Day 34 The Great Wall of China

When Chris and I bought a house together in Brighton just over 10 years ago, we sat down and wrote a wish list about our future....a list of places we would like to visit together either locally  or further afield. By chance,  I found that very long list a few weeks ago and 2 places jumped off the page:

A walk up Brighton Pier....never achieved.....and......

A walk up the Great Wall of China!

So there we were yesterday, in a coach, in the smog, heading for this most iconic of sites.

The first 2 hours of our journey were alarmingly bad. The air conditioning in the coach didn’t work and the outside fog enveloped us in a warm insulated jacket of pollution. At first we could just about see through the windows.The scenery consisted of endless miles of flat reclaimed land with intermittent blocks of flats and unfinished buildings.

 Then the smog grew so dense that the road in front of us was closed. The driver turned the bus round and drove very fast for several miles on the wrong side of the congested carriageway in minimal visibility beeping his horn at the oncoming traffic. I felt my life pass before me. We were all extremely relieved when the coach stopped after an hour for a ‘rest’,  even if the only available facilities were the typical Chinese ‘squat’ toilets.

After 2 hours anger was replaced by despair.

Then, quite suddenly, the fog lifted and the flatness disappeared. Motorway turned into narrow hillside lanes and deep green mountains sprouted on either side of the road. As the height of the peaks grew, our spirits lifted.

Half an hour later, we caught our first glimpse of the Great Wall of China.

There was no disappointment. The scene was a perfect replica of the travel book pictures. The endless length of wall meandered steeply through the mountain tops like an everlasting game of snakes and ladders.

We were desperate to go up there, to climb the steps and become part of this amazing feat of early engineering. 

It was fun. It was also hard work! The steps were uneven in length and depth. The incline was steep. The air temperature had risen to the mid 70s.The wall was busy, but not uncomfortably crowded. However, every so often the climb was punctuated with a small temple or dark narrow tower which ‘bottlenecked’ the walkers into a precarious line of 2 way climbers and descenders. Despite the addition of several ‘Princess’ tour loads the vast majority of visitors were Chinese.

After a respectable walk, I left Chris with the bags and ascended a few slopes further. Once my calf muscles threatened industrial action, I too turned back. The return downward with no rails to support my balance was far more challenging than I care to admit.

So we did it! We climbed a part of the Great Wall of China.

And we were so tired on the way back, we barely noticed the smog.

Day 33 Sailing in Soup

Good Afternoon.

We are sailing in a north westerly direction across the Yellow Sea. Our destination is Tianjin, which is about 2 hours from Beijing and a further 1 hour from the Great Wall of China. A deep soup of sea fog has descended across the water. The ship’s fog horn is announcing our presence with eerie regularity. 

Chris and I are taking it easy today, as tomorrow will be a very long day. We will dock in Tianjin at 4 am, and are due to disembark at 6 am. The 3 hour coach ride will deliver us to The Great Wall by about 9 am .Being May Day, it will be a public holiday in China tomorrow, so we are warned to expect crowds. To add to this confusion, only 700 of us are expected to return to the ship. The majority of cruisers will be finishing their cruise in China and flying home from Beijing. Our return to the ship will clash with the embarkation of a new set of passengers, and their luggage, and their jetlag. Those of us doing both sectors of the journey are told to use the ‘crew entrance’. I feel quite part of the establishment!

Yesterday we made a brief stop in South Korea, but as we are visiting the port again, I will blog about Korea in a later post.

So how are we spending our sea days?

It’s amazing how little we can do to fill our time. A regular quiz trivia spot, watching the daily cruise ‘Wake Show’ and occasional viewing of a live comedian are the only repeated activities. Today, unusually, we did a bit more...went to a talk on Chinese herbal medicine, watched Warhorse on TV and cried, played the final snowball bingo and lost....not a lot really...but quite enough to punctuate our stops at so many seriously exciting places.

So that’s all for today. I need to conserve my energy and internet minutes for the Great Wall of China and subsequent trip to the city of Dallian.

Thanks for stopping by. I’ll be back soon.

Claire

Day 32 Nagasaki

At 2 minutes past 11 on the 9^th August 1945, an American plane dropped a nuclear bomb above the small seaside town of Nagasaki. 150,000 people were killed or injured, and the town suffered extensive damage.

This momentous and tragic event occurred just 6 years after Chris was born, and its significance is still engraved in our minds. Considering the gravity of the devastation, it is remarkable that the people of Nagasaki welcomed an American cruise ship with such graciousness.

Both our entry and sailaway were treated as special events with the local school band skilfully playing us out with traditional British and American theme tunes.

The peace park and museum carried no messages of blame or self pity. The simple and tragic exhibits and monuments spoke for themselves.

Glass bottles melted by the heat of the bomb.

Sculptures donated by international governments and artists

Both the museum and the peace park were laid out with careful design and lighting to give respect the enormous human tragedy which was represented.

As in all parts of the town, the floral displays and sculpted trees created a calm and restful atmosphere. Even our ice creams were shaped like a flower!

Strangely, for such an otherwise welcoming country, the entry requirements for Japan were very strict. Every single passenger onboard was photographed and finger-printed. I now have an internationally recorded identity!     

Shanghai Noon

The centre of Shanghai is filled with acres of tall structures, mostly built in the last 20 years as older buildings were demolished to make way for the new.

 This has allowed for the development of an amazing array of unusually shaped sky scrapers with wide multi-level roadways and careful inclusion of parks and trees, which the farmers are paid to grow and plant.

People whose homes have been demolished compulsorarily  are offered alternative high rise accommodation. Access to international TV channels is forbidden, but satellite dishes for this purpose are visible everywhere, with little evidence of prosecution. I have no idea how spacious these apartments are, and they vary enormously in their visual impact.

Our tour guide talks about the country’s new ‘capitalist’ endeavours. He sells his nation with enthusiasm. He does not mention ‘democracy’ .The reality is far too complex to untangle in a short one day visit, and our instincts prevent us from asking too many probing questions.

After a drive around the financial sector of Shanghai we are taken to the Jin Mao Tower, which houses the biggest tall sightseeing observatory in China. The lift travels smoothly  at 9 metres per second and we step out on the 88^th floor to view an amazing landscape of breathtaking architecture.

We have 2 more visits to China in this trip, once to a rural seaside port, and also to the historic ‘Great Wall’. Hopefully, these additional stops will help to give a fuller picture of this massively developing and complex society.

Day 30 Escape from Shanghai (Maglev)

We are sitting onboard our ship in the Shanghai harbour, waiting for the ship to leave. The sea is murky, the sky clouded with fog, there is a faint smell of pollution and our departure is as yet delayed by over an hour. It was a similar story this morning. The ship docked in plenty of time at 5 am, but at 7 am the central immigration procedures were still underway. In China these things take time. Despite the burden of beaurocracy, we received a very warm welcome in Shanghai and spent a wonderful day. Once all the passports and visas had finally been checked, disembarkation was very swift and brilliantly organised. Local guides were placed along the passages of the impressive new terminal building to greet us individually and handout maps. The uniform coaches were parked ready to leave  at parallel angles, and local folk dancers lined up to welcome our entry in to China.

 In this blog post I will concentrate on our journey on the Maglev train, and then write a second post about my impressions of Shanghai as a city.

‘Maglev’ stands for magnetic levitation. It describes the means of moving a train using electro- magnetism to set up opposing magnetic fields to propel a train at high speed without rails or wheels.

The Maglev train in Shanghai runs 31km from the city centre station to the airport.

The journey takes 7 minutes and reaches a maximum speed of 431 km per hour, half as fast again as a Formula 1 car.

Surprisingly, you don’t feel the pace. There are no bumps or vibrations. Apart from the digital display the only indication of the speed is when you look out of the window at the rapidly passing scenery. This was an amazing experience.

Day 29 Diamond Princess

We are sailing in a north easterly direction towards Shanghai in the East China Sea. The temperature is a pleasant 23 deg with moderate sea conditions. Although still very calm, we are feeling the motion of the ship after the ‘millpond’ sea state of the last 10 days. We have sailed over 3000 nautical miles since Singapore. There are occasional passing  fishing vessels and container ships,  and yesterday we caught a rare glimpse of the Taiwan coast.

There is a good balance between port visits and sea days, and we are now entirely acclimatised to our new time zone. The ship is large, similar to Grand Princess, but she seems to run more smoothly. In particular, the Horizon Court Buffet is not normally overcrowded, except for breakfast on port days when queues are long as everyone needs to disembark early!!

With such a long trip there are very few children onboard and the pools are very civilised and warm.

The library is well stocked, and the onboard TV info works extremely well. There is a wide selection of films, such as The Artist, Warhorse and Iron Lady.

Our balcony on Dolphin deck is really quite spacious. Having won a bottle of fizz (with help) at the 60s Trivia quiz, we managed to fit 4 of us on the balcony and promote USA/UK relations!

There’s loads more to say about the ship, so I will try and fit in some more details in later posts. We sail into the Huangpu tomorrow as we approach Shanghai, and I should have time to post some details about our day. After that, due to Japanese Radio Communication , there will be no onboard internet services  from 27^th April to am on 29^th. I should be able view emails on my kindle in port, but there will be no blogs for as couple of days.

Day 28 Hong Kong

Those people who see me at work may remember the red and black rucksack which accompanies me on my train journeys and produces from within  scribbled notes on school self evaluation  and the latest guidance from Ofsted. This rucksack now has a new function. It is our Far East travel companion and holds cameras, currency and fold up pac a macs. The pac a  macs were tightly rolled up unused until yesterday.

Our ship was too big to be allowed in the central Victoria harbour in Hong Kong so we awoke in the morning to find ourselves berthed in yet another container port. The ship had organised a regular and free shuttle coach service to take passengers into the town. Not wishing, or needing, to take part in another Princess tour, Chris and I started our DIY day by catching the shuttle.  As we walked off the ship a deluge of rain dropped unexpectedly from the cloudy sky and we frantically delved in the rucksack for our waterproofs. We finally climbed on the coach in rainwear, much to the envy of the other drenched passengers. ‘They’re well prepared’ I heard an American say. ‘Not well prepared, just English’ I retorted.

The rain soon passed and, by the time we had boarded the ‘Star Ferry’ to take us from the mainland Kowloon to Hong Kong Island, the weather was dry, although the tops of the numerous skyscrapers and hilltop peaks were immersed in cloud.

Chris and I chose to take the ‘Big Bus’, Hong Kong’s equivalent of the Ho Ho, and our £30 (not cheap) tickets  included the Star Ferry and Victoria Peak tram. Bearing in mind the uncertain weather, this proved to be a wise choice. As with all the locations so far visited, I loved Hong Kong and would like to revisit, though it is maybe not my very favourite venue so far. It is still very British in many respects. However, the residents (though not the traffic) move at constant high speed. It is far noisier than any British city, and dominated by the somewhat claustrophobic density of record breaking tower blocks.

 Opportunities for unlimited  designer shopping were everywhere, interspersed with local health and food outlets. Sadly our wallets did not stretch to a new Armani wardrobe, but we did manage to order a local ‘Hong Kong’ lunch, helped somewhat by the perfect English spoken by the staff!  

It was very refreshing to be in a place where we felt confident to travel independently.

We now have 2 days at sea before we disembark in Shanghai and Chris gets his long awaited ride on the high speed maglev train.

So for any cruisers interested, I will try to do a mini-review of the ship tomorrow.