Yangtze Cruise

Andrew and Anna came back to Kunming and it was time for us to leave. After sad "Goodbyes" to our good friends, Chinese and foreign, we flew to Chengdu where there is an excellent panda breeding programme. It was a great thrill to see the pandas in almost their natural environment, including a 2 week-old panda cub in an incubator (giving nature a hand!). Our visit took place in some of the heaviest rain they have had in Chengdu and we were soaked to the skin (literally!) but the rain made the pandas more active than usual. In Chengdu we enjoyed spending time with Christine Carver, a good friend from Tewkesbury.

Next to Chongqing to join the "Victoria Prince" for a 6 day cruise down the River Yangtze to Shanghai. The ship wasn’t easy to find - they hadn’t warned us that we needed to take a passenger lift to get to the quayside so we stood with our luggage, baffled and frustrated, knowing the ship would soon be sailing but totally unable to see where it was berthed or how to get to it! But once aboard and in our comfortable air-conditioned cabin we were able to relax and enjoy the holiday.

It was wonderful to relax and watch China go by. The ever-smiling crew looked after us wonderfully well, serving us with excellent food as well providing high-quality entertainment in the evenings.


The most interesting and beautiful stretch is the "Three Gorges" where the river winds through narrow gaps in the mountains as it finds its way from west to east. A large dam has just been built here which has formed a reservoir many miles long up the Yangtze and its tributaries. The water level has already gone up 80 metres with another 20 metres to go. So the gorges are much easier for a large ship like ours to navigate but they’ve lost a lot of their previous grandeur. Still pretty impressive though.

It was fascinating to listen to some of the millions of local people whose homes were flooded and who have been rehoused. The older people mourn the loss of their old homes but the younger generation love living in modern homes with electricity, running water, etc. Some of those who have been given new jobs in other parts of China where the customs, culture and language are quite new to them are finding it hardest to adjust.




Judy and the dam








Trips from the ship included going by cable car up the Yellow Mountain (covered in cloud so not much to see!) and a museum with fascinating items from the tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng (yes!!). The latter is not as vast as the Xi’an terracotta warriors but more varied and just as interesting - Google it and have a look.

The Yangtze was in flood (remember all that rain in Chengdu?) so we were delayed by nearly a day getting through the locks at the three gorges dam - I couldn’t understand why as the locks seemed well able to cope with all that water) - so the ship had only got as far as Nanjing by the time we were due to leave her. The final leg to Shanghai was by bus.

During the voyage we got the exciting news that our newest grandchild had been born. Mike and Kim have their first child. Isla is a beautiful baby (not that we’re biassed!)

Hunting for Cerana Bees

Peter set out to buy bees with Asing, an Indian who has been honey hunting in his home state of Nagaland. The professional beekeeper recommended by a professor in the Agricultural University Beekeeping Department had no bees for sale, but Asing had heard of bees for sale in a mountain village north of Kunming.

After a two hour bus ride to Wuding and another two hours by minibus over terrible mountain roads, we arrived at the village in a beautiful mountain valley which reminded Asing of his home area. The villagers were Miao, except for one Lisu family.

The Miao and the Lisu are two of the many minority peoples of China. The crowning glory of the Miao women seemed to be their hair which they wear piled up on their heads, looking almost as if they are wearing a hat.

The Lisu have their own written language - “Fraser script” - invented by JO Fraser about 100 years ago and much easier to read than Chinese characters. The Miao have a similar script, probably created by Sam Pollard, although these villagers seemed to be saying that it came from the Rev. Berkeley (may not have the name right!). It was very moving to hear one of the Miao reading familiar passages to us in his own language.

Asing had phoned the Miao beekeeper to tell him we were coming but he was not at home, so we went on to another village where someone said there were bees, but no luck there either. As we walked, we kept stopping to visit homes or chat to people by the roadside, so it was supper time when we got back to the first village, and the Lisu family generously invited us in for a meal.

Meanwhile the beekeeper had returned. When he saw that a foreigner wanted the bees, the price immediately doubled from that agreed over the phone. Furthermore, the bees were not in hives but in hollow logs, a traditional method but not what we wanted. And he was going to have to remove the combs, including the brood (eggs and larvae), which would otherwise have broken as the minibus bounced around on the journey back to Kunming. Plus, Cerana bees have a habit of absconding, especially if they have no brood, so very reluctantly we returned empty-handed.

The journey home was a nightmare! The minibus had no full beam head lights and we would suddenly encounter a lorry parked in the road with no lights, seeing it only just in time to avoid a smash. The minibus engine kept cutting out and the driver had to stop at intervals to fiddle with the wiring or pour water into the radiator. Much of the road surface had been broken up by hundreds of heavy lorries so we had to go really slowly in those places. Also, our driver constantly overtook on blind bends, somehow managing to dodge a head-on collision with the lorries coming the other way.

We were most thankful when got home at one o’clock in the morning. No bees, and stomach upsets for several days afterwards, but a fascinating glimpse of another side of life in China.

6 July 2009

A Tale of Two Cakes

Sorry we have not updated this blog for two months. For some reason, access to our blog site from China has been blocked. Probably our comments about the buses have upset the powers that be! If you can read this it’s because we have emailed it to UK for one of the family to upload. If you can’t read it, that idea didn’t work either.

We had an excellent visit from Richard and Hazel Padfield in May. We went together to Dali and Lijiang, two old Chinese towns which have been restored for the benefit of tourists like us. In Lijiang we stayed in the Naxi Tea Horse Family Guest House, a traditional Chinese courtyard building in the centre of the old town. The Naxi are a local minority people and the tea horses were used to carry tea along the Silk Road. It was really interesting travelling by bus to these two towns, especially for Richard who is a farmer. It was rice planting season so we saw hundreds of people bending over in the paddy fields, quite different from the mechanised farming in UK.

With less than four weeks to go before we leave Kunming we have started taking photographs of the people and places we have come to love, and Judy has gone into ‘last minute buying’ mode, because most of our stuff will need to be sent off by sea in near future. We can’t believe how much stuff we have managed to accumulate in just over a year!

It’s the rainy season here and it has been particularly wet and cold this July, we look at the people ploughing up and down the swimming pool below our window and think how hardy they are!

Judy has been making jam and cakes, with varying amounts of success. She bought some Chinese wheat flour and added some extra baking powder to the recipe (to make up for the altitude) - you can see the result in the sneaky picture Peter took.

It was supposed to be lemon drizzle cake, but ended up being Niagara Falls Cake as it erupted from the tin and cascaded into the oven.

Things went much better on Judy’s birthday, when friends brought over a magnificent cake and plenty of candles to go with it! We had supper in the revolving restaurant on the 21st floor of a Kunming Hotel This turned out to be a fascinating experience, as different parts of the floor (and ceiling) appeared to revolve in different directions and at different speeds. It was also tricky for the staff, because they would step into the room in a different place each time they brought the food, then they had to trot around the circle until they found our table. We were convinced that only the outer section and core of the restaurant were moving, and we were staying still, until we got up to leave and realised that Kunming University Library had moved!

We are due to leave Kunming July 31, arriving back in Cheltenham August 29 (a slow boat from China, or down the Yangtze at least)

The mystery of the Kunming buses continues.......

Judy spends a lot of time travelling on buses to and from work. However, life has been complicated by the decision to make some buses ‘Express’. One Friday evening, Judy trotted off to No.6 Bus Station to catch her bus to the staff meeting. There was no sign of a Number 69 for some time, but then a double-decker swept into the station and the crowd who were waiting piled on board. Instead of turning left at the usual crossroads, this one carried straight on towards the city centre. Judy was pleased to see that she was not the only one to be totally baffled by this, many Chinese commuters were remonstrating with the driver (who ignored their questions completely). Judy managed to get off the bus fairly near her school and walked the rest of the way. Later that weekend we discovered that certain buses had been designated ‘Express’, but it seems to be a fairly random system, so life ‘On The Buses’ continues to be an adventure.

This week we decided to go swimming in the open-air pool on the other side of Kunming. This included a ride on the Number 130, a bus the size of a school minibus with no suspension. This bowls happily along the road, lulling you into thinking it will be a comfortable ride, then it suddenly takes a sharp left up a crowded alley and gives you a fascinating tour of the stone yards and timber yards of Kunming. The weight of the heavy lorries carrying tons of stone has broken the road surface into chunks, so that you bounce from one to another at high speed. If you are unlucky enough to be on the back seat you have to hang on for dear life as your head meets the roof and then you fall back to earth again. After about 20 minutes you are deposited beside a huge gold Buddha, which is sitting outside an ornamental masonry shop waiting to be sold. Next to the Buddha is the statue of David (last seen in Florence) which is considerably smaller and stockier than the original and has a coy grin on its face. We couldn’t tell whether it was made of white marble - or white plastic.

The swimming pool was lovely, outdoors, but heated to about 28°. Judy had to buy a swimming cap, there was a choice of two and she chose the nylon leopard skin one (she refused to have her picture taken in this new fashion item!)

Feeling clean and invigorated, we trudged back through the stone yards, where huge lorries drove past, covering us in red dust. We caught the bus along with a group of elderly ladies in their blue national dresses and embroidered slippers. They had large wide-brimmed pink and blue sun hats on, so it was obviously the WI outing. They were far too smart to sit on the back seat, but they enjoyed watching us bounce up and down enormously!

Xi'an

We had a few days to spare this week so we went to Xi’an, a 2 hour flight from here. Domestic flights in China are easy and usually on time. Check-in closes 30 minutes before take off and the main hassle is getting to the airport through the Kunming traffic and ever-present roadworks. At the other end of the flight, the airport shuttle bus took us straight to our hotel in the city centre. (We had been advised not to use taxis in Xi’an.)
Our main reason for going was, of course, to see the Terracotta Warriors (or "worriers" as they were described on a packet of postcards we bought.) So we signed up for a trip which included a visit to a silk factory and another tourist attraction, the Big Wild Goose pagoda. This is actually a large Buddhist temple complex with the pagoda as its focal point. The pagoda is modelled on an Indian pagoda of the same name, so called because a wild goose is said to have dropped dead at the site! The visit led to some interesting conversations between ourselves, the local tour guide, (Sean - good Chinese name!) and the American Jewish couple who made up our small group.
At the silk factory we were fascinated to watch the fine silk threads being unwound from the silkworm cocoons. The larvae are used for food and each cocoon yields over a kilometre of thread! Before we left the factory there was the inevitable opportunity to buy the products.
We had seen the excellent warriors exhibition at the British Museum last year which was a good introduction to seeing them in situ. It was so impressive to see the rows of thousands of warriors, horses, etc. which were uncovered by chance in 1974. A farmer made the discovery while digging a well and when we arrived he was on hand to sign copies of the guidebook. He is a lot richer now but looked as if he might have been happier as a farmer.
Our hotel was in the tourist area with lots of shops asking tourist prices. Just over the road was Starbucks which we don’t have in Kunming so we treated ourselves to several lattes while we could. We enjoyed wandering among the fascinating variety of shops and stalls in the nearby Moslem quarter. It was there that we were accosted by a couple of female students who are studying Business English at one of the 75 (!!) universities in Xi’an. They told us that they make a practice of speaking to foreign visitors in order to practise their English. They were good company as they helped us to identify the mysterious objects we came across and encouraged us to bargain for the best prices - not very British! We must admit we introduced our new friends to MacDonalds. They were a bit puzzled by the ‘jam’ in their beefburgers – so were we until we managed to identify it as melted cheese!
We are now back in Kunming where it is getting warmer but still not really hot - Kunming is known as Spring City - and looking forward to seeing Richard and Hazel Padfield visiting from Gloucestershire next week

Some of the Terracotta Warriors

.......... and some who escaped to seek a new life in the city!!

Easter Wekend in China

Easter greetings! Actually, Easter weekend in China is not very different from any other weekend, so it has been good to tell our Chinese friends about how we celebrate it in England, including the flying of kites on Good Friday. You didn’t know that was an English custom? Well, it is in our part of Cheltenham!

Last weekend was cold and the blankets we thought we had put away for the summer were back on the beds. This weekend is warm again with hot sunshine mixed with thunderstorms. Good weather for rainbows. One thing Yunnan has in common with England is the totally unpredictable weather!

We had heard nothing from Andrew Hay since the death of his mother following a fall in a storm at sea on their trip to Scott’s base hut in Antarctica. Her father had been part of Scott’s team which was the reason for the trip. Sadly, she died a few days before arriving at the base hut, so Andrew had to complete the pilgrimage without her.

Several weeks later the ship arrived back in Auckland and, with considerable difficulty, Andrew was able to make the arrangements for his mother’s cremation and to obtain the necessary paperwork to take her ashes back to Spain for the memorial service, a job which was completed only hours before his flight was due to leave.

On the flight from New Zealand to Thailand, Andrew developed deep vein thrombosis in his right leg and was unable to walk for several hours, so he rested in Bangkok for 24 hours before continuing his journey to Spain, exercising vigorously all the way. After the memorial service, he and Anna were planning to take a few days holiday in Spain before returning to Norway, but severe chest pains put Andrew in the hospital trauma ward with a pulmonary embolism resulting from the DVT. He came out of hospital last week and has been banned from flying for a few months so cannot go back to Norway for a while.

He had planned to come out to Kunming in May which would have given us the opportunity to discuss progress on the water projects and make plans for the future. I had hoped that together we could recruit a local person to continue making the circuits for the UV light water purifiers after I leave at the end of July. Something we need to be thinking about. We are still hoping Andrew and Anna will return to China before we leave.







Another of the many examples of Chinglish we see every day. Can the dogs read?

The Erhu Man is Back

One of Judy’s memories of the first time she led a school trip to Kunming was the atmospheric sound of the erhu (pronounced Ah Hoo), a traditional two-stringed instrument being played outside the university hostel. We have seen and heard the elderly erhu player many times since then and he has become a friend. We enjoy his playing and usually put money into his collecting bowl as we pass, although he seemed a little puzzled during last year’s school trip when he found in his bowl a ticket for lunch at the hostel which Peter had accidentally dropped in! We have a theory that the erhu man is actually a university professor who enjoys playing the erhu in his spare time.
For some weeks there has been no erhu music outside the hostel. Maybe he was ill or perhaps too busy lecturing! However, we are happy to report that the strains of the erhu are once again drifting into the windows of the hostel. On Friday Peter came across our friend sitting in his usual place and there was a shaking of hands and smiles on both sides!

Saturday was a school holiday. It was "grave sweeping day" when many Chinese visit the graves of their ancestors. Many shops were still open, however, so clearly not everyone does this - perhaps the journey would take too long. Judy’s school arranged for Saturday’s classes to be rescheduled to Monday but none of her pupils could make it, so the holiday was, unusually, a holiday.

March has been an extra busy month for us both which is one reason why there has been a bit of a gap in our blog entries. April looks like being a bit quieter.

We visited Kunming Zoo, in spite of the guidebook’s warning that it wasn’t a place for animal lovers. The guidebook was right, although the park itself is a very pleasant place for the human visitors. The birds and butterflies seemed happy enough but conditions for the large mammals (elephants, bears, lions, wolves, etc.) were far from ideal. But the yak looked healthy and we liked the way he had his hooves neatly together.

Later this month we plan to visit Xi’an and the Terracotta Warriors. We went to the impressive exhibition in London last year and are really looking forward to seeing them in their original setting, as well seeing the rest of what Xi’an has to offer.

Sad News

You may remember that Andrew Hay was taking his 93 year old mother to the Antarctic to visit the base hut used by her father who was a member of Captain Scott’s final expedition. Sadly we heard that she died 3 days before they arrived at their destination following a fall on board the ship during rough weather. This was over two weeks ago but the ship does not return to New Zealand until today when Andrew will have to face all the legal procedures as well as making funeral arrangements. It will be especially difficult because Andrew’s mother was a British citizen living in Spain who died in a Russian ship operated by a New Zealand company. Please keep him and Anna in your thoughts.
We marked Shrove Tuesday a day late this year for reasons which we cannot quite remember. One of Judy’s colleagues is French and sent us some crepes the previous weekend which were much appreciated, but on Ash Wednesday Judy made English style pancakes which we shared with some Chinese friends. They were amused and impressed by the pancake tossing ceremony and very much enjoyed eating the results.
Judy has been given another class at Robert’s School. This one is at the other branch of the school where few of the Western staff go and is from 1915-2115 on Friday nights with 9 and 10 year olds. The first week she had 9 out of 12 children, just a nice number, although the children had never had an English native speaker before and she couldn’t explain things in Chinese. They were studying Bonnie Prince Charlie and the ’45 Rebellion (who thinks up these subjects?) Did you know that Charlie’s mother was Polish and his fifth name was Casimir? Last week she arrived at the lesson to find that they had added another class to her original 12 and she now had 22 crammed into her small classroom. It was a nightmare!
Peter was invited to attend the first morning of an ICIMOD beekeeping workshop at the Agricultural University. ICIMOD (http://www.icimod.org/) is a group of 8 countries around the Himalayas and Hindu Cush committed to improving the lives of the people who live in these mountainous areas. He met a young Cornishman working in Afghanistan who said that water purification (which Andrew and I are working on) was not a big problem there but asked whether we could help him with information about low-cost solar-powered water pumps for use in the long periods of dry weather. Any ideas welcome!
After a spring-like February, the weather turned cool and wet for a short while but now we are back to warm sunshine (25 degrees by day). Peter is not sure whether the open air pool is warm enough for him yet and is still using the really warm (31 degrees) indoor pool. It has to be admitted, however, that some tough Chinese men have been using the outdoor pool every day throughout the winter!
A fascinating feature of Kunming clothes shops is the dummies they use to show off the clothes. Strangely, none of them looks Chinese. And they all have rather odd expressions or are wearing totally unsuitable wigs. We especially liked the "Army Cadet" outside what was apparently an army surplus shop.

Spring is here!

We arrived back in Kunming on February 10 (Peter’s birthday!) to warm sunshine. What a contrast from when we left 3 weeks earlier, from thermal underwear to T-shirts and sandals. Daytime temperatures now are up in the mid-20s.
Our fortnight in UK was, as most of you will know, a very different story. After the usual long and boring flight via Bangkok, it was great to be able to spend time with family in Tewkesbury and London, including the get-together in Coventry to celebrate the arrival of Esther, Philippa and Carl’s second daughter and our fourth grandchild who was born in August when we were last in England. We were very pleased to be able to meet with a group of the friends from Gloucestershire who have been taking an interest in our activities in China and to bring them up to date with our news. A big thank-you to Richard and Hazel who generously welcomed us to stay in their home while we were in Gloucestershire.




The family gathering at Esther's
"do". (Photo by Roger, Peter's brother)


Before we left Coventry the snow began. And kept on coming! The next day National Express got us to London and we managed to get quite close to Philippa and Carl’s home on the one train line from Victoria which was still running but then no buses and no taxis! Carl was eventually able to dig his car out of the snow drift and rescue us.


View from the aircraft window as we left Heathrow.





By the time we were left Heathrow for Bangkok the planes were flying again and we were wafted away to a 4 hot days in Chiang Mai, North Thailand. We swam in the pool every day and enjoyed exploring this lovely old city. We were there for the annual flower festival and an added bonus was an evening with Andrew Hay and his mother who were on their way to the Antarctic!
Judy has been especially busy back in Kunming because her school has been running extra classes to make up for the ones which the students missed in the holidays. Work in the workshop has been a bit held up by a loss of electrical power and overflowing drains but Peter has had plenty of other things to keep him busy.

Spring is coming!

The daily bursts of firecrackers, a few shops closed already so that their owners can make the sometimes long journey back to visit their families and, today at least, the warm (-ish) sunshine are all pointing to Chinese New Year and Spring Festival. The actual date depends, like Easter, on the phases of the moon and this year it’s quite early - the year of the Ox begins on January 26.
It’s a Chinese tradition to visit the family for Spring Festival, so Judy’s school is on holiday and we are planning to visit our family in UK. We fly to London via Bangkok on Tuesday, 20th. It will be great to see them all again. After a few days with Philippa and family in London, it’s back to Gloucestershire to see family and friends in Tewkesbury and Cheltenham.
Andrew Hay (it’s his flat we live in here) is back for another visit from Norway before taking his 93 year old mother on a trip to Antarctica. Andrew’s grandfather was on of the party which found the bodies of Scott and the group who died on their polar expedition. Andrew’s mother is keen to visit her father’s base hut while she still can.
Andrew is continuing his work on water purification devices for Myanmar where many people are still having to drink polluted water. Peter is continuing to assist with building the devices, although we are currently reassessing priorites for future work.
The arrival of spring means that the bees will be getting busy and Peter is hoping to have more opportunities to work with several farm projects which are keen to include beekeeping in what they do.

Sunday lunch with Andrew, Judy and a duck.

Xishuangbanna

Xishuangbanna is in Yunnan, the same province as Kunming and is only 300 miles away (40 minutes by air). But how different from Kunming! Because it is further south and at a lower altitude, January in Jinghong, where we stayed, is like mid-June in a good English summer. T-shirts and sandals instead of thermal underwear.

It was a real treat to sit outside a cafe on the evening of January 1st and enjoy the warmer temperature. We ordered chicken cooked in coconut (expecting chicken cooked in coconut milk on a plate) but it really was chicken cooked in a hollowed out coconut - no wonder the waitress looked baffled when we said we’d like chips with it (it would have been really tricky to get them into the coconut!) Our most surreal eating experience was ‘The George and Dragon’ (you can probably guess the nationality of the owner!) Peter enjoyed a freshly made chicken pie while we watched the early years of the Beatles appearing on ‘Ready, Steady, Go!’ on dvd.
It sounds as though we spent all our time eating, but we did manage to fit in some trips as well. Having watched ‘Wild China’ (brilliant BBC series, with lots of pictures of Yunnan) Judy was keen to go to Wild Elephant Valley, even though we knew our chances of seeing a wild elephant was slim. There are warning signs to drive slowly because of elephants crossing the road, which we thought made the deer signs in the Forest of Dean look a bit tame. Our driver bowled along at a good speed, so we were quite relieved not to meet any elephants (wild or tame) before we got to the park. The visit started with an elephant show (which helps to pay for the upkeep of the wildlife park). The elephants went around the arena, selling bags of bananas to the audience and collecting the money. We were impressed by the nifty way they held the money in the crease of their trunks, while doling out bananas and transferring bananas from trunk to mouth at the same time.

After lunch (not bananas) we toured the animal park, bird enclosure and butterfly house (see the picture) and took a 2 km cable car ride across the rain forest. Then we walked back through the forest, looking for the elephants, but only seeing footprints and elephant dung. There are 70 wild elephants living in a huge area of rain forest and they were far too smart to be seen by us! However, we did see gibbons in the trees who put on a spectacular show of swinging from branch to branch (black gibbons are native to southern Yunnan).






Which leaf is the butterfly?






Our tour guide spoke very little English, but we were very lucky to have a lovely young couple from Beijing with us, who kindly stayed with us and translated lots of information for us.


On Sunday morning we went to the bus station and took the local bus to the town of Menghai where there was a market. The drive through the mountains was fascinating as we passed rice fields and amazing terracing on the steep hillsides. There were people from different tribal groups at the market, so it was lovely to see their colourful costumes. The choice of fruit and vegetables was wonderful, and there was one honey seller although Peter had hoped to see more. (Yes, that is a Pepsi bottle being filled with honey for sale.)


We were back in Jinghong by lunchtime, and enjoyed meeting up with some western friends in the afternoon.

We spent Monday afternoon walking around the beautiful botanical gardens. Lots of interesting tropical plants and trees, including a working rubber plantation where we could see the white fluid dripping from the trees into the collection cups. The gardens are a favourite spot for wedding pictures and we saw a number of couples posing for the camera.
Xishuangbanna is the home of the Dai people who are apparently related to the Thai. The road signs are trilingual - Dai, Chinese and English. In fact it’s more like Thailand than China.
We’re now back in Kunming with only two weeks to go before we go back to UK for the Chinese New Year holiday. We’re feeling the cold here but reports of the big freeze in England (and in northern China) make us realise just how well off we are!