Postcard from China, 8
If I push the point a bit I can make this post a tale of two movies. Monday night we watched White House Down in a state-of-the-art cinema in Hangzhou, while last night we saw part of a classic black-and-white drama from perhaps the 1950s being projected from a 16mm print on an outside wall in Wenzhu. Of both of which, more follows. Sunday morning we took the a bullet train from Ningbo to Hangzhou. During the hour-plus ride, the sign informing us of our speed hovered tantalisingly around 295 km/hr, then 297, even 298, but it refused to reach the magic figure of 300. And we had left the luxury of a major hotel chain behind in Ningbo, being booked in here to one of the many often-excellent youth hostels across China.
Hangzhou is famous for its large and placid lake, Xi Hu. Remarkably, this butts right up against a bustling modern city with a population of more than 8 million, although at its edge the eyes often block out any sense of the scores of skyscrapers. Marco Polo is supposed to have said of Xi Hu that, ‘A voyage on this lake offers more refreshment and pleasure than any other experience on earth.’ And certainly it is very beautiful, with its vistas spotted by pavilions and pagodas, and with wooden craft sliding sedately across its surface.
The afternoon heat was truly intense, with temperatures up around 40 degrees, but a trip across to one of the islands on a small ferry did something to alleviate this. But as elsewhere there were LOTS of Chinese tourists and the contemplative moments supposedly prompted by framed views and pools of lotus flowers proved to be rather elusive. Our touristic duty done, we retreated to the air-con and cheap-ish beer of the hostel.
The hostel is sited in what was once an area of alleyways and merchants shops – green tea mostly, but also cotton and other goods. Now the surroundings are one of the past-and-present hybrids that we keep coming across in China, with the framework of the old buildings finely preserved but with the ground floors occupied not only by tourist shops but also McDonalds and Costa. In a way, I suppose, it’s a bit like Covent Garden, although considerably more exotic to our eyes.
Monday we took public bus no 7 to Feilai Feng, known locally as ‘the hill that flew here’. Such a bus ride is quite an experience, given that the destination is popular and Chinese buses have no sense of a maximum number of passengers. So more and more people kept getting on, along with push chairs, large boxes and numerous children. Talking of which, small boys here seem not to wear nappies but rather shorts that are split under the crotch, facilitating easy peeing and pooing pretty much anywhere. In Hangzhou bus station I saw a mother hold her kid over a waste basket to do his business, even though – as an irate official tried pointing out – she was right outside a Gents.
By this stage even I was suffering a bit from temple fatigue but we admired China’s largest sitting statue of the Buddha. I was also very taken with a vast wooden relief behind the Buddha which stretched up into the ceiling with a heavenly host of hundreds of figures. But too many of the other statues looked simply kitschy and my ignorance of the belief system prevents any deeper sense of engagement. Then we took a cable car to the top of the hill behind, and from here the proximity of the lake to the city was particularly apparent.
In search of somewhere away from the crowds we took a taxi to Guo’s Villa, about which Clare had found some lines of WikiTravel but which otherwise was not in the guidebooks. And this was a revelation, in part I suspect because it felt like our discovery and also because there was almost no-one else there. But the beauty and distinctiveness of its late nineteenth century garden right on the shore of the lake would I think have won anyone over. To drink green tea on a stone terrace backed by glorious ponds and flowers and with a wonderful view across lotus leaves to the lake beyond really did feel both special and somehow timeless.
By which point we were ready for the contemporary world again, a fantasy version of which we visited courtesy of Roland Emmerich’s SFX triumph White House Down. In case it passed you by when it ran in Britain a couple of months ago, this has Channing Tatum saving leader of the free world Jamie Foxx from a bunch of right-wing nutters. The film only opened in Hangzhou today, but the auditorium was no more than half-full which meant that our £7 tickets allowed us to sit in the front row and glory in the greatness of Hollywood at its hokiest – and most dazzling. We had a wonderful time, and Kate has now decided that Channing Tatum is a way cooler Dad even than yours truly (you need to see the movie to get this).
Onwards. If it’s Tuesday it must be time for another bus ride, on this occasion to the ‘canal town’ of Wuzhen. This is one of a number of preservation areas on tributaries of the Grand Canal which was built more than fifteen hundred years ago to link the Yangtse and the Yellow River. Wuzhen has similarities to Venice, with adorable houses built up to the river’s edge and picturesque stone bridges offering endless photo opportunities.
I don’t mean to sound cynical and I’m thrilled we spent a night here in one of the guest houses run by the town, but unlike Pingyao this really does feel like a Disney experience. There’s no litter and no beggars, which is and are otherwise ubiquitous, and there are electric carts to transport you around the edges, and bedrooms with all mod cons including wifi. The prices in the numerous upscale shops and restaurants are pretty eye-watering too. It was our daughter Kate’s birthday and she wanted (as did Clare and I) a break from Chinese food. In the Rip-off Ripples Western Bar a couple of burgers and a pizza along with their cheapest wine set us back more than £70 (and the beer was even more expensive).
Perhaps I should say at this point that I dread turning into my father as he was when he and my step-mother returned from one of their European jaunts in what we called a ‘Dormabile’ (can that possibly be the right spelling?). He could then tell you the price of every coffee and glass of wine that they had drunk from Calais to Cadiz – and whether that represented value for sterling or not. Should this blog give further signs of heading that way, please take away my log-in.
After Tuesday’s dinner we wandered through the charming back streets of Wuzhen. Us and several thousand others with their cameras and cell phones. Then in a courtyard just off the main thoroughfare we came across one of the entertainments laid on for our delight – a man with a 16mm projector throwing black and white images of a Mao-era army drama onto to a screen against a wall. My knowledge of classic Chinese film is desperately slim so I have no sense of what the movie was, but the fragility of the technology with a creaking loudspeaker and the film reel slipping across the sprockets was in a certain way wonderfully poetic – and somehow the antithesis of Wuzhen as a touristic experience.
Now all we have left are a couple of days in Shanghai, which will be the subject of my final China post on Friday.
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