viking Emerald
Sent from my HTC at 830pm. Beautiful vessel. Change of plan since thick fog on Yangtse meant we had to fly to Wuhan this pm and then take bus for 5 hours to just below 3 Gorges Dam. Leave.at 800am tomorrow to take 5 dam locks.

Wi-Fi seems onboard.

Amazing Shanghai!

Arrived safely after an excellent flight with Virgin Atlantic. Amazing skyscrapers and all different.  Poor Wi-Fi.
Zai jian Good Bye

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