September 7th, 2007 Chris
Just got an email from Loic and Laurie, a French couple we met in St. Marie. They were on the whale watching trip with us and were clearly better photographers that I was. So, for the record, three things you apparently need to get good whale pics:
- a good camera (they had a digital SLR and long lens; I had a p&s)
- some actual skill at using it
- luck
I often say that my Canon point-n-shoot does 90% of what I need. I guess this falls into that other 10%. Here’s what they got:
Posted in roadside blogging | 2 Comments »
September 3rd, 2007 Chris
Hi folks. Sorry for the longer-than-planned absence. I’m back in Dalian and mostly settled now, and I will be posting my Madagascar stories soon, with plenty of photos in tow. In the meantime, some China traveling for the mill. Enjoy.
The Beijing train station looks long abandoned as I walk across the broken terrace for my 1:30 a.m. hard sleeper back to Dalian. A fence surrounds the plaza, isolating it from the humming capital city, and unconscious bodies are scattered throughout. Inside, the station where I’m used to elbowing and shoving my way through throngs of travelers who don’t differentiate each other from cockroaches is nearly empty.
Even in the middle of the night, though, the train is full, stifling and humid with sweat from the close-packed bodies. Families crowd around bunks, but it’s quiet. Most people are two tired to socialize.
I throw my bag on the rack and take a seat by the window. No air comes through, but it’s a nice illusion of a breeze. Sweat is dripping off me.
A girl leans her head on the windowsill, and I strike up an awkward conversation. My Chinese is lacking after two months away, and I need the practice. She’s going to Dalian, too, so there should be something to talk about.
But we barely move past greetings before she slumps back on the window, watching the quiet station as the train pulls out as if mourning lost time in Beijing.
Behind me, a man in his mid-20s interjects with that old lie: “Ni de Hanyu bucuo.”
He’s in the Chinese Navy, attending university in Lushun, just south of Dalian. He’ll be in for six years. I ask him if he likes the military life.
“I don’t like your country’s navy,” he answers instead. “They can come to any country in the world. They are the best.”
I’m confused. “But you don’t like them?”
“Soldiers don’t like war,” he says.
“Our countries are friends, though, right?”
“Yes,” he assures me. “But many people do not think like me. After Iraq, many Chinese are afraid.”
“Afraid of America?”
“Yes.”
“Many people in America are afraid of China,” I say, a consolation of sorts.
“I know. I think if America and China are not friends, it’s very bad. Bad for everybody. Bad for the whole world.”
Night trains are a bad place to linger on apocalyptic thoughts. There’s plenty that could lead our countries into conflict—an independent-minded Taiwan, a disintegrating North Korea, a rearming Japan. We rattle through each turn, hurtling toward Dalian like a Beijing cab driver in light traffic. When the loudspeaker starts blaring pop songs at 5:30 a.m., I’ve barely slept and my stomach is reminding me that I’ve still not shaken the food poisoning from the last meal I ate in Madagascar.
It’s a long ride across Liaoning in the late summer sun. Towns outside are rural, scarcely conglomerated, often crumbling, a different China than the one I’ve lived in. We arrive just after 3 p.m., and I stumble back into the city I called home for nearly a year. We recognize each other, barely. It’s good to be back.
Posted in roadside blogging | 4 Comments »
July 28th, 2007 Chris
The whales weren’t there to give us a show.
Through July and August they migrate north to the warm waters in this unnamed strait between Madagascar and Ille St. Marie. They’d float up around our boat, maybe checking out the noisy craft intruding on their winter home, then exhale and drift back under the turquoise ocean.
That’s how whale watching goes sometimes, even in the farthest place from anywhere.
The humpbacks come here to do more important things, like give birth and spend the southern hemisphere’s cold months away from their usual home around Antarctica.
Our guide was a talkative local named Albert. He owns the beach-side bungalow where we stayed and the 12-person boat that took us out.
He used to ferry people across from the mainland in the same vessel, a harrowing prospect as choppy waters bounced us up and down, even close to the coast.
The Balmito is small enough to ride the current; it feels like surfing over short distances, which is fun until someone throws up.
The rainstorm that was hanging over the island caught up with us as we headed back to shore. We were soaked by the time we returned to our place.
But the whales we worth it, and we were thrilled.
Production notes: I originally narrated the above into my slide show (click the image) but decided against it at the last minute. This is the second time I’ve used Soundslides, and the first time using gathered sound, so any feedback puts you on my good side. These things take forever to upload on uber-slow, pay-by-the-minute Malagasy internet, so I think the rest of the multimedia will have to wait until I’m back in the PRC. That’s August 25, if you’re curious. Posts in old fashioned text and non-moving pictures are still forth-coming.
Posted in multimedia, roadside blogging | 5 Comments »
July 10th, 2007 Chris
I have a certain talent for making my life more complicated. Somehow, on every trip, for every dollar and hour I save, I can almost guarantee I’ll lose it in a feat of gross negligence. I get lost, show up late, or like today, can’t fill out simple paperwork.
But I’m here. I arrived in Antananarivo an hour late and made the ever-patient girlfriend (she’s waited a year already, not that she hasn’t been busy) wait another hour while I stood in line for an entry visa, then went back to fill out a declaration form, then had to follow a guard through a gaggle of touts and passengers with better sense of how things work here so I could get the visa I thought was obtained at the end of that line I’d just been standing in. Turns out I needed a stamp first, or something. I’m still not sure. You’d think I’d have the hang of this entry-requirements tango by now.
But as I said, I eventually made it through. My first impressions of Tana are a bit clowded by 20-plus hours of travel through four countries (China, Thailand, Reunion, Madagascar), and I’m lousy at taking everything in on the first day. Some things stick out though. Poverty is rampant. Shanty towns dot the city, intermixed with French colonial architecture. The finance ministry looks a bit like a run-down Chinese apartment building, with peeling paint outside and crumbling brick steps. I suppose this is what a real developing country looks like.
This morning, sitting on the plane, I saw the bluest sky I’ve ever laid eyes on. The clouds broke over the Indian Ocean at sunrise, and the pale dawn reached up toward indigo overhead. I forgot what a blue sky is supposed to look like, even in Dalian.
I keep saying things in Chinese, which does me no good here. French is the business language, but most everyone sticks with Malagasy. I don’t speak either. I’m told the local language is easy, so we’ll see how much I pick up in two months.
This is a bit disjointed. I’m still travel weary and my head is in the wrong time zone. More to come though, and photos, too.
Posted in roadside blogging | 4 Comments »
July 9th, 2007 Chris
The cliche about Chinese cities is that if you leave and come back, you’ll hardly recognize the place. That’s true in a sense: I find myself fixated on Beijing this weekend, my last in China for two months, and I can’t quite figure out why.
Almost a year ago, I arrived here after a 16-hour flight and not much more planning than that. Beijing hit me like one of its now-infamous sandstorms, and by the end of my first week in China, I was pondering a long train ride toward Europe, where at least there were two languages I could understand. But I stayed, and I’m back on my friend Lindsey’s couch, looking at the same landscape with new eyes.
In my mind, I pour into Beijing everything that constitutes a Chinese city, and to its credit, the place does not flinch from that role. Beijing is enormous and energetic, crowded and cultured, dirty and decaying and rebuilding at a pace that seems rightly called Olympic. The skyline from Lindsey’s apartment looks familiar, but I can’t quite fit it into the photos I took last August, sitting by the same window, dumbfounded by the monstrosity of it all.
Lindsey’s street looks much the same at first. It’s the particulars that are different. Most of the little noodle shops and restaurants have rusted chains slung across their doors, and the outdoor ovens that cooked some of my first Chinese meals are conspicuous in their absence. At least two storefronts have been gutted and replaced with cake shops—I keep seeing these same shops everywhere. They looked as trendy as they did empty on Friday afternoon.
Food was a priority at that point. I don’t know how a one-hour flight becomes an all-day affair. Somehow flying from Dalian (two hours delayed by fog), getting to Haidian District, picking up my Madagascar ticket in Chaoyang and returning to Lindsey’s neighborhood consumed a full workday without providing a lunch break. And “Let them eat cake” is not useful as economic policy or nutritional advice, so the renovations outside my weekend home weren’t welcome.
I settled for a stand on the corner, where a smiling woman offered cold noodles and meat-filled bread rolls, while a man hacked slabs of pork into fry-able chunks in back. I ordered a bit of everything (new city, new street food), and she filled a bowl big enough for me to wear as a helmet with leng mian, dousing it in vinegar and other unidentifiable sauces. “Spicy?” she asked me. I nodded. But it proved too much. The peppers made my nose run and bit back at into my tongue. The meat was good, though.
I sat on a shaded bench in front of the stand, across from a thin and wrinkled woman immersed in a heated discussion with herself.
I’m not sure who was winning the argument, since I could only hear one side and my Chinese still isn’t good enough to follow psychotic rants. She was determined, though. That much was obvious. She pressed each point with a gnarled finger and brushed away rebukes with an arthritic wave. At times she’d turn to me, either to bring me up to speed since I certainly couldn’t follow or to seek reinforcement. I’m not sure. I stuck with my noodles. Those I could understand.
Lindsey was asleep when I got back. Her roommate, Xiao Hong, was on the couch tuning a cherry red electric guitar, while his friend cleaned out an old pipe with a broken string. I sat by the window where I’d sat a year ago and wrote a few notes about the day. Other than a quick “nihao,” I was ignored.
Lindsey stumbled out of her room a bit later, rubbing sleep out of her eyes and looked at me.
“I hate Beijing,” she said. “I mean hi.”
This would become the theme of the weekend. Lindsey has lived here on and off since early 2004. She meant to come in 2003, but that was during the SARS days, and our university wouldn’t send students here to be poisoned by Chinese pneumonia, so she went to New Jersey instead. I’ve never quite figured that out. Once she did make it here, she grew attached enough to come back after graduation, and it’s been a strange match since. She’s taught English, polished copy at CCTV and freelanced for That’s Beijing. These days voice recording pays the bills.
Best I can tell, what she likes about living here, and what keeps her coming back, has nothing to do with the city. She loathes the traffic, the pollution, the way Chinese people treat each other, pretty much like most other expats I know. I’ve yet to meet anyone who says: “Wouldn’t it be great to spend a day on the Second Ring Road? We’ll just sit there, listening to the arrhythmic melody of car horns while sucking in exhaust fumes and marveling at what counts as blue in a Beijing sky. It’ll be awesome.”
A lot of this frustration comes out in the Muay Thai class she’s been taking for a few months. I tagged along on Friday night for a free lesson. I was curious to see just how out of shape I am after a year of not training in any martial art, or playing tennis, or pretty much not doing any sport of any kind, unless you count quiz night and darts at the Tin Whistle. Turns out those don’t do anything for your lung capacity, and I am really out of shape.
Big as Beijing is, Friday night was full of small-world moments. Friday night ended at a pricey bar full of expats, and within a minute of saying I live in Dalian, I heard someone call across the table, “Wait, do you know Vanessa W? And this guy Mike K?” Yeah, they’re good friends. I had lunch with Mike on Thursday. And one of Lindsey’s friends has an ex-girlfriend in the same Peace Corps group as my girlfriend. I’ve been assigned to collect intel.
None of this has deterred me from returning to Dalian in the fall, but spring could be a different story. Knowing Chinese, even a little, and not being shell shocked by everything that is China makes this feel like a place I could be, at least for a short while.
Comparing Beijing to Dalian is a useless exercise, like apples to Peking duck. The cities are on different planes, and what I like about one is not a matter of what the other does or doesn’t have, but more about what fits the mood I’m in now. This weekend, I’m glad to be in Beijing.
I asked Lindsey last night if she finds it weird that I’m enjoying Beijing.
“No,” she said, “because the city does have its charms. And besides, you don’t live here.”
Next post will be from Madagascar…
Posted in roadside blogging | 3 Comments »
July 7th, 2007 Chris
This is just a quick post to let everyone know I made it to Beijing. I’ll post more in the morning. I’ve been here all day and it’s been madness. If anyone is around and wants to meet up, drop me an email: eyeseast at gmail.com.
Three days till Madagascar.
Posted in roadside blogging | No Comments »
June 29th, 2007 Chris
About a month ago, Marc Ravalomanana, the president of Madagascar, offered the African Development Bank a prescription for aiding the rest of the continent. Among his recommendations: opening up trade, promoting private industry and an ongoing focus on infrastructure development.
The story caught my eye because of Ravalomanana’s audience. He was speaking in Shanghai. “We have to establish the right environment for foreign investment as well as for the private sector,” China Daily quoted him saying.
I pull this story out of the clip files now because in just over a week, I’ll be boarding a plane from Beijing to Antananarivo for a two-month trip to Madagascar. The trip is mostly a vacation (not that I’ve earned one), and a chance to see the girlfriend who went off to the Peace Corps just before I moved to China. While I’m there, a big question on my mind will be one Andrew Leonard of How the World Works asked a while back:
Why is China gaining wealth and emerging as a superpower, while Africa remains mired in persistent, worsening poverty? Why can’t Africa (or many underdeveloped regions, for that matter) be another China?
I’ve been hesitant to announce this trip for fear that alerting the blogosphere would set off some karmic chain reaction and somehow spoil the whole thing. I almost went in January, then canceled and ended up in South Korea where there was a prospect of work and a real paycheck. But it’s really happening now. My plane ticket should (is there a way to digitally knock on wood?) be waiting for me in Beijing, and all I have left to do in Dalian is finish up grades, take the GRE on Tuesday (half of it, anyway) and pack.
And say goodbye to all the truly fantastic people I’ve spent the past year with, most of whom won’t be in China when I get back. That’s going to be tough.
I’m packing my Chinese books, which I keep telling myself I’ll look at once a day. My teacher promised to look over my character exercises when I get back here in late August.
Here’s the plan: I fly out of Beijing on July 9, so I’ll head to the capital a few days before and crash on my friend Lindsey’s couch. This is where I spent my first few nights in China, jet-lagged and bedazzled, so there’s a sense of coming full-circle on my first year in the Middle Kingdom.
The flight goes through Bangkok, though not long enough to revisit to Khao San Road. I arrive around 8 a.m. in Antananarivo, bringing travel time to around 20 hours. This is one of the shorter routes to the island nation. Madagascar is about as far as it gets from anywhere.
Posts are likely to be infrequent over the summer. Madagascar is one of the poorest nations on Earth (despite being relatively peaceful and democratic) and internet access is a luxury where it exists at all. I am bringing the laptop, mostly to reacquaint the aforementioned girlfriend with DVDs and digital music, so I will keep writing and taking photos.
This might be a good time to add me to your RSS reader, since posts will likely come in a flood, whenever I can connect. Figure there will be something on the Chinese market in Antananarivo included, plus lots about beaches and lemurs.
I’m heading to Beijing next Thursday or Friday. If anybody in the capital wants to meet up and grab a beer/coffee/lunch, shoot an email to eyeseast at gmail.com. More soon.
Posted in roadside blogging | 5 Comments »
May 17th, 2007 Chris
I should have gone to Tibet last summer. Or in February. Even over May holiday or whenever there was a chance to fit it in.
Now it’s going to be much, much harder to get a worthwhile trip. China is tightening restrictions on foreign tourists in response to protests at Mt. Everest base camp a few weeks ago, the Times Online reports (h/t Granite Studio).
The new rules came into effect after the week-long May Day holiday, according to an official with the state-run China Travel Service in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital.
She said: “We can’t let foreign tourists just go anywhere by themselves. In the past they could be left alone to travel independently as they wanted for a few days. Now this is not allowed any more.â€
The restrictions will also stop foreigners applying for a permit to enter the region from the office of the Tibetan travel bureau in the southwestern city of Chengdu, from where there are direct flights to Lhasa. All travel must now be approved by the head office in Lhasa, which operates under police supervision.
The Free Tibet folks, all Americans, were detained and expelled from the country, according to the story.
I have to ask the protesters: What was actually accomplished with this stunt?
Having graduated from UC Santa Cruz, I’ve seen more than my quota of protests, rallies, demonstrations, sit-ins and walk-outs. I’ve got up and stood up. Hell, I even organized a few noise-making events back in the day. One of the things more astute organizers always stressed to me was the need for clear targets. Targets aren’t people you take out, they’re the ones who can give you what you want. In this case, that means Beijing, as Davesgonechina pointed out in his post last month, Free advice for the Free Tibet crowd. Right now, it’s hard to say who the target is.
So now I don’t know when I’ll make it out west. Maybe next year, if things have relaxed a bit.
Posted in roadside blogging | 3 Comments »
February 25th, 2007 Chris
We made it. An overnight bus to Bangkok and a three-hour ride south put us where we’ve been trying to get for the past three weeks. Arriving on the beach at Hua Hin, the Gulf of Thailand stretched out before us, flat ocean that went on forever.Part Four: Into the salty shallows of Hua Hin.
Eric and I went straight for the water. The brine here is murky, warm and salty, good for floating but shallow enough to stand even a good way from shore. I walked in like I owned the ocean, letting my feet sink just a bit into the squishy sand with each step. Then I stubbed my toe on a sharp rock. No matter, I kept going, just heading out to sea, until I hit another rock. Then a third. This was really starting to disrupt the triumphant music playing in my head.
Finally I just gave up and floated with the current. Belly up in the tide, I stared at the sky for a few seconds. I could have flown to Bangkok two weeks ago. It would have been cheaper, probably, just hopping down from Beijing. There wouldn’t have been the long nights on sleeper buses when no one slept, or the hassle of finding transportation to the next way point, or border crossings or visas. The overland route is always tougher, but I almost always prefer that way. There are very few travel stories I enjoy that start: “We flew down. It was a decent flight. They served us vodka tonics and pretzels on board.”
Hua Hin seems an odd place to end up, though. Karen recommended it, saying it was the more “chill” option of the beach towns close to Bangkok. I think our definitions of chill differ slightly. I was thinking of something rustic, maybe with some good hiking nearby and back roads where I could ride a bike (motor or not) without having to swerve out of the way of too many cars.
“Retired” might be a better word for this place than “relaxed.” At least, it would describe most of the people we see on the streets. It’s a resort town, as far as I can see, one originally built for (and still used by) the royal family, but now overrun with elderly tourists. And everywhere there seems to be more westerners than Thais.
Further complicating matters, (pretend you’ve just commandeered a U-boat now) Everything’s in German! It’s not a censorship issue this time. Apparently Hua Hin is more popular with German and Scandanavian tourists than with Anglophones, which just makes me realize how much I take for granted English being the international language of just about everything these days.
I have until Thursday before I’m planning to fly back into China. The new semester starts March 5, and I think this is the year I learn Chinese–real, more-than-survival, Putonghua.
One more thing: I’ve been incommunicado for a few days due to traveling, and I’m three or four posts behind. Lest I once again promise to write about somewhere only to forget later, I’m adding a new block to the sidebar listing those upcoming posts. Also, if there’s something you’d like to hear more about, just drop me a comment or an email: eyeseast [at] gmail [dot] com.
Posted in roadside blogging | No Comments »
February 20th, 2007 Chris
I am a wreck today. Most of the past 30 hours have been spent on buses as we worked our way south from Lijiang to the Lao-Chinese border: an overnight to Jinghong, five hours to Mengla, then a quick (only two hours) ride here to Mohan, where we finally dumped our bags and found hot showers.
From the latest frontier, Part Three of my winter wandering. There’s an ocean out there somewhere.
Mohan is an eerie place. The town looks and feels almost abandoned, as if no one actually lives here and the few people on the street are only passing through on their way to or from the border. We had to hunt for a restaurant willing to feed us. Most places were closed before 9 p.m. We settled on chuan’r, where the woman cooking stood fanning the barely-glowing coals while our meat and potatoes slowly roasted.
We’re all wearing t-shirts, by the way. I mention this because less than a week ago we were shivering in a foot of snow in Zhongdian (also known as ShangriLa) on the edge of the Tibetan Plateau. In fewer than seven days, we’ve moved from the frigid Himalayas to mild central Yunnan to tropical Xishuanbanna. The jacket, sweater, extra shirt, scarf, gloves and beanie I wore just a few days ago are now stuffed into the top of my backpack, which is filled to capacity now that I’m not wearing most of my clothes most of the time.
While the bus rides have abused and exhausted us–Eric slammed his ribs on a rail when the sleeper from Lijiang jerked sideways, and he now winces every time he coughs–we have seen more of rural China in a week than any of us has in months of living up north. The ride from Jinghong to Mengla followed the Mekong through wide valleys, the bus winding over mountains on a single-lane road lined with palm and banana trees.
Traffic crawled most of the way. A stall, we learned, can stop progress for miles. For all the bumps, some of which tossed me out of my seat and dropped me down hard, we fared well compared to other passengers. As we passed an outdoor market where locals were barbecuing fresh meat, a car-sick woman behind Sam quietly vomited into an orange bag. “Everything smells so good here,” Sam said, looking out the open window. I didn’t tell her to turn around.
The last ride today took us as close to the border as we could get. The dirt roads here are temporary. Construction crews are blasting through the mountains and laying concrete for a new highway that will connect China’s booming economy with ports in Southeast Asia. We crisscrossed several segments of that thoroughfare on the last leg. This trip will be easier next time.
Beyond our planned crossing tomorrow morning is a big unknown. I’m only going to see a sliver of Laos on this trip, probably two days on the Mekong before we head west into Thailand near Chang Mai. Like any place we’ve visited on this trip, I expect Laos could take a month on its own without exhausting my curiosity. Three years ago, I was ready to commit to a half-year in Vientiane for an editing job at the state-run English daily. I’ve been itching to get there since.
Whatever the next few days bring, I’m sure it won’t be the last time I visit this part of the world.
Posted in roadside blogging | 1 Comment »
