Spending Time in the Big Cities

Well not much to say about Beijing and Shanghai except that I am totally digging it. Beijing was ultra-cool because of all the hype surrounding the Olympics at the 8th minute of the 8th hour of the 8th day of the 8th month of the 8th year (i.e. August 8th 2008). When I was there the city was experimenting with pollution control as they get ready for next summer. This involved a few of the following actions: a) only allowing cars with even license plates to drive on Monday and odd ones on Tuesday; b) shutting down something like 80% of factories to ensure a "blue sky day" (one of 260 such days planned for this year) and c) fining the horkers and spitters.

In Shanghai I stayed with Jason, a good friend who left Cairo 2 years ago and moved to Shanghai with his partner Timber. They are living in something like the Club Med of Shanghai at the Racquetball Club with a pool and a jacuzzi in their back garden, tennis courts, an in-house spa and a fantastic restaurant. Needless to say in my three days there I managed to get out only for reflexology, DVD purchases and Chinese silk. The Red Bag has now been joined by a lesser quality carry-on to hold these fine purchases!

The Great Wall

"The original 'wall' was begun over 2000 years ago during the Qin dynasty (221-207 BC) when China was unified under Emperor Qin. Separate walls, constructed by independent kingdoms to keep out marauding nomads, were linked together. The effort required hundreds of thousands of workers, many of them political prisioners... An estimated 180 million cubic metres of rammed earth was used to form the core of the original Wall, and legend has it that one of the building materials used were the bones of deceased workers...The wall never really did perform its function as an impenetrable line of defense...


The myth that the Great Wall is visible with the naked eye from the moon was finally laid to rest in 2003, when China's first astronaut Yang Liwei failed to see the barrier from space." (Beijing Lonely Planet 2005). Below are pictures from the 2250m long granite section of the wall at Mutianyu, where I went up by cable car and down by luge!

A Few China Pics

It seems I am able to edit on Blogger from Beijing, but I'm not actually allowed to view the blog site. Strange. Oh well, gives me a chance to add some pics. Here are a few from Yangshuo, definitely China's tourist mecca and locale of the odd-balls in the country, including the hot underwear model, the albino fortune teller and a great personality banana-seller.







My photos of the Pandas in Chengdu are not the best as they weren't very playful or outgoing the morning I saw them.


This is a guy about to cut the head off his goose in Fengdu, the "Ghost City" on the Yangtze.

This was, thankfully, not our Three Gorges Scenic Cruise #1, but our boat was not much better. We did have a top deck though which made all the difference.

And this monk is definitely making some peace with himself...

Third Class on The Yangtze

I am typing this from Yichang, a city somewhere on the Yangtze. The "Three Gorges Scenic Cruise #1" dropped us off here last night. The 4-day "cruise" was definitely an adventure! I had booked 2nd class, which meant a 4-bed room, somehow assuming that I would be put in with a nice Chinese family where I could teach the kid the a-b-c's. No such luck, instead I got three sweaty men in tank tops rolled up to their necks smoking and drinking lager. I quickly changed rooms to third class, which had six beds, and shared with 2 foreign couples. One couple, a French guy and a Vietnamese woman, were absolutely horrified at the state of our room. Cramped bunkbeds, squat toilet, brown water, malfunctioning 'aircon' and the roar of engines at our heads. The other couple, Steve from England and Dr. Zuzana from Slovakia, were much more positive and optimistic about the adventure and the showerless days; so I hung out with them and chilled on the top deck with two young Dutch lads who were also happily enjoying the scenery.

The Yangtze river itself and the gorges are absolutely stunning, though the water is murky and the air was smoggy for most of the time. It was a peaceful ride, and we went through the lesser three gorges on a traditional boat with Chinese singing folk songs. At the end of the journey was the controversial Three Gorges Dam, the largest and most ambitious engineering project "in the world". The purpose of the dam is to provide hydroelectric power to Shanghai, much-needed water up to Beijing and elsewhere for irrigation, and most importantly for the Chinese, flood control. While Lake Nasser (the human-made reservoir from the Aswan Dam in Egypt) has the highest capacity for irrigation, the Three Gorges claims to have the highest storage capacity for controlling floods. It is estimated that about 1.5 million people have been displaced (official Chinese figures), and lost their homes and livelihoods. We went through the town of Wuchang, where the farmers and mountain dwellers have been resettled. At this point we got off the boat and enjoyed a hotpot and beer, and witnessed the Chinese doing their nightly communal dancing and aerobics in the main square.

I'd like to say more about the Three Gorges, but won't until I am in another land.

Now I'm about to enjoy another 20 hour train ride to get up to Beijing, where I am looking forward to duck pancakes, trekking on the Great Wall, seeing the Olympics sights, and drinking red wine with a couple of friends of friends living up there. Would be nice to have a bit of normalcy at this juncture!

Thanks again to Joey for posting this for me :)

Experiencing Technical Difficulties in China

Hi All. I am writing this as an email and have asked my lovely sister Joanne to cut and paste and post this for me on the blog. China is not allowing the access of Blogger, and in some places, I can't get into Yahoo either. Firewalls! I'll also be unable to download photos I think for awhile, but will do so as soon as I get the chance...

As I had done Hong Kong with some luxury, I have decided to do China on the cheap as a backpacker; by staying in dorm hostels, taking smelly overnight buses and spending too many hours on trains. I am trying to see if I can do this amazingly large country without taking any flights (aren't you proud?!) So after Hong Kong, I took the Kowloon-Canton Railway (KCR) to Shenzen, where I met two young lads from England studying medicine, and who had just cycled 1000 miles from Shanghai to Hong Kong for charity! Great to see the young ones doing something productive in life. We were on the strangest bus I had ever seen, with three rows of sleepers and a French movie dubbed in Cantonese for 12 hours. I hung out with these two cyclists, Dave and Chris, who look remarkably like Prince William and Harry, for the next few days in the tourist mecca of Yangshuo, just south of Guilin on the Li River. We met up with another traveller Madeline, and the four of us managed to get in a bamboo rafting trip, a cycle through the countryside, and a mud bath in the Buddha Cave. Yangshuo is a bit of a hippy tourist mecca, and attracts the many sides of Chinese folk to the town. The best was an albino fortune teller who totally had the hots for Madeline, and I just had to get my portrait painted on a t-shirt from a disabled artist. I also, perhaps not too surprisingly, bumped into an American I knew in Cairo four years ago!

I then survived a 26 hour train journey by getting through half of Mao's biography (wow, what a brute), and am now in Chengdu, Sichuan province. Home of one of my favorite Chinese dishes, szechuan shrimp. As I am only here for less than a day, I have managed to get in a Chinese opera (not too bad, great acrobatics and mask-changing stunts), and this morning ventured to the largest Panda breeding centre in the world. The movie highlighting the park announced that "panda breeding is as important to China as sending a man to space".

Today I am embarking on a Yangtze River Cruise. Believe me, it will not be luxurious (no five-star treatment and there are doubts about whether or not there will be anyone else speaking English). My only reason for doing this trip is to the see the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, and to hopefully do some research on the environmental impacts of the dam just for the heck of it. I have been emailling folks to try to get someone from a Canadian NGO I know working there to talk with me, but no luck so far. In any event, the Three Gorges is suppose to be absolutely stunning, and after the dam is finished in 2009, the river from Chongqing may be unpassable. So I am getting there just in time.

More soon from the land of Buddha, fake Rolex's and cool bamboo hats.

From Joanne: I did it!!!

The Fragrant Harbour on Day 50

I am on Day 50 of my adventure, and still here in Hong Kong. I am totally into this place. It really doesn't feel that different from hanging out on Dundas and Spadina. Every second shop sells mobile phones and camcorders and you can smell that infamous chinatown aroma at every street corner.

Today I spent the day at the Museum of History to learn the fascinating Hong Kong Story: the boat dwellers, opium, the Brits, opium, opium, opium again, the Japanese invasion and absolute desolation, the Brits again, typhoons, water shortages, the Chinese again. Its peculiar, this is a modern citystate with a breadth of history that seems to be lost. Since July 1997 Hong Kong is officially part of China again, but when I ask people what has changed since British reign, they are reluctant to say anything. Perhaps really it isn't that different? Though I always thought that Hong Kong was more British than Chinese. I was wrong. Malesh, here are some pics of the modern fragrant harbour. The pics from the market are when Martha, my cooking teacher, took me on a tour through the food market here in Kowloon. Chinese like to eat their animals fresh, so I saw a lot of chopping off of heads of chickens and fish to give to be cooked for the evening meal. I also saw the longest green beans; like seriously over 2 feet long, as well as eggs that literally just dropped from the hen. The last picture is from the jade market. Jade is thought to bring good luck and when Chinese people are brought into this world or celebrate an event such as graduation, childbirth or marriage they are traditionally given a piece of jade. The Chinese are incredibly superstitious and accordingly, because of the year I was born (pig), I am actually not in a good position to take risks at the moment. Hmmmf. Seems I have taken quite a few this year. Well I'll buy a piece of jade, eat some fish heads, rub a few yellow-haired monkeys and hope for the best.

Oh, and since I am at my half-way point of my adventure, I thought I should celebrate it somehow. But wasn't sure... do I do an assessment towards meeting my objectives (ha! a mid-term review!)? Lessons learned? Challenges faced? Most memorable moments? Then I thought, nah. I really am just going with the flow anyway and I really am not out to achieve anything, but rather to experience. I suppose the greatest semblance toward progress of some kind is that I am not smoking. Yes people, I am seriously not smoking. Okay, I had a slight lapse in Thailand one day with the rock climbers and then the next night while out drinking with folks; but since leaving Krabi a week ago, I have again been without nicotine. So yes, I have had more smoke-free days in the last 50 then I have had smoking. And now we don't need to discuss it anymore, we just know that Lor is a non-smoker. Yay. I will however commemorate the half-way point with a fine glass of red at the hotel's bar. I've just realized its happy hour. Happy happy :)

A Touch of Heart in Hong Kong

Anyone who knows me for longer than like a day usually knows that my bro, sis and I grew up eating a heck of a lot of dimsum from an early age. While in Cairo, I would often get cravings and would immediately get to SoHo or to Ken's as soon as I landed in London or Toronto while en route. Yep, as we know, I have a thing for Chinese food. Well now my dear friends, I know how to make the best of dimsum!! To chop, to mix, to roll, to saute, to deep fry, to steam...

Dim sum in Cantonese translates to English as a "touch of heart". It takes a hell of a lot of patience and time to get those lovely pieces on a bamboo steamer to a trolley for your weekend consumption. It seems that almost all of the dim sum treats we know and love consist of the same ingredients, but the dough may be slightly different or the flour a different variety. There exist a few secrets in dimsum cooking which I am finding out in my 3-day cooking class with Martha Sherpa (http://www.cookery.com.hk/). Martha usually trains proper chefs from all over the world and domestic helpers in Hong Kong, but I emailled her a few months ago and she agreed to put me into her classes. This new found skill will only come out for special occasions! It takes a long time, but I promise that my first real dinner party in Ottawa shall include some dimsum pieces :)

P.S. Can you believe I am actually cooking with mushrooms. Yuck. I still think they are gross even if they are in absolutely everything here.