AsiaScribbler

Wikiaid

2010-12-08T14:08:00.002+08:00

Arguably the greatest advance in journalism in my life is Wikileaks: truly a tool for bringing greater transparency to the world.
As its founder, Julian Assange, sits behind bars on trumped up charges (his accusers have links to the CIA), now is the time to resurrect Canned Revolution, an old anarchic movement set up in the dark days of the Bush regime. Yesterday we launched the design to your left in support of Wikileaks. This nifty Wikiaid comes in all shapes and forms, from tshirts to mugs to wall clocks and much more besides. For that perfect anarchic Chrimbo present click the following link for a free press: http://www.cafepress.com/CannedRevolution

In defence of Guangzhou

2010-10-07T08:19:00.001+08:00

It’s been a year or so since I last visited the noisy metropolis of Guangzhou and so, when earlier this week faced with a deadline to create a snappy city guide to the place formerly known as Canton, I thought I’d see if anyone had any useful nuggets of info on Facebook. I asked my 193 friends on the social networking site what are the five best things about Guangzhou. The responses were predictably dire from those who have lived in Hong Kong. Below a sample from one wit:
1. The train to Hong Kong.
2. A flight to Hong Kong
3. Barge down the river to Hong Kong.
4. They sell beer.
5. Seeing your pet cat about to be disemboweled and fried.
Poor old Guangzhou, host of this November’s Asian Games, has never ranked high on people’s travel lists. And yet, I really like it. I prefer it over Shanghai, for instance. Its huge sprawl can make it appear tough, grimy and confusing for first time visitors (often referred disparagingly as China’s Los Angeles) but scratch beneath the surface and you’ll see wonderful ancient culture coupled with soaring modernity and the best cuisine in the People’s Republic. After much thought here then are my five favourite things about this 2,500-year-old city.
1. Shamian Island – This tiny spit of land was the only place that Europeans could establish settlements. Beats the Bund hands down for outstanding 19th century European architecture.
2. The food – Undeniably the best in China.
3. The annex of the Victory Hotel – One of the best bargains accommodation-wise across the whole of the nation.
4. The markets – Alright, post-SARS the full on gore of many of the wet markets has been toned down, but the city’s assorted stalls are still pretty unique in their offerings.
5. Karaoke – For some reason I always seem to have a crazy singing session when in GZ – cantar in Canton.

La vie en jaune

2010-10-06T10:26:00.001+08:00

Part of the reason why I have been so reticent on this here blog has been an amorous affair. Well, more like the spark of an old flame.
I really have fallen back in love with Europe and can see myself living there soon. Pictured is my house in the Pyrenees; the sunflowers came out strong this year.
A recent EU-wide poll put France top in terms of quality of life (and the UK bottom) and it is once one is nestled in la Hexagone for a while that you start to appreciate what is important in life. The constant running around in Asia, the never ending schedule of appointments, flights and deadlines suddenly pale away once ensconced in my basic mountain shack.
I am now formulating a way in which AsiaScribbler Co could continue to work as a going concern with yours truly living in la belle France … and I think I might have worked it out.

Scrumptious pickings

2010-10-05T09:03:00.002+08:00

The verb to scrump is a wonderful word that conjures up, for me at least, images of Kentish autumns. To scrump is to take the fallen fruit, normally apples, from an orchard. This is one of my favourite times of year in the UK from where I have recently returned and a suitably non-controversial topic in which to venture/tip toe/sneak back into the world of the AsiaScribbler blog.
Kent, where I was born and brought up, is the Garden of England. This time of year the county’s trees are weighed down with fruit, like old men carrying home the shopping, the mornings are crisp, the ground is green, the leaves are turning and the air is fresh.
What’s more, this year’s harvest is one of the best ever. A report in the Independent wrote about “the exceptional sweetness of the fruit” this year. “Oddly enough,” the report continued, “this was prompted by the overcast, chilly weather in May. The light level at that time influences the eventual size of an apple. In effect, the tree decides how big its fruit is going to be. Grim weather meant smaller fruit, but fine, sunny days in June and July converted the starch in apples to sugar. Since the fruit had a smaller number of cells than normal, the sugar was concentrated. The delectable displays look even more tempting than normal due to cool nights in August intensifying their rosy blush.”
This year’s scrumping options are truly scrumptious.

Back in blog land

2009-11-01T22:36:00.003+08:00

Ah, I’m back in blog land. The Public Security Bureau (PSB) has tried and generally succeeded in shutting me off the airwaves for quite a while now. Whatever virtual network I used was quickly smote down by the powers that be in Beijing.
The tough censorship in this country is at times infuriating. Strangely I get Facebook messages in my email inbox, but that site as well as so many others (YouTube, Twitter, blogs, many news sites, etc, etc) are banned.
As a journalist operating here there are concerns. Everything I do (including email) is tapped, phone calls 'n all. To illustrate this point, I have the PSB coming to my office from time to time to catch up. The last time they came and discussed recent articles I had written that they'd read. In general they liked them and we discussed them at length. It was only after I left that I clocked the last article we'd be discussing had not even been published yet -- they could only have read it via my email!
Another example of the strange attitude towards journalists here, at a bar the other night I was chatting with a Chinese guy. He was an English teacher and asked what I did. 'I'm a journalist,' I said. Immediately, without a bat of an eyelid, he said, 'Oh, so you're a spy!' I attempted to explain the difference of Western and Chinese media. He was drinking what looked like Limeade. I said that if Beijing says his glass is actually full or red wine, then that is what Chinese journalists will diligently write to their readers where as we in the West would question whether that light green liquid really is red wine. This difference was lost on him.
Anyway, by and large I do keep off controversial subjects up here, but I do find the position of ethnic minorities in China fascinating and have written plenty on this topic and that is contentious. It sounds paranoid, but I have the British Embassy in Beijing on speed dial just in case.
So after a blackout of what seems like ages (a decade ago, no internet would have been no big deal, how times change!) I’m now foot loose and fancy free on the World Wide Web. How? Via the ingenuity of HideIPVPN, genuises who mask my online presence back to Blighty thus circumnavigating the Great Firewall of China. I salute them, thank them and will now return with haste to the wonders of the previously out of reach BBC iPlayer.

Farewell Kashgar

2009-10-17T20:16:00.002+08:00

In the earthy confines of an ancient Uighur courtyard house in the heart of the endangered Old City of Kashgar a shaft of sunlight illuminates the deep furrows of an ageing face. In front of me sits an elegant 97-year-old Uighur lady, an ornate shimmering white shawl draped over her head. Given the repression meted out in this Muslim outpost of China her name shall remain anonymous.
Her deep lines on her forehead reflect the tumultuous times she has lived through. Speaking in a quiet croaky voice, perched on a ledge, she recalls the arrival of the Communists. “From then on our lives were never to be the same, for better or for worse,” she says in a hushed tone, anxious not to be overheard by any of the hundreds of spies who mill about town. A shard of light spotlights half her face, and falls to the wall below her and intricate blue and white patterned tiling of the house she has called home all her life.
In 1958, Kashgar was electrified, something that changed daily working habits dramatically.
Ten years later, red guards charged through the old lanes, tearing off women’s scarves, smashing ancient relics and mosques, burning books and pillaging old homes.
“But we survived that,” recalls the old lady. “That was easy with what came next.”
Chinese authorities tore down much of the ancient city wall, a 10-metre-high earth berm, and paved over its moat in the 1980s to create a ringroad. The roar of cars is now monotonous from this lady’s house.
At the end of the 1990s, running water came to the old city. With the onset of the new century though and the whole nation undergoing irrevocable change, redevelopment sped up in Kashgar with many old lanes jettisoned in favour of a wide highway known as Liberation Road that bisects this ancient dwelling.
In 2002, renovations to the Id Kah Mosque commenced. “If they could touch that, well then, we knew nothing was sacred in their eyes,” recounts the old lady. “We knew then that it would only be a matter of time before they came knocking our way.”
During this round of renovations, the traditional bazaar and old residential area in front of the mosque vanished and were replaced by a broad, dull square and giant commercial buildings on the other side of the street. Hanification was in full swing now that the railway was up and running.
My kind host pats the earthen wall beside her. “Look,” she says, “this is a proven way of living in the desert. These walls are cool in summer and hot in winter. What do they know about desert life,” she says dismissively, her wrinkled hand waving weakly to her side.
I spent a month in Xinjiang province in August 2008, an incredible trip, one I’ll remember for the rest of my life, not least the sights, sounds, smell and people of Kashgar. But I know it is a city with little time left. When the announcement comes through earlier this year that 85% of the remainder of the Old City is to be razed to the ground I am saddened, irritated, despondent, but not surprised.
“Because many houses were built privately without any approval, the life of residents is not convenient and the capability against earthquakes and fire is weak,” a report in the state-run local media said. “Our target is every family has a house, every family has employed members and the economy will be developed.”
The fact that these centuries old houses have withstood countless earthquakes in the past unlike, say, the modern cheap rubbish that was blown away in last year’s Sichuan earthquake is, needless to say, not discussed. 220,000 Uighurs are moving out of their beautiful homes. Any house with a red + sign on the wall is due for demolition, not unlike the dreaded star that marked doom for Jews during the Second World War.
In a 2008 book called Kashgar: Oasis City on China's Old Silk Road, architect and historian George Michell described the Old City as “the best-preserved example of a traditional Islamic city to be found anywhere in Central Asia.”
The outcry over the city’s demolition might have been larger had it been where it rightfully belongs, on UNESCO’s World Heritage List, but Beijing never applied to have it certified.
I slurp down the remains of my tea and get up to leave, thanking her profusely for her hospitality. “Now go and tell others of what’s happening here,” she urges me. “Our way of life is coming to an end.” Outside her pink studded door, there’s a red + on the wall. Her days in the old city are numbered.

Cup of copy

2009-08-31T13:41:00.002+08:00

Journalists are machines that convert coffee to copy. This rather wonderful description of my profession I saw on Facebook just now and it perfectly captures my August, easily one of the most word-intensive ones I’ve had to endure.
A Hong Kong chum, who I shared this coffee/copy witticism with, added: "...and then back into Carlsberg and so goes the circle of life..." Amazingly, this month has been, by and large, an alcohol free one for yours truly. Strange times, indeed.
My day starts with espresso and by 11am I’ve generally gone through a cafetiere, averaging 500 words a cup. In total, this wildly exhausting month has seen the best part of 50,000 words churned out. Caffeine intake has been horribly high to the point whereby I swear it makes no impact and yet people look at my crazy, strained, hopping eyes and beg to differ.
Though I am now heading to Europe there is no let up – September’s output is going to keep baristas happy everywhere – at least another 40,000 words.
Time to put the kettle on.

Football tribalism

2009-08-29T21:48:00.002+08:00

Thwack, bang, crack, capow.
In the movies when they punch people, the sound is very perceivable of fist hitting skin yet in real life when someone throws a punch the sound makes no more than a dull thud at best.
One Saturday a year or so ago in the UK heading back from watching my team Charlton Athletic lose 2-0 at Ipswich, the train I was on got delayed quite quickly due to rioting in a carriage resulting in severe damage necessitating police action. It was merely a precursor of worse to come. Getting back into London I dived onto the Northern Line and made my way to London Bridge where I then waited on platform 5 for my 8.38 down to Paddock Wood.
Three West Ham fans walked past, turned the corner and were heading to the loo. A mirror copy of them - fat, bald, pointed face, unhealthily white but with a light blue Millwall shirt on - turned to one of the West Ham fans and sneered, “You’re scum”.
“What’s that, mate?” replied the West Ham fan. “West Ham… scum,” came the rasping reply. These two teams are old foes. Quickly the atmosphere on the platform turned dark.
One of the West Ham supporters tried to keep it civil but the Millwall fan kept baiting them. Eventually two of the Hammers lads drag their most aggressive mate away and head to the loo. But, as they approach the door, he hands his friend his stuff like his phone and glasses and says, “Don’t worry, I’ll be back in a moment.” He swivels round, walks up to his nemesis and plants a huge punch on the Millwall fan’s face. The scuffle starts.
The antagonism had been big and all three West Ham fans lay in to the Millwall guy who quickly falls to the ground. He’s getting kicked, he’s getting punched. He stands. The whole platform sways and is watching horrified at proceedings. He gets up, his face bloodied. He spits and a couple of teeth clatter onto the platform. The West Ham fans have taken a bit of a beating too and their faces look puffy. The Transport Police are called. The skirmish continues in and out of a train carriage, delaying trains.
These two teams brought football into dispute once again this week with massive carnage over at Upton Park. It is sad that something so tribal and yet so frivolous as football continues to cause such damage to the reputation of this country, damaging our bid to host the 2018 World Cup.

Running man

2009-08-16T16:26:00.004+08:00

I’ve loved running since I came to Asia. Hated it before then, mind. Could never think of anything more stupid. Now though I love it. It’s a time to reflect, get your thoughts in order, have strong creative ideas, get fit and enjoy the endorphin rush at the end – a free high! Anyway, of late I’ve been seriously getting back into it as part of a healthy month involving no booze, plenty of fruits, the odd juice fast and a quarter marathon a day – and, for my sins, I am signing up for the London Marathon. The daily quarter marathon, though repetitive, I now find pretty easy. So yesterday I did something other than my normal flat urban route, heading to the stunning countryside around Binhai Lu in southeastern Dalian. I Google Mapped the route ahead of time.
That run taught me I am not invincible yet -- the proverbial wheels really came off. It was my first big hill run for ages and ages and left me knackered. The rugged park area was incredibly steep and most people get ferried in little electric buggies or at most they walk small down hill stretches. Gumbo here is running for Britain and it’s a scorcher so I take my top off. Things do jiggle on my body, for sure, but it’s a definite improvement over a month ago, the previous day's juice fast and that morning's subsequent ass like a Japanese flag certainly keeping things more trim.
Having risen from sea level to 900 metres -- which is a darn steep old climb -- the road then starts to weave down and down super steep and I'm thinking, “Oh ok, I've seen Google Maps, this will get to the coast then I'll be able to whizz left along the coast and back home.” Anyway, I'm running and running, down and down, even overtaking these electric buggies. Now running downhill for a lengthy period always makes me uneasy. Running suffers a reverse Newtonism -- what goes down, must go up. Anyway I get to the bottom where there's a couple of hundred people queuing up to take them back up the hill. They all applaud as I go past them … then disaster strikes. Google Maps in China is, of course, out of date the minute the satellite passes by. There's a huge great construction site where my road back home should have been. It's blocked off which means I have to go back the way I came. Gingerly I turn around, knowing there's 200 pair of eyes on me. It's now a face thing, I know I've got to pony up, look nonchalant and get cracking. I set off, muscles already screaming, and get up half way back up this incredible hill, out of sight of the crowd at the bottom who have cheered me on, taking pictures and videos of this giant, hairy beast, before I walk – or more rather hobble - the remaining 6 clicks or so. The London Marathon mercifully is still seven months away.

Russian randonée

2009-08-05T10:45:00.006+08:00

Regular readers (as if!) might recall the concept of flâneuring around a city, namely going for a random walk, taking the first right, then the first left, next right etc, an idea given to me the other day by someone on the conference circuit in Shanghai. The word flâneur was coined by Baudelaire meaning a random stroller. Being such an evocative language French has a wonderful word for hiking – randonée – which sounds similar to random. Anyway, a couple of weeks back after the breakfast of a lifetime in the opulent surroundings of the Grand Hotel Europe in St Petersburg I went on my first random walk, and it was marvelous.
The hotel is world class, scene of countless movies, and, lucky for me, I’ll be back there in six weeks. It was quite a drag to take myself out of its luxurious embrace but keen to break my flâneur duck and walk off all that sour cream with the caviar I headed out onto a cobbled street lined with black, tinted windows Mercedez and took my first right and then first left, adhering to the random rules.
As luck would have it this simple act takes me onto one of the most famous, glorious streets in all of Russia – and indeed Europe – Nevsky Prospect, a commercial throughfare dotted with glorious historic buildings, the heart of the city commissioned by Peter the Great. It’s a wide street, as so many are here, and to get to my next right down Sadovanya Street I have to pass under a subway, littered with tourist stalls.
The right side of Sadovanya Street is lined by a light yellow colonnaded building. Part of the joys of being here in summer are the jaw dropping, revealing sights on every pavement, the local women, especially nearer the richer centre of town, strutting around in very little. Repeatedly I find my head craning around in amazement as one beautiful creature, all cheekbones and endless legs, follows another.
I cross the road to take the next road on the left by the Calvin Klein Jeans store. How times have changed here since my only other visit, back in the latter days of Yeltsin in 1998. The city centre is clearly richer, brands fight for position and there’s way more cars and consequently traffic. The upside of all of this is that the ancient buildings are in better shape than before and there are less overt signs of tramps and beggars. I take the left down a small diagonal road, Krilova Street.
At the end I take a right onto Ostrovskoga Square. Gorgeous yellow palisades abound and there’s a large theatre with statues peering from the walls ahead. Peter the Great insisted on painting so many buildings such wonderful pastel colours to get over the monotony of the bleak Russian winters. To my left is an inviting leafy park but I’m sticking to the rules like I’m the Dice Man or something and the rules say to go right here. After a couple more turns around the square I’m onto a boulevard, symmetrically designed with more yellow colonnaded giant buildings on either side. It’s a quiet part of town, at least it is on the Wednesday morning I drop by.
It really is a stunning city – my first equal fave alongside La Paz in Bolivia, though they are both very different. Bah humbug to all this Venice of the North crap. St Petersburg is a city in its own right and beyond comparison.
A bridge up ahead across a river looks tantalizingly out of reach according to my new random code, until I look more carefully at the way there – left, right, left as proscribed does indeed take me to the 18th century bridge, left around a roundabout, right along the water and left onto the bridge; dark storm clouds the only impediment to the otherwise picture postcard 360 degree view.
Afterwards, it’s a right along the water on Poutanki Street, the day beginning to warm up.
Up ahead a sign clearly states the next left is a dead end but the code dictates left. I take it regardless. The street is packed tight with large deep yellow and pink edifices. A lengthy queue of swarthy men waits for some government office to open.
It begins to rain. Bugger. Why didn’t I bring my swanky hotel umbrella with me?
It isn’t a dead end. There is no premature death of my first random walk. I can make out a bus crossing a road in the distance, 500 metres or so ahead.
I turn right through some grimy housing complex. Russian techno music blares out of one window, a number of neighbouring panes are cracked. The paint on the walls is peeling. This is more like the St P of yore.
A man in overalls walks towards me carrying a large rusty scythe. I take a left onto Djamvulu Street. A 50-year-old lies sprawled on the street, shitfaced. A comrade comes and yanks him up. He can’t walk straight. In fact, he can’t walk at all, quickly squatting back down, his capped head resting on his trembling knee.
Russia holds many demographic records, not all good. For instance, no place on earth has a greater disparity between male and female life expectancy than here – 13 years being the gap. Why? Alcohol. The average male lives for just 53 years in this country. 53, for Christ’s sake! The average vodka consumption in the population – the average of everyone that is, including babies – is 50 bottles a year. On my previous trip to Russia, I wrote about an especially alcoholic morning of toasts and clinking of shot glasses in Vladivostok. One of the characters in that particular chapter of my life was dead a month after I met him, his liver pickled like kimchi.
On a street corner my eyes alight on a poster for some scantily clad buxom young things – the Troika bar. Ads for sleaze in this town are commonplace. A typical walk in the city centre will involve turning down five or six business cards for escorts.
I take a right onto Zagorodny Street, past the Jazz Philharmonic Hall. I check what’s on in the evening – Konstantin Mamonov on sax, niiiice. Perhaps I’ll go and check him out. (I don’t – vodka and a nightclub put paid to that cultural idea).
Turning left I pass a supermarket and inhale the sweet smell of fresh fruit. An ad on a bus shelter exhorts youngsters to sign up for a glorious career in the navy.
My next right is into a park – ahead of me the yellow glow of a McDonald’s sign juts out. I can’t help but think of the Economist’s great way of tracking global currencies – the Big Mac Index, how prices of Ronald McDonald’s most famous offering compare to home soil in the US. Russia has been hit hard by the downturn. Oil and gas comprise 90% of the Russian economy. All fine ‘n dandy during most of this decade when demand from abroad has been booming and prices sky rocketing. Come the downturn though and the appetite for gas, especially from Europe, has dropped, as too have the prices for oil and gas. The curse of being an energy economy – a phenomenon well known through out the world – has come home to roost, the ruble dropping off quicker than Lidia’s sequined robe at the Troika Bar 300 metres behind me.
At the entrance to the park an old man reads the local paper pinned to a shelter for all to read communally just like in China.
A monolithic ugly 1960s concrete theatre sits in the middle of the park. The commies sure didn’t have the design aesthetic of the tsars.
Taking a left in the park I reflect on my less stressed eardrums. It’s nice to be away from the groan of the incessant traffic momentarily.
The roar quickly returns though as I take a right onto a busy main road called Marata. There’s little to commend it, which has been a rarity on the walk thus far. As I jot this thought down I almost walk into a muddy puddle, sidestepping in somewhat theatric fashion at the last moment. I pass a dodgy DVD shop. The illicit DVD trade is a mainstay of the Russian mafia, and one who’s supply chain I am interested in covering at some point, albeit at arm’s length so no mafia lead is inserted at high speed into the back of my head. It’s a rotten place to be a journo here, just like in China too.
I’m thirsty.
There’s train tracks at the end of the road. It takes me back to 1998 again and how I arrived in this great city, drinking vodka with Russian sailors on a train ushering in my 21st birthday. Yesterday I turned 32. The rolling stock looks just as old now, while I have definitely aged too – grey hair on my temples beginning to take root, a 36 waist now, rather than those svelte 32 or 34 days.
I head left onto another grimy, drab road walking parallel with the tracks. Two ladies on little ponies clip clop past.
The day before a concierge at the über flash hotel had produced a map saying everything I needed to see was “here” – drawing a neat, tight circle around the hotel. “It’s all within 15 minutes walk,” he had said. What he said is true in that the centre is the spruced up, most stunning part of town but this randonnée gives me another point of view.
An old man in a black leather coat shuffles ahead of me, stops, looks up, turns around, grunts, his vivid blue eyes looking dazed. He’s walking the wrong way. I’m just walking the random way.
An Asiatic women walks past, weighed down with her daily groceries. Her presence is a reminder of the vastness of this nation that straddles two continents and takes up to ten hours to cross by plane, and God knows how long by road given the pathetic Russian infrastructure whereby there are no motorways outside of St Petersburg or Moscow.
Turning right, I walk alongside a waterway and under a bridge, train tracks overhead. Looking down, the water sure is murky. Russia suffers from appalling environmental mismanagement. A couple of dilapidated factories in the distance might explain the toxic H2O.
I’m now well clear of the glitz and glamour of central St P and into the industrial suburbs and still rather thirsty.
A dumpy woman with bright red hair walks past. Her green tshirt says amusingly: “Don’t bother. I’m not drunk enough.” Having dabbled in the tshirt business myself, my imaginary riposte tshirt would read: “Don’t bother. I’m not blind yet.” I chuckle to myself at my mean sense of humour and carry on.
A left over a bridge and a right along the same waterway, a sign telling me it’s the Obvodnoya Canal. I think I can guess where I am on the map that is burning a hole in my pocket but until I stop I cannot look at it – that’s a rule I just made up to add to the randomness.
Still, the end comes quickly, my thirst winning the argument. Two thirds of the way down the street I see the magical sign KAΦE. Time for a coffee and a sit down. It’s basic inside but I spy the all important espresso machine and plonk myself down. Amid the formica the back wall laughingly has a photographic wallpaper of a grand old library full of mock shelves stuffed full of leather bound tomes. Everywhere in this great city has delusions of grandeur.
The middle-aged bufoned proprietress shows me exactly where I am on the map; essentially in the bottom centimetre of the central map due south of the hotel. It’s been a great hour and three quarter stroll.
I must have walked along 50 to 60 streets to get to this coffee shop yet to get back takes just three throughfares and 40 minutes.

In the footsteps of Hitler

2009-08-04T17:01:00.001+08:00

The other day I trod in the footsteps of both Adolf Hitler and the last Tsar of Russia, Nicholas II. I was having a gander around a palace by the Neva river in stunning St Petersburg that was occupied by an uncle of Tsar Nicholas. It was suitably sumptuous and, in fact, I will be attending a private reception there next month (what a show off!). Anyway, on the second floor was a series of interconnecting rooms with a thick, rich, grey carpet with Beaujolais red patterns (pictured) in each room. This carpet, measuring some 60 metres by 10 metres, has been at the foot of key moments of the 20th century. It was originally laid down at this palace before moving to the Crimea at a summer retreat used by the tsar. It was nabbed by the Nazis in 1942 and taken to Hitler’s bunker where it was trampled on by increasingly agitated and cranky Nazi high command before mass suicide and Soviet victory whereupon the carpet was taken back to its original home in St Petersburg.

Question: What do former communist allies Moscow, Dalian and Pyongyang have in common?

2009-07-29T14:56:00.010+08:00

Fit policewomen!

Selling like hotcakes in Moscow

2009-07-28T14:02:00.000+08:00

You know you're staying in a flash hotel when ... (Part II)

2009-07-28T13:54:00.002+08:00

When ex-US presidents (normally George Snr and Bill C) are schmoozed in the lobby photos by the invariably balding Swiss sounding GM of the establishment in the rogue’s gallery of mugshots … along with the odd selection of C celebs – Dolph Lungren anyone!

You know you're staying in a flash hotel when ... (Part I)

2009-07-28T13:52:00.001+08:00

You find a note such as this tucked into the highly prized bath robes

Bacon 'n caviar

2009-07-22T13:30:00.003+08:00

The sonorous melodies of the harp reasonate around the gilded, stunning room. In front of me as I come in lie a mound of strawberries and three bottles of champagne on ice. I make my way to the centre of the decorated hall, gazing up at the ornate stained window ceiling and the beautiful lighting. To my right a pile of caviar sits waiting with my name on. This is elegant luxury defined. It also happens to be my breakfast dining room for today and tomorrow here at the Grand Hotel Europe in wonderful St Petersburg. Whoever came up with that dietary manta that one should eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper may well have had the Tsar-tastic brekkie I just wolfed down in mind. And even I thought it was too decadent to have champagne at breakfast!

The tragic plight of the Uighurs

2009-07-07T13:17:00.002+08:00

Yining sits to the very far west of China. Carry on a little bit and you’ll hit Kazakhstan. To its east are wonderful grasslands. Life there though is a tinderbox with fear and loathing visible on the streets.
Yining, or Ghulja as the Uighurs call it, was the site of a massive 1997 Uighur rising that saw thousands protest and a very bloody response from the authorities with many human rights organisations suggesting the number of violent deaths that followed hit four figures.
When I went there nearly a year ago I came across greater repression than I had experienced anywhere, and that includes North Korea. Police, army and local militia roamed the streets armed to the teeth looking for trouble. We were stopped every second block, our papers looked at, our bags checked and our digital pictures scrutinized. 11 years after this massacre and the city was still a powder keg.
Urumqi (pictured with riot police), the capital of the province, is an 11-hour bus ride east. As far as I can make out the authorities there reacted violently to a peaceful demonstration Sunday and massacred indiscriminately. We will never know the full death toll, but believe me when I say you can add a zero to the official 140 toll. The Uighurs have never received the same international attention that Tibet does for its harsh treatment by Beijing. Urumqi will now suffer the same long, drawn out tortured fate as Yining. There are times when I hate China.

Calling Mike Hill

2009-07-06T12:35:00.002+08:00

Bit of a bizarre post one, given the modern digital age we live in with Facebook, Skype, etc. Anyways, Mike, saw your comment on this site to get in touch -- can't find your contacts anywhere so email me when you can: sam@cityconnect.com.cn -- I am in the UK for the next couple of weeks

Diamonds aren’t forever

2009-07-05T09:41:00.001+08:00

After a year of first class treatment from the lovely folk at Cathay Pacific my top tier Diamond membership of their loyalty programme ran out a few days ago. I’m now relegated to Gold, the Championship as such, which let’s face it is a whole lot better than where Charlton Athletic find themselves. I can honestly say though I hope I never attain that Diamond card again. Don’t get me wrong, the perks these past 12 months were wonderful. The flashest airport lounge imaginable, upgrades galore, lounge access even when not flying Cathay, ludicrous baggage allowance … the list goes on. But what one has to do to become Diamond, phew, that’s an effort. In a 12-month period you need to crank out 120,000 miles with CX. To put that in perspective, HK to London is just over 6,000 miles. It’s alright if you are a highflying exec, as taking business class gives you double points. Your humble scribe here though has never coughed up the cash to sit up front in the plane so 120k worth or miles meant that in that particular 12 month period (June 2007 to June 2008) my feet barely touched the ground, home on Lamma was a place to shower, unpack and repack. Frankly, looking back on it, travelling that much ain’t good for the mind, let alone the environment.
Still, as I sit here writing this – in transit with Emirates at Dubai airport – I could really do with that Cathay lounge...

Strange brew

2009-07-05T08:51:00.003+08:00

Yesterday I read an article on the Beeb’s site about North Korea making a TV advert about a product, not a person (as in the Kims) for once. The product was one I am intimately familiar with - Taedonggang beer. I would have posted about it yesterday but of course I was in China where Blogger continues to be blocked. So here I am on a stopover in Dubai. Time for a quick rehash of the wonderful tale of this now briefly famous beer.
Back in 2000, the Dear Leader, known to be fond of a tipple or 10 (he is allegedly Hennessey Cognac’s single biggest customer) decided the proletariat deserved a better brew. Having been long-term importers of China’s Five Star beer, Kim Jong Il wanted his Stalinist state to have its own standout beer.
He cast around for a brewery and in November, 2000, using a German agent, answered an advert and spent a reported £1.5 million purchasing the venerable Ushers brewery. The 175-year-old brewery located in Trowbridge, Wiltshire in the west of England was dismantled and moved lock, stock and barrel 8,500 km east to the eastern suburbs of Pyongyang.
Strange but true – but then in 1976 in similar fashion Kim’s father Kim il Sung (still president despite being dead for 12 years) bought and imported a Swiss watch factory!
Back in 2000, Peter Ward, the director of Thomas Hardy Brewing and Packaging, the owner's of Ushers, said: "When they first approached us I thought they were South Koreans and I was a bit shocked when I discovered they were from the Communist North." Once he had got over the shock and was reassured that a) the North Koreans would pay and b) would be using the technology to ferment yeast not germs (the two practices being similar) the deal was done and 12 North Koreans headed to the brewery to help take it down and move it away to Asia.
State media at the time noted: “The respected and beloved general, who is always deeply interested in further improving the people's diet, took a benevolent action for constructing a modern brewery in Pyongyang.”
Thomas Hardy Brewing bought the Ushers plant after the brewery closed in early 2000. Ushers began brewing in 1824 and was best known for regional ales such as Best Bitter, Founders Ale and Mann's Brown Ale. The Ushers brands are now brewed under contract in Dorchester.
Suggesting the Dear Leader’s urgent thirst troops of the North Korean People's Guard were deployed in the construction project "for the purpose of completing a quality factory in the shortest possible period of time," according to the North Korean Central News Agency. “All combatants mobilized to the construction are carrying out the struggle of loyalty day and night with the fervent desire to make a report of loyalty to the respected and beloved general after excellently constructing the brewery,” the news agency reported at the time.
But installing this comparatively hi-tech facility was no easy task for this incapacitated state.
The wonderfully apocryphal story, told by more than one DPRK old hand though impossible to confirm like so much else in this nation, goes that after much jigsaw assembling of the factory, the first pint was poured to much excitement. The brown, none-too-fizzy liquid that poured forth came as rather a surprise. ‘That’s no lager,’ wondered the employees in unison as an incomprehensible award winning ale poured out of the taps. Germans were immediately called in to install state of the art stainless steel piping and out of the taps a few weeks later poured lovely crisp lager that would not have been frowned upon in even the most discerning Munich beer hall.
However, the story didn’t end there. Failing to pay their bills, a common DPRK trait, the factory ran into difficulty six months later needing extensive repairs, something the German engineers were not prepared to do. Cue the age old North Korean feat of reengineering – the end product being Taedonggang Beer – named after the River Taedong which flows through the centre of the capital and is unquestionably, despite the alleged tinkering, the country’s finest beer.
The Korea Workers' Party organ Rodong Daily said that year that with the 500,000 barrel a year brewery completed, Pyongyang citizens now enjoy this fine beer, and that "they are unanimous in speaking of its quality."
As of the middle of 2002, those rich enough could buy this brew, which comes in distinctive 650 ml green bottles with a logo of a bridge. But at 50 pence or so a bottle this and every other beer in the country are far too much for the average citizen who earns no more than a couple of dollars a day. Since launching, perhaps down to austerity measures, the alcohol content has dropped from 5.7% to 3.5% yet this straw-coloured drink makes for a delightfully crisp, refreshing, light brew when served cold – not a problem in winter when temperatures regularly hover around the -10 degrees Celsius mark.
Alongside this and only available at certain microbreweries and the ‘luxury’ Koryo Hotel is the dark Taedonggang ale with a voluptuous, rich caramel flavour.
Now, give the friendly folk at Koryo Tours a bell to go to the reclusive east Asian state soonest for a surreal pint.

Fear and loathing in Dandong

2009-07-02T12:39:00.002+08:00

You've haven't been to Dandong in Liaoning until you've experienced Real Love -- the best disco in China bar none. With its bouncy floor, hard core drinking DJ and dingy surroundings it is a legendary haunt. What's more, it's impossible to miss. Get out at the train station, gaze up at the giant rusty red statue of Mao and follow the finger where the Great Helmsman is pointing. As the big man said, you can't have a revolution without a party.
Once inside green laser lights and techno music collide. Be warned, as you near that dance floor you are putting your liver in harm’s way. Few Westerners make it up to this cool slice of northeast China that shares a river border with North Korea. Fewer Westerners still make it to Real Love. So the novelty value of seeing a laowei bouncing up and down on the jolting disco floor is often too much for the DJ to resist.
The last time I hauled my lanky two metre frame there, all of a sudden the music stopped, the chubby DJ pointed towards me and beckoned me to his lair in front of a hundred or so bemused locals, who’d had their dancing suddenly interrupted. Operation Embarrass The Foreigner then swung into action.
A beautiful dancer handed he and I a bottle of warm beer. He urged me to down it. Was he mad? Did he seriously know who he was messing with? Me, the gigantic Asia correspondent for Beers of the World magazine against this runt. Bring it on, biiiiitch! But before I’d even swallowed the first gulp of the rather ordinary amber nectar his arms were aloft, victorious, having downed his bottle in literally a second flat! The crowd were delirious – the local having thrashed the giant marauding foreigner.
Alright, game on, I thought. You’re just a little bit rusty, Chambers, now go show him who’s boss! We were each handed a second bottle. Marks, set, go. Once again, the crowd roared their appreciation as the DJ sunk his beer before I’d barely made an indent on mine.
Jesus, this guy’s good, now might be the time to slink off, stage left with my tail between my legs, having admitted defeat, I thought. The DJ and his adoring fans were having none of it though. He bayed for a third and then a fourth bottle while making me repeat some no doubt idiotic words in Chinese into a microphone. He could have just come in from a week from the Sahara the way he downed that fourth brew, as I toiled much to everyone’s amusement.
By now the DJ could see I had had enough, but there was time for more humiliation. A fifth bottle each came out. My stomach had that distended Ethiopian thing going on. Thrashed soundly for a fifth time, I walked off stage to huge applause. My prize for the ritual humiliation was sitting back at the table – a six pack.

Pop stars passing in Shanghai

2009-07-01T12:47:00.004+08:00

This has been the second time I have been in Shanghai when a world famous musician has died. The first time was far sadder for me. George Harrison kicked the bucket on December 1, 2001. He was my favourite Beatle. Quiet, unassuming, he lived in the shadow of the great Lennon-McCartney writing combo – as so many from that decade did; step forward Ray Davies. Yet his Beatle contributions were among the very best the quartet ever recorded. Greats like While My Guitar Gently Weeps and Here Comes The Sun have withstood the sands of time. In the 1980s George was the greatest influence in the supergroup of all time, The Traveling Wilburys. Just before he died Harrison made a stunning album called Brainwashed, which saw him hit creative peaks not seen since the early 1970s, and All Things Must Pass. In short he was a genius.
I was in Shanghai when I learned of his passing. Together with a commercial colleague we went out that night on yet another massive pub crawl. At every stop we demanded the pub play something by George Harrison. However, dingy the bar, however Shanghainese, we were adamant that the pub had to pay a loud homage to Harrison. We must have cleared out endless pubs with our drunken rants for Harrison homilies that night.
Fast forward seven and a half years and I’m sitting down on day three of a conference, opening up my laptop, lazily slurping my first cup of coffee and an events colleague of mine tells me Michael Jackson is dead. ‘Fuck off,’ I retort, dumbfounded. ‘I’m not kidding,’ she says, heading to the BBC homepage. Sure enough, there he is, warped, white Jacko, dead at the age of 50. I get in a taxi later that day. The Chinese radio station is playing Jackson tributes 24/7 and so begins the bizarre media deification of a man they helped satanise in the 1990s. Both Google and Twitter crashed on the day of Jacko’s death so great was the volume of traffic. Apart from the pair of them dieing while I was in Shanghai, the other link I guess they have is that in the 1980s Jackson bought up half the Beatles back catalogue, quite literally for a song.
A week on and Jackson’s departure still leads the news, every Tom, Dick and Harry comparing his passing and life as greater than that of Lennon’s and Presley’s. It’s become one of those mega news events – a where-were-you-when-x-happened type event. People, get a grip!

The flâneur

2009-06-30T14:33:00.002+08:00

Right, left, right, left, right and so on. No doubt taking his cue from Luke Rhinehart’s novel The Dice Man, a recent acquaintance told me in Shanghai how he goes about exploring cities these days. For years much of his travel has mirrored mine: airport, plane, airport, taxi, hotel, conference, taxi, airport, plane, airport, sleep. Sick of this routine this peripatetic tycoon decided to make an effort to be different and see a unique slice of each city he visits. Now, when he gets a spare moment (and he always makes time – at least two hours) he heads out of his hotel and takes the first right, then the first left, then the first right and so on. This wonderfully random way of exploring appeals to me no end and will no doubt form the basis for many future blog posts, as (doff of the cap in Paul French’s direction for this lovely word coming up) what Baudelaire might have called a flâneur -- "that aimless stroller who loses himself in the crowd, who has no destination and goes wherever caprice or curiosity directs his or her steps".

Oink, oink

2009-06-29T11:25:00.003+08:00

The door of the airplane opened. Four masked men strode in. The one in front raised his gun, pointed it at the forehead of the air steward nearest him, and pulled the trigger. The steward survived. His temperature was deemed okay. Swine ‘flu and the associated paranoia from 2002’s SARS epidemic had driven authorities in China to new levels of extreme fear mongering. As each and every international plane touches down on PRC soil a team of four, clad in white forensic overalls, surgical masks and best of all ski masks (!!) enter each plane before anyone can leave. It’s like a scene from a low grade Hollywood disaster movie. The temperature guns are pointed at everyone’s forehead. Anyone slightly suspicious gets a second actual thermometer check. Then we are allowed to proceed. Leaving the plane, we’ve filled in a form saying we have no life-threatening lurgy, which another masked official takes ahead of passports. Pig paranoia preeminates.

Sweat fest

2009-06-23T16:19:00.003+08:00

Returning to Hong Kong this past Saturday was a quick reminder of why I hate Junes there; because you still have another three months at least of extreme humidity to put up with. Now in years past I have gradually got used to the return of the humidity as it permeates the atmosphere from April onwards. This time I flew in from London, headed into town, up and out of the Airport Express and past all the ludicrously priced shops of the International Finance Centre and headed out of my hermetically sealed existence of the past 16 hours onto an external elevated walkway. Hong Kong's offices are the coldest in the world, while outdoors have some of the highest humidity levels anywhere leading to curious common pneumonia occurrences. As I pushed open the glass door to head outside I noticed the T1 sign was up -- a typhoon was circling in the area. The oppressive heat hit me, smothered me really from head to toe. BOSCH --- it invaded every pore of my body straight away, hitting harder than a Springbok tackling a mauled British Lion. When typhoons hover, the air around Hong Kong tends to get sucked out of the atmosphere; the humidity climbs to 98%+ and even the hardiest, sinewy of locals has a sweaty brow. Within seconds my body taps switched on, perspiration popping from every part of my body. The alcohol from the flight is coming out neat and staining my shirt. This time of year is like walking in a sauna 24/7, with tshirts needing urgent changing all the time. This past weekend was about as bad as it gets. Time to get the hell out of here and head back to the cooler climes of the mainland.

Through the Looking Glass – China’s Foreign Journalists from Opium Wars to Mao

2009-05-27T11:39:00.001+08:00

Quick plug to my old chum Paul French’s latest book called Through the Looking Glass – China’s Foreign Journalists from Opium Wars to Mao. Paul, the Old China Hands’ Old China Hand, examines the convulsive history of the old China press corps from the first newspapers printed in the European Factories of Canton in the 1820s through the 120 years of change, war, convulsion and revolution that led up to 1949. The story starts with a Sunday afternoon sword wielding duel between two editors over the opium trade and ends with a fistfight in a Shanghai jail over how to report Mao’s revolution.
Like journalists everywhere, the old China press corps took sides and brought their own assumptions and prejudices with them but a fair number also brought their personal hopes, dreams and fears along too. They certainly weren’t infallible; they got the story completely wrong as often as they got it partially right. Most did their jobs professionally, some passionately and a select few with rare flair and touches of genius. They were all too often flamboyant and gregarious characters; sometimes dodgy and dishonest; sometimes obsessive and manic. More than a few were drunks, philanderers and frauds and inevitably there was the occasional spy. They changed sides, they lost their impartiality, they displayed bias and a few were downright scoundrels and liars of the first order. But they were never anything less than fascinating.
You can catch Paul around the region. He’s normally funny, occasionally abrasive and worth listening to. Here are his book tour dates.

Sunday June 7 – Book Launch – The Glamour Bar
Through the Looking Glass – China’s Foreign Journalists from Opium Wars to Mao

The Glamour Bar
6/F, No. 5 The Bund (corner Guangdong Road)
4pm
RMB 65, includes a drink
To book: 6350-9988 or reservations@m-onthebund.comwww.m-restaurantgroup.com

Suzhou

Monday June 8 – The Suzhou Bookworm
Through the Looking Glass – China’s Foreign Journalists from Opium Wars to Mao

The Suzhou Bookworm
Gunxiufang 77, Shiquan Road, Suzhou
7.30pm
RMB30, includes a drink
http://www.suzhoubookworm.com/

Beijing

Tuesday June 16 – The Beijing Bookworm
Through the Looking Glass – China’s Foreign Journalists from Opium Wars to Mao

The Beijing Bookworm
Building 4, Nan Sanlitun Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing
7.30pm
RMB20 (members); RMB30 (non-members)
http://www.beijingbookworm.com/index.php

Wednesday June 17 – The Bookworm at the Yin Yang Community Centre
“Girl Reporters” in China

The Bookworm at the Yin Yang Community Centre
The First Courtyard, Hegezhuang Village, Chaoyang District, Beijing
Tel.: 6431.2108
Email: contact@yinyangbeijing.com

Thursday June 18 – The China Foreign Correspondents’ Club
Through the Looking Glass – China’s Foreign Journalists from Opium Wars to Mao
http://www.fccchina.org/

Hong Kong

Monday June 22 – Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents’ Club
Through the Looking Glass – China’s Foreign Journalists from Opium Wars to Mao

HK FCC, 2 Lower Albert Road, Central, Hong Kong
Time: 11.15
Tel: 852 2521 1511
http://www.fcchk.org/

And for us up here in lovely Dalian, he’s coming to the Brooklyn Bar probably in the first week of July.

Bulldozing history

2009-03-30T15:10:00.002+08:00

Out of the darkness a hazy grey midday’s light crept into the lift as it made its way up the outside of the swish Hyatt on the Bund. This swanky hotel sits in an area of Shanghai – the North Bund – that is only now receiving the full attention of property developers. The scene from the ascending lift was all too depressingly familiar. Scars – 50 feet deep – were all that remained of huge plots of land where once had been characterful close knot sixty-year-old dwellings. The odd island of yore remained surrounded by blue fences, cranes and construction noise and mud.
In Shanghai the local government has protected many of the large old buildings while totally bowing to the avarice of property developers when it comes to old style accommodation. The city is a mess right now as it hurtles towards hosting the World Expo next year. Once locals have had time to look around after the dust settles, they might just regret the out and out pursuit of new dizzying skyscrapers. New office blocks I am reliably informed are only 35% taken up at the moment. This rash of overbuilding has also hit the sprawling hotels with occupancy rates at leading five star establishments now hovering dangerously low around 30%. Some day, someone will learn: less is more.

The Wofe

2009-03-29T09:51:00.002+08:00

Setting up on the mainland as a small independent concern is no easy task, harder still if you happen to choose a second tier city such as my new home, Dalian.
About a year ago I set up a bank account in France. I remember walking away from the place, my wrist aching thanks to the incredible number of times I was asked to sign pieces of paper – something like 50 in all.
All this though was merely good practice for the bureaucratic assault that is China. In Hong Kong we take for granted just how simply everything works. Setting up a mobile phone service, for instance. Five minutes and away you go. Trundle down to China Mobile on the other hand and prepare for a good hour’s hanging around.
Rent was admittedly quite straightforward – and wonderfully cheap.
Which then brought around the issue of company registration. This is a minefield. But it was a battle I had to win to ensure decent visa status. I was aiming to set up a WOFE (Wholly Owned Foreign Enterprise, pronounced woofee) rather than a representative office in the knowledge that come another Beijing immigration crackdown as witnessed in the run up to the Olympics I would be safe.
However, being a penny pincher I simply refused to splash out exorbitant reams of renminbi on the myriad company registration firms, who charge an arm and a leg essentially to fill in forms and sit in long queues. No way. I’d do this myself.
I located the right office in the centre of town for the initial batch of forms. A pile of dense Chinese documents was presented to me from the austere grey surroundings of the tax bureau. A friend helped me fill them in. Signature count: around eight. I handed them in a few days later. A burly bloke with acne scars and a gruff demeanor took one look at them, mumbled something about filling in one line incorrectly and plonked the papers back on my lap. He returned to his tea while I sought out a new batch of forms. I found out that any firm registered in Dalian has to be monikered with the opening word Dalian (eg Dalian Acme Co). This was proving difficult and my near non-existent Mandarin was stretched. I relented after a while and sought help.
A friend up here who is a bit of a government fixer said she’d help out for 5,000RMB – under the half the normal third party charge. Plenty more signatures scrawled and we had successfully crossed the first hurdle.
Before proceeding to the Foreign Commerce Bureau – another giant, dull edifice this time on the outskirts of town, we had to have a contract with an accountant and office rent secured. Odd, I thought. Jumping the gun a bit to lay down cash for office space when you are not guaranteed a company. But, now into the swing of things, and not at all surprised by the diktats of Chinese bureaucracy these two parts of the jigsaw came together quickly.
Round two of the signature express – this time for the Foreign Commerce Bureau – saw our next batch of papers rejected thanks to Gordon Brown. Since I had started the registration process, I had slapped down 10,000 pounds as my registered capital for the firm (you need to show 100,000 RMB or equivalent as a minimum). Months down the track and London was being referred to as Reykjavik-on-Thames, the pound was worth a pittance and I needed to up my stakes.
This then done, we were presented with a gold and red embossed certificate of approval. Though looking the part, this document only serves as a certificate of approval … of the application. We were about half way down the track.
The process then moved to the municipal government for their approval.
Sitting in queues in government offices has been very good to catch up on my reading.
As I write this I have been embroiled in this messy process for nearly five months. I am now just about complete. Days spent in tax bureaus, chop making holes in the wall, foreign currency centres and then the Bank of China and finally I am up and running.
It has by no means been easy but in the long run this will all prove worthwhile. It has proved to be the biggest bureaucratic test of my life and a handy insight into the sprawling apparatus of local government.

Winter delight

2009-02-18T20:00:00.001+08:00

Woke up, drew back the curtains and gazed out at a snowy urban scene. While everywhere in China from Shanghai south tends to warm up post the Lunar New Year, up here in Dalian February is traditionally the coldest month.
Part of the reason for taking so darn long to move of Hong Kong was that I had become a southern poof. This is my first winter this decade. In Hongkers one quickly becomes used to the fact that winter simply does not exist – the slightest drop in temperature bringing out a ridiculous display of thick North Face jackets.
Dalian sits exposed on the Liaoding peninsula, overlooking and buffeted by both the Yellow Sea and Bohai Bay.
The other day I went outside having just washed my hair. I stepped out into the curious vortex of wind that is my building’s entrance and within five seconds I could feel ice forming on my bonce. As I stepped gingerly on the tricky ice outside my gaffe, behind me all of a sudden a loud, protracted female shriek echoed around the buildings. A well wrapped up young woman behind me was pushed 10 metres, sliding, along the ice by the fierce wind.
And yet here really is not too bad. The thing is Dalian is very dry, so the worst cold does not go to your bones like you get in other cities like Shanghai. And besides in New Zealand recently I bought a possum fur hat and that really can withstand any cold.
The forecast for tomorrow is heavy snow. I might have to pull a Dr Zhivago to get to the airport on time.

Supermarket Sweep

2009-02-14T13:41:00.005+08:00

The Chambers family has always been highly adept at the Carrefour supermarket sweep. Traditionally, it was the final port of call prior to taking the ferry back across the English Channel. Car doors would slide open, we’d be armed with a slew of francs (latterly euros) to unleash a battalion of trolleys. The family would march into the giant hypermarché. Wide aisles stacked high of just about everything lay ahead of us. Everyone had their own tasks. Timing was of the essence. We had a ferry to catch in a couple of hours. The organized side of the parental unit (Mum) would have a long list of household items that are just better value on the Continent. The focused side of the parental unit (Dad) would traditionally head to the alcohol department bringing my big brother for muscle. 10 cases of beer and a triple figure of wine bottles later (plus the obligatory giant pot or three of Maille Dijon mustard) and a three foot long receipt would fizz out of the till. Our car would have beer crates for seats and would be close to pulling a wheelie all the way back home in Kent weighed under by the then illicit volumes of booze we’d hauled across La Manche.
Fast forward a decade or two and I encounter a Carrefour experience of totally different proportions. Here in Dalian I have a lovely little abode in the centre of town. There were a few things I needed to kit it out though, plus I fancied doing a bit of cooking so I trooped down to the local Carrefour. Phew!
There’s simply no way of doing the fabled supermarket sweep here in the cavernous depths of this supermarket on the outskirts of Zhongshan district. The sheer volume of people wielding trollies makes for tough navigation up and down the aisles.
I am bamboozled by choice. Pick up a sauce pan or washing up liquid and an employee sidles up and suggests a different brand, giving a lengthy, keen rationale for her choice, not that I can understand her argument.
Anger spills over regularly among both customers and employees. A lady is irate that she hasn’t been served soon enough at the meat counter and vents her spleen, her decibel rant rising across the hectic shopping commotion. Unlike in Europe, say, the people behind the meat counter giver as good as her, a mass argument breaks out until she is escorted away.
It’s bumper trollies as I make my way to towards the fruit and veg section. It takes a while to find any bags to put the fresh produce in. Once secured, and lots of veg later, I then have to get it weighed. There’s a gaggle of people pushing and shoving to get their stuff weighed. My long arms eventually get the job done.
Staples that I take for granted in Hong Kong and Europe either do not exist or are prohibitively expensive with limited selections. Cheese looks like becoming a luxury up here. And amazingly for a country so famous for cha, a good tea bag is tough to find.
The checkout queue is haphazard. I eventually get out, head home and decompress with a calming cup of tea. The trick I have learnt is never, ever to go there again on a weekend, weekdays during work hours is easier.

Oasis in the concrete jungle

2009-02-03T10:35:00.003+08:00

There’s nowhere quite like Shamian Island in the whole of China. Shanghai has the Bund, Xiamen has an island full of ancient colonial buildings too, but it is old Canton that one truly feels concession China as it used to be.
Guangzhou for the uninitiated is full blare noise and grime – a real wake up call from the pleasant surroundings of Hong Kong. Though Cantonese and proud of it, it feels like the real China as soon as you step out of the plane or train – a noisy attack on your senses. All of which makes Shamian Island all the more special. At the turn of the 20th century this little haven where was where the enfeebled emperor allowed foreigners to set up base and trade with China. The Swires and Jardines funneled their opium through here. The deal etched out was that the island – a narrow wedge between two rivers – was fair game but Joe Foreigner could not step foot off it. Up sprouted wonderfully sturdy colonial style buildings amid spectacular trees.
Go there now and little of this heritage site has changed. Sure, there’s the 28-storey white giant that is the White Swan Hotel, Guangzhou’s first five star and to this day best known hotel. Bar that though little has changed. Statues dotted everywhere depict yesteryear, plaques on buildings denote who was who a century ago. It’s quiet, which after a headache inducing day around town is a God-send. It’s leafy and it’s retained its dignified air. These days the majority of foreigners visiting this tiny strip of land – probably no more than 1.5km by 500m – are Americans here to adopt kids. Stalls garner business by offering free pram rentals. Western adults stroll the avenues as new parents – their Oriental offspring bemused by their hugely changed circumstances. All the restaurants here are top notch, Lucy’s is a pleasant bar to sup a beer as the dusk sets in and the banks of the Pearl river switch on a gaudy storm of neon. The annex of the Victory Hotel is a top place to stay at under half the price of the White Swan. An even better bargain is the Guangzhou Youth Hostel, whose rooms will surprise those brought up on a the European or American equivalents of the YMCA.
Before moving to Dalian I used to enjoy bookending my China trips from Guangzhou. The airport there is the best in the mainland with cheaper fares than Hong Kong while the train station is the starting point for countless exciting adventures. And after a rough few weeks away the civility of Shamian was and still is a joy to behold.

2008 in review

2008-12-31T17:05:00.005+08:00

New countries visited

None that I can think of, strangely

Countries revisited after a long absence

Russia, Vietnam

Days spent on the road

250 approx

Biggest change

Leaving Hong Kong after so long for Dalian

Best trip

Xinjiang in August -- stunning

Worst trip

Xinjiang in August – repressed more than North Korea

New Year Resolutions

Travel less
Write 1,000 paid words every other day
Learn Mandarin

2009 outlook for the AsiaScribbler

Strangely positive despite the global downturn. I feel ’09 will be the culmination of years of hard yards getting to where I am, namely a relatively savvy East Asia writer with a dab hand at editing. People might not know me going into ’09, but I am going to be marketing myself hard this year!

Daily grind

2008-12-31T17:02:00.001+08:00

Show dailies – they’re good money, ultimately satisfying but hugely stressful. For those that don’t know the terminology, show dailies are the newspapers that come out at exhibitions – a what’s on guide, plus news from the show type newsletter, generally done with a skeletal staff and amid incredibly tight deadlines … and often with designers who are a couple of bulbs short of a chandelier (or, at least, that’s my excuse, and I’m sticking to it!).
For regular readers you’ll have noticed a strange, frankly worrying appreciation I have with things that I find are difficult or irritating.
The latest show daily I was asked to do was in Dubai in mid-December. There was an Ozzie company exhibiting just opposite where our show daily office was and the guy manning their stand described perfectly the frustrations, stress and all round madness that I endure editing these show dailies.
“At the beginning of the day, your hair was relatively neat,” he said, a kind lie given that I sorta pride myself by how few times a comb has ever touched my bonce! “But as the day went on your hair went more and more wild,” he relayed, “ I could see you literally tearing it out! By the end of the day your hair looked like someone who had been electrified.”
Therein lies the joys of editing and writing show dailies, but they do they get me around the world. Sometimes, though, the pressure does tell, such as in Greece this year where for the BOLD front page headline we managed to spell ‘heralds’ as ‘hearlds’ to much consternation the following day, scrawled large across 5,000 odd copies at one of Greece’s largest exhibitions. Nevertheless, this is me saying I’m a scribe for hire for any and all exhibition show dailies!

Hot and cold in Dubai

2008-12-29T07:14:00.004+08:00

Dubai is a place that leaves me cold. And I’m not just talking about the indoor ski zone – perhaps the world’s most unenvironmentally friendly building (click here for video). Sure the forest of cranes shows ambition, the soaring skyscrapers dazzle and the blueprint for the future looks, on paper, to be world beating. And yet it feels so empty, so soulless. The locals are not exactly forthcoming with their friendliness. The expat brigade are a funny bunch too – obviously money obsessed since there is no other earthly reason why you’d chose to live here. And the workers from third world countries are treated APPALLINGLY.
Take a look here and you’ll see part of the reason this place is so soulless. It is all so new; there has been no time for things to settle, to take shape and character. The pictures of the main throughfare from 1991 to the 2005 show the dramatic changes. From desert dustbowl to Bladerunner in the space of a generation.
People in Dubai have size envy. Everything has to be the biggest. Whether it’s the tallest building in the world (pictured) or the recent opening of the Atlantis Hotel (click here for a video of the event), a spectacle so large it could be seen from space and used five times more fireworks than Beijing’s blockbuster Olympic opening ceremony in August.
But this theme of emptiness was all too apparent on my second visit to the emirate this December. Dubai is running out of cash. It has been too lavish. The immense property boom has crashed. The emirate has attempted to build an economy on a grand scale that is diversified away from oil dependence, yet it does not have the hinterland to achieve its aims. Newsweek memorably wrote that the opening of the Atlantis Hotel resembled Nero partying while Rome burned. While I was in Dubai, its leaders had to make a humiliating journey to the UAE capital, Abu Dhabi, cap in hand to ask for some urgent oil dosh.
Projects are on hold, cranes are stationary, the normally constantly rising skyline is experiencing a rare moment of monotony, and workers from the sub-continent and the Philippines are heading home as work dries up.
With my parents I boarded an open air double decker tourist bus to get a feel of the city. The prerecorded guided tour relayed by headphones was amusing in that it perfectly encapsulated Dubai’s severe lack of character. I’d say about one in two of the twenty odd places described was a shopping mall – not what I in particular with my aversion to malls (see previous story here) would classify as tourist stuff. (NB The best, most characterful thing to do in Dubai is to take a water taxi or abra to and fro across Dubai Creek.) The bus tour stopped at one of many malls on the tour – in fact the one where we were staying. It had the aforementioned ski resort with snow inside. Environmental guilty secret: I’ve only been to Dubai twice and both times I’ve skied there! Anyway, you think that’s bad: at a beach 15 minutes walk away (or 25 minutes in a taxi through Dubai’s notorious traffic) they plan to build an underground cooling system because, poor lambs, the sand gets too hot in summer! That’s not all that’s burning in Dubai as Newsweek pointed out.

Uniquely Singapore

2008-12-28T08:57:00.001+08:00

It had been an especially gruelling travel schedule and so one Tuesday in Singapore this December rather than going out on the lash for the umpteenth night in a row a colleague and I decided to check what was on at the flicks. A quick bit of research around lunchtime showed the best option was Ridley Scott’s Iraq spy movie, Body of Lies. To be safe we booked online though we had nothing to worry about, with just ten of the seats taken.
We bundled down to one of Singapore’s many shopping malls that evening where there was little sign of the credit crunch. The place was mobbed making negotiating the countless cluttered escalators to get to the top floor cinema a very trying experience; Singaporeans, like many in this part of the world, have zero spatial awareness.
I cannot stand shopping malls as a rule. The muzak gets on my nerves; the sheer volume of people buying pointless tack annoys me. In situations such as negotiating a mall, I switch off – I go on autopilot, turn down most of my sensors and adopt a sort of tunnel vision.
A spot of nosh, a quick pee (there’s nothing more annoying than needing a piss during a movie) and film time beckoned. Into the cinema with ten minutes to spare and we’ve got the whole place to ourselves. We plonk ourselves down at the centre of our allotted aisle and wait, leaving a gap of one seat between us because a) I’m tall and b) two blokes going together to a cinema frankly need some breathing space or people will wonder!
A couple come in and sit a couple of rows behind us. Two more come in and take up seats at the far end of our aisle. Still, with barely five minutes to go before lights down it’s about as busy as a Lehman Brothers board meeting.
Suddenly they started filing in. Not in any great torrent, but a steady number. At no point was this cinema, which could hold around 200, busier than 25 people. For some strange reason though 15 of the said 25 people had opted for tickets on our row.
Gradually our row filled up. We were shunted more towards our actual seat numbers as the row filled up, even though the rest of the room was pretty much empty. To my right a gigantically fat pair were chowing down on three courses of cinema junk food, blubber rolling onto the arm rest where my elbow had been.
The situation was crazy and very Singaporean in the lack of spatial awareness and the supreme observance of following rules, in this case seat numbers.
It got to a point whereby there was a guy and a gal who came in just before lights down and who had the end seats of the row. They were taken as we had shunted everyone to our right down by one to ensure we had a seat between us. The film was about to start, the man could have had a centre seat on just about any other row in the place but, oh no, he wanted to stick with what he had been given, the crappy pair of seats on the end. He called an attendant over. Our extra seat was swallowed up. The entire row was full. Crazy-la!
As the ads came we made our move getting in everyone’s way as we tramped over the refuse of my neighbour’s junk food, trod on people’s toes, tripped on people’s shopping and clobbered others with our bags. We bolted for a nice empty row two ahead of where we had been. Phew! The movie was a humdinger; the movie experience uniquely Singaporean!

Moving on

2008-12-27T13:08:00.001+08:00

In Hong Kong the traffic lights tell first time visitors a lot about the energy of this frenetic city. The clacking sound they make counting down to when a pedestrian can cross the road is like a starting gun. Once that little green man flashes, the sound picks up considerable pace, like a scatter gun. Nowhere on earth has a faster sounding pedestrian crossing noise, I’d bet, than Hong Kong.
Life in this city is fast, sometimes too fast, hence my decision years ago to live on an outlying island.
When I got my first full time job in HK in the autumn of 2000 a colleague told me that once you’d worked in Hong Kong you could work anywhere else in the world, so hard do they work you down in this Cantonese former colony.
Many who live on the mainland give the SAR a bad rap, saying it has no future and its expats are a bunch of fat so and sos. I will always stand up for Hong Kong and its amazing opportunities it offers people with ambition. Its stunning skyline – the best in the world – reflects the citizens’ repeated ability to reinvent themselves to fit in with the regional and global economy.
Nevertheless, after eight and a half years this November I decided it was time to sample a different paced life. I’ve decamped to what the locals in my new environs like to call the Hong Kong of the North; Dalian in Liaoning province. It’s got a long way to go if it really does want to become the Hong Kong of the North. For starters, the pedestrian crossing noise is way too slow. Still, it’s high time I learnt Mandarin and this lovely city is the perfect place to do so, and should make for a more interesting blog, which now, post crazy busy HK, I should have more time to spend writing.

Will the real Olympics please stand up?

2008-08-26T19:14:00.006+08:00

I am sure I speak as one for the many travellers around China. Thank God this farcical Olympics is over! Getting around the People’s Republic during this period has been a right royal pain in the bum.
I watched the closing ceremony in Xining, Qinghai province with great relief. After seven years of propaganda the five-ring circus was nearly over. The pundits who continually referred to the whole Olympiad as China’s ‘coming out’ ceremony had, in my opinion, been totally wrong. This was an event aimed at an internal audience, something to rally around and boost the image of the ruling party. The tub-thumping nationalism that had characterized these Chinese games had proved a huge turn off for me. That said, I admit there were rare stirrings of national pride as the ceremony wound down to the handover to London.
The British part of the ceremony did not start strongly though. A typically unkempt Boris Johnson guffawed his way up the red carpet, mock saluting as he passed each stunning dolly bird lining the route. The Olympic flag that marked the transition from east to west – Beijing to London – struggled to unfurl.
Then came the staged London show, starting off with that dreadful London Olympic logo. How anyone could be paid for this incomprehensible, ugly signage I will never know. Since someone pointed out to me some months back that it looks like Maggie Simpson giving Homer a blowjob (go on, scroll back up to check, if you dare!) I’ve never been able to see it as anything but a seriously fucked up episode of everyone's favourite yellow, four fingered cartoon characters.
There followed a humdrum introductory multicolour, multiethnic and multimodal cartoon before a red London bus made its way round the Bird’s Nest stadium --- people popping out of the iconic London transport mode and performing some modern dance – all arched backs and big gesticulations. It all seemed so small to what the Chinese had been doing for the past 16 days. And then the roof of the bus folded down and a TV talent show winner started to belt out a tune.
It was the guitar that I clocked first that got me going. Surely not, I mused. The camera moved up from the jangling, familiar Gibson. There he was, Jimmy Page, in a long dark coat, sweaty in the Beijing night, nailing one of the most recognized riffs in history. No Robert Plant, granted, but Ms TV Talent Show had a decent voice and rarely have the lyrics to Whole Lotta Love hit home more than on this global stage. ‘You need cooling, baby I’m not fooling, going to take you back to schooling…’
Somewhat predictably and crassly the camera panned to David Beckham who punted a football, snapped up by a delighted Beijinger.
The tune came to an end, the bus gently left the stage, Jimmy awkwardly dancing. Still, the lesson was there for all to see: you don’t need to be big and brash to host an Olympics – on the contrary, there is no doubt Olympian fatigue setting in and it will be London’s mission to teach the world that the Games are all about, errr, games. China’s urgent rush to modernity, its penis envy with the West can infuriate and also obfuscate reality.
I leave my hotel, humming Led Zep in an elated mood. Stepping outside a horribly disfigured shadow on the uneven pavement begs for any small change.
One world, one dream, biiiiiitch!

Where the rhinos roam

2008-08-13T12:16:00.003+08:00

Romanian émigré Eugène Ionesco wrote the wonderful allegorical French play Rhinocéros back in 1956. Over the course of three acts, the inhabitants of a small, provincial French town turn into rhinoceroses; ultimately the only human who does not succumb to this mass metamorphosis is the central character, the indifferent Bérenger. The play, very much part of the so called Theatre of the Absurd, essentially looks at how the French succumbed to extremism, especially fascism in the 1930s and 1940s.
Earlier this month that play reverberated around my head as I wandered through the heavily policed streets of Yining in the west of China’s Xinjiang province. As the crescendo of the Olympic opening ceremony hit an ecstasy of fireworks many of the locals were kowtowed. Squadrons of army and police sewed fear into the minds of the Uighurs. Worse still though were the people’s militia that roamed the streets. These state backed civilians, almost all Han Chinese, wear a red armband with yellow characters safety pinned on their sleeves stating that they are public security. Some stroll around with tazer batons, others drag baseball bats behind him. Many of these state backed vigilantes have taken to wearing all black too. We have been here before, some 70 years ago, haven’t we?
Beyond the alarming city of Yining though China and the Chinese as a whole are far more keen to exert their newly acquired power than before. As nationalism has replaced communism as the ties that bind (fasces: ties that bind bundles; Latin derivation for fascism) the Chinese together and to central government the winning of the rights to stage the Olympics in Beijing seven years ago set in motion the centerpiece around which the Chinese Communist Party could rally the nation.
The Beijing Olympics flag is everywhere alongside the five star China flag, just like the swastika became synonymous with the German flag. The swastika was an ancient Buddhist sign from thousands of years ago symbolizing represents Dharma, universal harmony, and the balance of opposites before Adolf Hitler defaced its meaning by attacking those he deemed opposites. It was Hitler who instigated the concept of the Olympic torch relay around the world, something the Chinese embraced to much fanfare and considerable controversy. Now the Olympic logo, tarnished with commercialism from the 1980s onwards, has been tainted with nationalism.

True blue

2008-08-13T10:35:00.001+08:00

Tourist locations are perennially sprucing up their image, using Photoshop to often comical, outrageous affect. We’ve all seen it before. The murky, rough English Channel transformed into an azure, flat Caribbean paradise on postcards for sale near Dover or tourist brochures extolling the stunning blue skies of Beijing.
So it was with some apprehension that I unfolded a tourist map of Xinjiang nine days ago to see where I was heading from the provincial capital Urumqi. There way up in the far north, on the border of Russia and Mongolia, was an image of Lake Kanas (sometimes written Hanas). The picture was of a piece of stunning chalky turquoise water. Simply unbelievable.
36 hours and another 1,200 kilometres later though I got to see that this was no figment of an imaginative tourist board’s mind. Measuring 24 kilometres long and up to 188 metres deep this huge domestic tourist draw set in a gorgeous, gigantic Alpine valley, just two valleys away from desert, has a mythical creature in it like Loch Ness in Scotland.
Eagles soar, nomads roam, and for the brief three months of the year that constitutes summer the Chinese mob this spectacular location. However, walk for five miles and you’ll have the place to yourself, everyone else contents themselves with taking a high speed boat to tour the area. Go there!

The taxi driver

2008-08-13T10:28:00.003+08:00

She was 50-ish, permed, and a Chinese version of Roseanne Barr, replete with wild cackles. She hurtled through along the highway in her green taxi, the fierce hot air blasting in through the windows. Worryingly, Roseanne keep giving me the eye in the rear view mirror. Like an infatuated teenager she teetered and laughed whenever our eyes happened to meet. I lowered the wide brim of my cowboy hat to avoid eye contact. It was going to be another long journey.
Getting to the Narat grasslands in the centre of Xinjiang was proving difficult. The police had said it wasn’t possible. The area was full of innocuous Kazakh nomads, hardly a breeding ground for terrorism, but, hey, by now we were used to the unilateral, undecipherable decisions of the cops in this part of the world during Olympic time.
The night previous though salvation seemed to arrive as we kicked our heels at a bar watching the opening ceremony. A Chinese guy chipped in saying that he could get a car and take us to Narat no worries. Narat was where his girlfriend was and it shouldn’t be a problem. Cool, we toasted this rare bit of good luck over another ice cold Yanjing beer as Yao Ming led out the huge Chinese sporting delegation into the Bird’s Nest stadium to rapturous applause.
As is the way of these things, our man turned up the following day with a car and the driver just happened to be his sister, and the price just happened to be 100RMB higher than originally agreed. Nevertheless, eager to get out of Dodge and onto the horses in the beautiful grasslands we headed out of Yining. It was a relief to be out of the heavily policed city but increasingly I had something else to worry about. Roseanne didn’t exactly beat around the bush. “She wants to f*ck you,” Roseanne’s brother tells me after a couple of hours on the road. He glances at me seeing my surprise and takes it for confusion so he repeats this generous offer, “My sister, she wants to f*ck you.” I demur. It’s hot as hell in the cab, and following this statement the temperature seems to have risen further. We get two thirds of the way to our destination before cops at a roadblock turn us back – no permit, no entry. By now this kind of irritation is so commonplace we take it in our stride. The cab turns round heading back to our nemesis, Yining. Will we ever get out of this Orwellian police state?
Roseanne continues to cackle, glancing up in the rear view mirror, preening herself as she looks my way. Dear God, got me out of here! To compound matters our car overheats twice on the way back. On one such occasion in the middle of nowhere Roseanne, with her considerable girth, tries to pin me against the side of the car. Whooooa, lady! With a deft touch, I pirouette out of her orbit just as she is coming in for her prey. Suddenly I can’t wait to get back to the security of my hotel room in Yining.

The five ring circus

2008-08-09T12:19:00.001+08:00

They swooped before dawn. Roads were cut off, police sirens whirred and more than one hundred menacing green trucks of the People’s Liberation Army started to patrol the streets of Yining in the west of Xinjiang province. Guns toted from flaps in the roof and riot shields formed walls at the back of the vehicles. They travelled in packs, slowly and deliberately, so that no one could miss their significance.
Taxi drivers scratched their heads. Long haul buses had to drop passengers in the outskirts of this multiethnic city that sits nearer to Almaty than Beijing. Citizens woke up confused, dazed as their normal walk to work was shut. The eighth of the eighth in 2008, a day when China was to show its friendly, polished face to the world would also turn out to be the single most repressive day of my life.
Xinjiang – which literally translates as New Frontier – has always been a contentious region for Beijing since it was conquered in the 18th century. It briefly enjoyed a period of independence in the first half of the 20th century known as East Turkestan. There are a total of 14 minorities in the region whose size is the same as western Europe. Mass Han Chinese migration from the 1950s onwards diluted this mix. The region is home to the largest onland oil and gas deposits in China as well as significant mineral reserves. Up until the early 1990s it was home to China’s nuclear testing. It shares borders with Kazakhstan, Russia, Mongolia, Kirgizstan, Tajikistan, Pakistan, Afghanistan and India. All of which means the presence of the Public Security Bureau, the army and the police is unmissable. The repression of the minorities especially the Muslim Uighurs, the original inhabitants of much of this land, has been well documented.
Yining was the site of a massive 1997 Uighur rising that saw thousands protest and a very bloody response from the authorities with many human rights organizations suggesting the number of violent deaths that followed hit four figures. The Uighurs call this city Ghulja and when I arrived on the August 8 before six am they were clearly kowtowing to the increased security presence, wary of the recent bomb near Kashgar that killed 16 Chinese soldiers and the reports of reprisals and riots that followed.
After a long night time bus journey covering some 1,000 m our bus finally hit solid tarmac and came to the outer limits of the city where at 5.45am the first police patrol boarded and gave a very firm look at all ID cards and passports. Before I would get to my hotel three hours later my passport was checked another six times.
There are police/army checkpoints on every other block of the city and in total my passport is checked 17 times that day, my bags scrutinized countless times too, and the pictures on a digital camera are given a quick once over for good measure. Police carry a full complement of fearsome looking tools – knives, guns, rifles, and bats.
Moreover, there’s a public militia, generally Han Chinese led, with citizens wearing red armbands fixed to their sleeves with safety pins with ‘Public Security’ scrawled in yellow Chinese characters on their armbands. Some of these locals even tote tazers. Hey are there ostensibly to check bags of people entering buildings but also to inform authorities of anyone they deem suspicious. Xinjiang, like Tibet, has long been awash with spies and informants. My second nature journalistic tendencies such as reaching for a notebook, snapping a pic, are kept on the down low all day long. The constant security keeps everyone on their toes.
We eat that evening just around the corner from Sidalin Jie, it appearing wonderfully appropriate that the city has named a street after Stalin.
After dinner the long seven year countdown is over; the Olympic opening ceremony is underway. No where is showing it outside in the bright sunshine. It might be 8pm but the sun is still high – Beijing insists on one time zone for a nation that stretches from New Delhi to Vladivostok in longitude.
We decamp to a bar to watch the culmination of the greatest propaganda show on Earth. The symbolism of this four hour power flaunt is occasionally misconstrued. All dressed up in their ethnic costumes individuals from China’s 56 minorities process through the sweaty, smoggy Bird’s Nest stadium with the five star flag over their heads, handing the red and flag drape meekly to six stern looking members of the People’s Liberation Army. Around 20 minutes into the show a dove of peace emerges on the digital scroll in the centre of the stadium. Outside the bar all we can hear are the sounds of sirens.

The bus journey

2008-08-09T11:27:00.003+08:00

We pull up. It’s just after 10 and the sun has finally gone down in this remote part of western Xinjiang. Strolling barefooted down the narrow aisles in between the bunkbeds we put our shoes on at the exit of the bus. Ahead lies dinner and round the corner a chance to ahem ‘freshen up’.
The bare surroundings of the diner mirror the landscape, the only colour bar the blue plastic seats is the fearsome black grime eminating all over the kitchen area.
A cheeky chappy comes in with a deck of cards trying to hustle diners with three card monty – no one is dumb enough to fall for this routine. He leaves within 60 seconds.
The Hui chef attends to his wok on the roaring stove; the results are slopped onto bowls and passed around.
A host of men shuffle off to the bogs – open holes in the concrete. While others are pissing away three men whip down their kegs and are crapping for all the world to see through the fetid gaps, one even nonchantly speaking on his mobile while laying his deposit.
So far this day we’ve covered around 750km, there’s another 300 or so to go before we arrive in Yining – a town with a wild, gritty reputation for multiethnicity, drugs and prostitution.
Bus rides in this part of the world, as well as being bad for yr stomach (I barfed gloriously a couple of hours back), are also a relentless security nightmare. Countless passport checks both in station and on the road, bags checked and stickered as safe. No leaving the bus station once you’re in. A caged existence.
Sirens wailed, combat police stood to in our last city where we changed buses. One day before the Olympics security is at all time high in Xinjiang following bombs and riots in the Kashgar area.
Now if only Beijing 2008 had a freestyle crapping tournament the Chinese would win hands down.

Alorcha – a haven in a fast changing society

2008-07-21T11:00:00.001+08:00

As Macau changes beyond all recognition there are few constants left amid the spiralling gambling revenues. Macau has given up a lot of its charm as Vegas has moved in. Don’t be misled by the 30% rise in GDP figures – this is a two strata society where gleaming casinos make a few very, very rich and leave others poor.
One haven though that I make a beehive to every time I am in the former Portuguese enclave is the simple, traditional surroundings of Alorcha, a small, immaculate restaurant opposite the maritime museum and just round the corner from the Poussada Sao Tiago. Inside there are arched whitewashed walls, tables that seat 50 people max – book in advance +853 313193, as this is a place locals frequent regularly. This place is probably my favourite restaurant in all of China.
The food – a fusion of Portuguese and Macanese – is good, filling, honest fare; the chargrilled chicken washed down with a cheap bottle of Borba red a standout favourite. And then there’s the friendly staff who greet regulars and newcomers with a warmth that increasingly is hard to find in plastic coated, casino driven Macau. If somehow after the massive oven warmed bread roll and your humungous main course you can squeeze a pudding in too then the serradura should finish you off.
Old Macau just exist still, you just have to search harder for it, but it’s worth the snooping around.

Hanoi rewound

2008-07-21T09:53:00.003+08:00

Hanoi, glorious Hanoi. A chance to reminisce. A throwback. Or would it have changed beyond all recognition? Flying in for the first time since the mid-1990s there was a part of me that expected me to recount countless tales of “Well, of course it was much nicer back then …” or “Globalisation has ruined this city.” It hadn’t. Far from it. Hanoi still is the place I remember. Wonderful dilapidated French buildings, a colonial whiff among the teeming streets, and the calming influence of the lake. Sure there are more cars now, less conical hats, Coke has replaced Ho Chi Minh as the premier brand, and some modernisation pervades the skyline, but the character of Vietnam’s capital is still so exotic, cultured and colourful. My murmurs of “well in my day …” were muted.

Curries on the high seas

2008-06-28T11:51:00.002+08:00

Measuring some 750 feet long she wasn’t small by any means. And when her engines roared it was clear we were in for a special journey. What we couldn’t have known at that point was the frailty of the engine that powered this Mediterranean Shipping Co-owned containership bound for the US.
We were onboard documenting some fluff for a magazine. Our welcome had been magnificent; the Indian crew and officers clearly delighted to have something out of the norm onboard.
We were set to go from Hong Kong to Ningbo, a port city a couple hours steaming south of Shanghai. It was meant to take two and a half days along a busy section of the East China Sea. No sooner had we left though than a problem arose. A piston gave way within 45 minutes and we spent a full 24 hours staring back at my home island of Lamma. Still, the inconvenience was negligible so hospitable were everyone onboard.
The cook hailed from Goa and prided himself on his curry skills. He was ably abetted by both the chief engineer and the master who grew limes and chillis on the bridge and in their cabins and made the most delicious lime pickle imaginable. In between meals we’d while away an hour or two playing table tennis or strolling around the deck. Our cabins were very decent – they probably each measured about half the size of my flat, which was just about in view as we lay prone while a team got to grips with the engine, appearing from time to time very grimy but always cheerful.
Masters of containerships hate this particular stretch of work, with so many port calls in China, and, post-911, more and more paperwork to fill in at every call. Worse still is the volume of boats dotted in the sea. The Chinese are hoovering their seas dry and it takes a fair bit of skill to avoid the phalanx of fishing vessels.
The night before we arrived at Ningbo there was an impromptu party with much drinking, singing and dancing, the latter a reminder of just how long these men can be at sea without heading back to their families.
I had put in a word to a tycoon in Hong Kong who originally hailed from Ningbo saying that I’d be heading up to his old stomping ground. I was gob smacked as we docked and glimpsed the red carpet and limo that awaited. “Mr Koo said to look after you, please let me know of anything I can do during your stay,” the driver said, before whisking us away --- passport stamps done in a VIP manner. We had arrived in style.

The daily commute

2008-06-26T10:16:00.003+08:00

Mine is an incredible commute, but one that I and thousands of others simply take for granted in fast living Hong Kong. Door to door it lasts about an hour and hits all five senses good and proper when I am more alert, particularly on a hot, sweaty summer’s day. I’ll take you through it.
Leaving the confines of my fan-assisted top floor living room I head downstairs. My hands brush up against the walls on the steps which are already sweating, beads dribbling down the tiles. The grated door shuts behind me with a metallic grunt. Outside the bright sunshine initially blinds me. My flat is full to overload, crammed with books, DVDs, electronic gizmos and eight years worth of pointless paraphanalia which has a habit of crowding out the daylight.
Straight outside there is a strong jungle noise. No, not dub, the real deal: banana leafs shuffling in the light breeze, crickets blaring full volume and birds tweeting wildly. This zoological cacophony is added some domestic growl by the block of flats opposite, stuffed full with at least ten excited, barking dogs.
If it’s been raining then the initial cracked stages of the path can get ankle deep in muddy water requiring a spot of tight rope walking, plank style. These first 50, 60 metres are lined with overgrowth higher than me, the green natural corridor nourished by the swamp to the right. Said swamp though is imperiled by the never-ending construction. Only five thousand odd people live on Lamma Island, yet they never stop building blocks of flats. Within 100 metres of my flat I can list nine new blocks built in the five years I have been there.
The path wends its way onto a larger street that eventually spawns shops, restaurants and bars: welcome to Main Street. It’s hardly a bustling hub, but bear in mind this island is different to most of Hong Kong; no cars, no high rise buildings, narrow streets and no chain stores. If I am catching a ferry before 9am then the Main Street is packed with commuters, my quick, long-legged pace reduced to an impatient shuffle. Bicyclists’ irritation at the throngs can be amusing to watch – with no amount of bell ringing working.
The ferry pier gives me an idea of how bad the pollution is. Most of the time it ain’t great. 28 days out of every month are deemed high pollution. If you can see across the sea to Lantau island, consider yourself lucky. Such visibility – all of five clicks, say – is rare.
OK, now to the ferry. It used to be easy – 10 bucks for a slow ferry, 15 for a fast. Then they raised the prices twice in quick succession so the price is now an awkward 11.8 or 16.8 bucks – that’s a lot of shrapnel to get through the turnstile. Most people have monthly tickets to avoid this daily coin shenanigans. Even after eight years I still don’t, and yet I bitch and moan about all these coins every day, particularly when the turnstile spits them out mistakenly.
Here’s a strange thing about Hong Kong. Pneumonia is common. Hot and sweaty from the 15-minute walk in 97% humidity to the pier, stroll onboard our ferries and you’ll quickly understand why this illness pervades. Inside it is freezing. Pointless fact of the day: the former British colony has the coldest offices in the world. If it’s before 9am then the seats are almost fully taken up, many regular faces chatting away, others hidden behind broadsheets. Some sit outside, most cool off under the Arctic blast of the air con.
Engines stutter into action and the ferry is underway. We immediately cross one of the world’s busiest container shipping lanes, the Lamma Channel. Giant ships laden with cheap goods made in the Pearl river delta plough in front of us creating swell and a stiff neck as the shipping geek in me peers up as each vessel looms passed us.
Hong Kong island - “an upland terrain which the sea has invaded” as a 19th century government official eloquently described it – rears up through the pollution. Aberdeen lies opposite Lamma – hardly the granite city of eastern Scotland, more a series of monochrome, dull apartment blocks dwarfed by the sheer, green Peak, the centrepiece of the island, where high society lives in property with more 0s alongside their prices than the in the bubble wrap covers of their swimming pools.
Talking of swimming, as the ferry comes alongside Hong Kong island, with the small Green island to the left, every morning, come rain or shine, a few elderly hardy souls stroll down the bamboo platform of the swimming club and are to be seen exercising among the filth and detritus of the South China Sea.
Entering Victoria Harbour boats of all shapes and sizes scuttle to and fro, a giant steel wire bridge spanning the container terminal to the left nears completion, Kowloon with all its multiethnic charm lingers on the left, while we pass Kennedy Town, then Western and Sheung Wan before alighting smack bang in the middle of town, Central, home to one of the world’s greatest skylines.
Out of the ferry and onto an elevated walkway, the sound of cars below, a free rag of a newspaper thrust my way. It takes 90 seconds to scan through on a good day though a few minutes to wash the cheap ink off my fingertips later on. Hong Kong is great for pedestrians with all its walkways through malls and above streets, avoiding the roadside pollution and the rain.
A few minutes later and we’re inside the IFC shopping mall – a brand sensory overload where Versace competes for your attention with Calvin Klein, Armani et al, all over the desperately irritating tinny muzak of the mall. A glance to see what’s on at the cinema, and on past endless shoe shops and fashion stores. It’s cold in here. Folks scurry, face down, oblivious to their surroundings. They’ve got work to do, and their armed with their little helper, the ubiquitous Blackberry clasped to their ear.
Suddenly back into the glaring sunlight and heat as an elevated walkway connects two malls. I like to walk fast. A walk should be exercise and at two metres in height I do leg it pretty quick. The thing is, though, the Cantonese have a habit of typewriting when they walk. What I mean is they will drift to the right as they amble gently forward and just as I am about to overtake them, it’s as if they have eyes in the back of their heads, PING and the typewriter starts going left.
Anyway, into Chater House and the Landmark, two identikit high-end malls with gaunt models peering from every shop window and more icy chill, and Starbucks cups in the hands of those who aren’t scrolling through their Crackberries. HMV in the far corner is the only potential wallet lightening distraction for yours truly. Upstairs and across another walkway where the clash of perfumes and soap from competing stores makes quite a stench.
Finally, I am out in the open, just behind Marks and Spencer. The deafening noise of the road, where pneumatic drills and tooting taxis combine, is almost a relief from the infernal sax led, sub Kenny G drivel that constitutes music inside Hong Kong’s ever-encroaching malls.
There’s just one hundred metres to go to SeaBird House, where I exchange the same gesticulated banter with the member of staff on the ground floor as I do every morning. Mind your head, he cautions silently, tapping his forehead with a smile. I smile back, touch my forehead with a grimace as I do every day and chuckle for effect. I really must learn more Cantonese if only to alternate our daily silent routine. I step into the ancient lift, hit the fifth floor button and muse to myself that this 1960s lift is one of the last redoubts in this capital of consumerism where there are no ads or speakers blaring. And so to work.

Visa wars

2008-06-01T20:10:00.002+08:00

I recently had to go through the rigmarole of getting a China visa and was none too happy with the experience. Post us and the French trying to snuff out the Olympic torch Beijing has suddenly changed the laws for getting a visa into China. Multiple entries are out, and on applying you now need to show flight tickets and hotel vouchers – and it costs close to US$200 for a double entry, three-month visa, which is the best Beijing is offering at least till after the Olympics.
The effects of this new regulation have already been seen. The giant Canton Fair in Guangzhou, where buyers from around the world flock to buy anything and everything from coffee machines to engines, reported a huge drop in international visitors this year.
Now, I have to admit I was super hacked off with this visa change, as I’ll probably shell out at least $400 in China visas before the Olympics are over. However, on reflection can I really blame the apparatchiks in China? Not really. There are a hell of a lot of floating westerners in China, taking odd jobs, never paying taxes and generally not contributing to the improvement of society. This measure serves to clear them out --- as well as, obviously, minimizing potential demonstrator embarrassment during the all-important August showcase that is the Olympics.
But far more importantly, let’s be honest, if a Chinese fella walks into a British embassy or consulate and asked for a six month multiple entry visa to the UK he’d be laughed out the door. Tit for tat.

The world is bumpy

2008-06-01T20:03:00.002+08:00

Are we approaching the moment where globalization suddenly comes to a very firm halt? The whole premise for “making the world flat” was to get Johnny Asian to manufacture things darn cheap for fat Westerners.
China entered the World Trade Organisation in 2001 and its exports have soared ever since. Factories in the US have been relocated to China, an incredible amount of gigantic container ships are being built to ferry all these finished products back to the shelves of Wal-Mart et al.
Massive inflation in China in the past 12 months has given some factory owners pause for thought. But the real reason why globalization is unsustainable is down to the price of oil. At $135 a barrel suddenly moving that tshirt/teddy bear/TV 6,000 miles from Shenzhen across the Pacific to the US consumer just does not make economic sense. International trade is likely to become far more regional if oil prices remain at such exorbitant levels. Thomas Friedman will have to eat his hat.

Gulliver’s travels

2008-06-01T19:59:00.002+08:00

I’ve just arrived in Europe. While I’m here I’m going to get a tshirt made up with English on the front and Chinese on the back, saying ‘No, I do not play basketball.’
Just this week in Shenzhen a forty-year-old came up to me in the street, face askew to the sky and my head and thrust his phone in my face. He clocked my confusion and did the international sign for taking a photo. Oh okay, you want a picture with the freak show that at two metres in height is yours truly. His daughter dutifully snapped away with his phone, he putting his arm round my frame, and a gaggle of locals gathering to look at the giant. Then, as is so often the way in China, he turns to me and says excitably, “Yao Ming, Yao Ming!”. No, I do not play basketball, I tell him as I have countless others in China.
In the Philippines where basketball is the number one street, folk call out from the street, “Hey Joe, you play basketball?” Occasionally I might humour them and show just how bad I am at the game. Now though I’ll be armed with my sport repellent tshirt!

Flying the flag

2008-06-01T19:56:00.001+08:00

In North Korea it is mandatory that you wear a pin badge everyday, typically a red one with a picture of the Great Leader, Kim il Sung. Lose your badge and woe betide you; a gulag awaits.
In the coming week Barack Obama should be anointed as the Democratic candidate for November’s presendential election. For so long he managed to campaign on the ‘change for good’ mantra, claiming he was different to old Washington He had managed to eschew wearing the frankly fascist US pin badge so beloved of the current White House resident. Yet when Obama’s campaign hit a sticky spot six weeks back with his wacky pastor, Jeremiah Wright spouting off, his opponents attacked Obama’s patriotism – cue the stars and stripes pin badge on his crisp suits. A small but revealing aspect of the depressive, constrained state of US politics.

Dead in the water

2008-05-02T14:35:00.003+08:00

André the photographer looked out of the window at the thick, depressing grey in front of him. “They call it Wuxi,” he said of our then current abode, “cos that’s the sound it makes as the pollution hits the window – woooshi, wooooshi.”
We were on a triangular tour, various ships up from Hong Kong to Shanghai and then into the industrial heartland of the Yangtze delta before taking the 24 hour train back home.
We’d checked into the flashest place Wuxi had to offer, some 400RMB a night or so. It was satisfactory, especially considering the dreary surroundings. The trip had been tiring and we opted to eat at the Chinese banqueting hall downstairs. After a shower to peel the pollution off we headed downstairs. We ambled through the lobby and along a passageway towards the giant restaurant that seats at least 400 at a time.
Prior to the entrance of the eatery were fifty or sixty aquariums with the day’s fish on offer. Except, and somehow wonderfully appropriate for the noxious surroundings, every single fish was belly up – dead.
A Russian dance troupe entertained diners that evening. We feasted on Wuxi spare ribs, a famed Chinese dish, keeping well clear of any fish hoiked out of the Yangtze. No wonder there are no more dolphins plying the world’s third longest river.

Beijing Alzheimer’s

2008-04-30T14:58:00.002+08:00

To live in Beijing is like suffering from Alzheimer’s. No, you don’t wake up every day looking for your wallet, but almost as disconcerting you spend much time double checking if you are indeed on the right street as countless changes prove hard to compute.
There I was just the other day heading down one of my most visited streets for a blind massage to blow out the martini stained cobwebs of the night before. Glancing up to my left expecting to see my regular Xinjiang restaurant with its gold turrets masquerading its plain interior from where the most wonderful hand pulled noodles have been created for decades the regular Beijing horror set in. In its place was a humdrum 24-hour shop kinda like a 7/11 with an orange plastic facade. Double check. I was here just a few weeks back. Totally gone.
And then the other common Beijing moment in such instances – reminiscing over all the times I had been to that place. Mental note to never, ever buy anything from that shop. And then I walk on, slightly dazed by the rapid demise of yet another favoured haunt and its speedy replacement, so speedy in fact that it leaves me wondering if the Xinjiang restaurant ever existed on that street at all. That’s Beijing Alzheimer’s for you. And chuffed with this new municipal medical term at another bar nearby I had to scribble it down for a later blog post or else I’d forget it!

Media blackout

2008-03-31T00:23:00.003+08:00

It descended into a media blackout. A national prestige project was to be rolled out this year to much fanfare and nothing would spoil the coming out party. Billions had been spent on what was claimed to be the finest facilities of their kind.

However, as mass protests got underway, chaos ensued. Angry citizens hurled abuse, the kudos that this project, eight years in the making, was meant to bring was quickly soiled.

International media piled in to reveal the full scope of the bedlam. Each hour the news got worse and worse; those on the ground ever more infuriated.

Eventually the powers that be took the desperate decision to bar journalists from entering this hallowed area – a media blackout was the only solution the authorities could come up with to minimalise the fallout. It really has been an inauspicious start to the opening of Heathrow’s new Terminal 5!

Slow boat to Lamma

2008-03-30T21:19:00.003+08:00

Every Lammaite has the ferry timetable imprinted on their brain. People in town can spot a Lammaite easily. At the bars from Wan Chai to Lan Kwai Fong, Lammaites start getting tetchy circa 10 past the hour, especially ten past midnight, for in twenty minutes the final ferry back to Fantasy Island departs, and there isn’t another for six hours. Hasty goodbyes, and a much flagging for taxis take place; a couple of cans of Tsingtao for the boat ride, the shrill ringing like a school bell that signifies time’s up … all aboard.
For those that miss the 12.30 there’s two options. Stay in town or take a HK$70 cab fare to Aberdeen on the western shores of Hong Kong Island overlooking Lamma. From there old grandmothers tend to their sampans. They know tow things about you. 1. You have no other means of getting home and 2. You’re drunk. Your bargaining position is tough to say the least and HK$150 is about the minimum to get back home. These classic wooden motorised vessels leave busy Aberdeen harbour, normally by which time I am komatose on a bench, and enter the Lamma Channel, one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, where 350 metre long steel giants of globalisation plough through the waves, the little sampans bobbing like corks in their wake. If it’s rough, it’s a green faced way to end the night. After 45 minutes the lights of Yung Shue Wan pier hove into view and then 15 minutes later I’m wrapped up in bed, promising myself once again I really, really should have got that last ferry.

Granny Chan’s aka the Seats of Shame

2008-03-24T20:54:00.002+08:00

Of a steaming day in the back and beyond of Fantasy Island you used to be able to hear much hot air coming from a shaded seating area near the tennis court.
Granny Chan, a wizened old lady, ran her eponymous store, where perhaps failing eyesight accounted for her lapses in returning the right change.
Opposite are ramshackle seats in a concrete, grubby surroundings, shaded by tarpaulins. Here sat Lamma Island’s expat down-and-outs pontificating or generally putting the world to rights over countless Carlsbergs or Carsybas as they are pronounced in this neck of the woods.
In just a few years though these so called Seats of Shame have become deserted, their occupants no longer with us.
The loudest – and gruffest – of all was David Slough, a burly, noisy gentleman for whom Hong Kong would forever be a territory of the British Crown. He seemed to love his Alsatian dogs more than his Asian wife, and his booming voice carried over long distances. One day he forgot his key to his house, climbed up the drainpipe to his second floor apartment, almost made it, but fell and was gored on the bamboo fence below. A chopper got him off the island but he was dead on arrival.
Kenny, a prematurely silver haired Scot, was the ultimate piss artist. In his rare moments of lucidity he sold insurance for a succession of firms. Most of the time, though, he was incoherent and wretched. He meant well; alcohol had ruined him. He did marry a Texan lady who got him off the island and into rehab but to no avail. His thin frame eventually ballooned, his liver packed in, his skin lost all its palour and he died at St Margaret’s Hospital, across the Lamma Channel in Aberdeen. The Seats of Shame nailed another victim.
Then there was John, the most erudite of the Granny Chan regulars. A journalist with a massive thesaurus for a brain, John became like the rest – slurred, easily irritable and a wreck. He had a drinker’s body – no muscle and unhealthily pale skin. The last time anyone saw him, in his mid-40s, he was stacking shelves at a Tesco supermarket in Yorkshire and living with his mum.
Others who were regulars ended up taking the 12 step programme and now don’t touch booze. Granny’s is just a store these days, her family have built her a bungalow just down the slope from the shop. As for me, well, first I was always a Tsingtao guy over Carlsberg, and mercifully a full time job whisked me away from there in the nick of time.

The stickmen of Chongqing

2008-03-24T16:33:00.000+08:00

There’s nowhere quite like Chongqing throughout the People’s Republic. Ringed by mountains and rivers, the first time visitor will always be amazed to note the complete absence of bicycles. The burning sensation in your calf muscles as you walk the city’s steep streets explains this two-wheeled phenomenon. Not of course that there aren’t two wheel contraptions – nowhere on Earth produces more motorcycles than Chongqing, the world’s largest municipality. As well as this size moniker (it has roughly the same landmass as Austria!) the 11-year-old municipality is also famous for its spicy food – the home of lip numbing hot pot – and the ubiquitous stickmen, themselves a product of geography.
Up until the 1960s these wiry men, armed with their roped trusty bamboo sticks, were the principal means with which cargoes from the Yangtze were carried up the vertiginous river banks to the city.
Nowadays the port is more automated, but that does not mean there is little work. On the contrary, as the citizens get richer, their shopping bags become heavier and more numerous. This being one of the four so called furnaces of China makes the prospect of strolling home laden with heavy bags a sweaty and unattractive prospect. Cue the stickmen. Outside many a department store or supermarket these sinewy men hover waiting for business. There are an estimated 10,000 of them and they charge anywhere from 3 yuan to 20 depending on the distance, steepness, steps and weight of their job.
I caught up with a gaggle of them to see how their lives are progressing. All of them appear to have mobiles and pretty regular clients who phone them up in advance of a planned trip to the shops.
There are a couple of other cities with a noticeable if not as large stickmen contigent – Wuhan and Yichang, both also on the Yangtze.
Typically they work 12 hour shifts – 7am to 7pm – and tend to stick to specific areas. The savvy ones have moved to more upmarket areas where redevelopment has brought the joy of elevators over the dreaded staircase. The richest stickman I met, Zhang Guang Heng, 40, hung around the Hilton Hotel and paid the management 100 RMB a month for a license to operate. Zhang manages to make around 30,000 RMB a year and is the envy of all stickmen.
Typically, these green freight transport providers make 1,300 yuan a month. By comparison, the Chongqing average wage, according to the latest mayor’s figures is 2,700 yuan.
As this city develops the future of the stickmen looks likely to snap.

Where the sun is always over the yard arm

2008-03-24T16:27:00.001+08:00

To purloin a description from Prince Charles, they looked like waxworks. Puffy, purple, splodgy ancient faces beamed at us as we entered the president’s office of the Vladivostok State Maritime University. It was 10am on a crisp, but by Russian standards, manageable day in February and we were close to finishing a tiring but highly hospitable junket by French hosts, Total.
Regardless of the time a bottle of French cognac was plonked on the table. Three generous shots each later, and those less accustomed to such morning spirit consumption were eagerly consuming coffee to try and help assuage the burning sensation trickling down to our bellies.
Of all the demographic statistics I’ve read about Russia surely the most alarming one is the disparity between male and female life expectancy – an incredible 13 years, roughly three times the global average. Why? Severe alcohol abuse.
Come 11am we found ourselves in a cramped office for another round of meetings. The cognac from Armenia (pictured) was met with a glower of disapproval by our bon viveur French hosts but in the spirit of maintaining an entente cordiale we all slurped down another three healthy glasses before toddering back to the airport. Even the hardiest of drinking journos was taken aback by this half bottle of cognac each before midday.
Apparently many Russians have inherited Mongol genes that make them absorb more alcohol into the bloodstream and break it down at a slower rate than most Europeans.
That means that they get more drunk and have worse hangovers, and are more likely to become addicted to alcohol, given Russia’s taste for vodka and its harsh climate.
The Mongols swept across Asia and Russia and into Europe in the 13th century and ruled Russia for two centuries. Inter-marriage with the Slavs and other ethnic groups was common.
Scientists have long known that people of Mongol extraction, including Chinese, Koreans and Japanese, have an enzyme for metabolising alcohol that is different from that of Caucasian Europeans.
Russians drink about 15 litres of pure alcohol a head each year, one of the highest rates in the world, and by some estimates one in seven Russians are alcoholics. At least though they’ve nixed the old raping and pillaging routine of their Mongol forebears.

Poverty is pungent

2008-02-10T16:52:00.000+08:00

Poverty is pungent. And few places on earth stink of destitution more than the Philippines – an archipelago where the wealthy, corrupt few lord it over their impoverished constituents.
I’ve been to many poorer parts of the world; Africa, Bolivia, and myriad Asian destinations but when it comes to the stench of deprivation Manila wins hands down. Whether it's the garbage dumps of Payatas, the slums of port side Tondo, the amoral goings on in Ermita, Metro Manila does poverty in loud, full technicolour – an assault on all the senses. Yet, perhaps the most intriguing slumville area that until this weekend had eluded me were the rail tracks by Bicutan.
I presumed by the deep, well pressed garbage into the buffers that no train passed this depressed area. The kids played, the garbage stank, cockerels faced off to fight each other, while ingenious converted wooden crates ferried folk up and down the tracks. The stench was awful, the huts lined up close to the tracks, electric wires bunched overhead and sewage flowed freely. Yet happiness reigned.
I guess this is the key point with being poor – people get by, their glass tends to be half full, where as us with a living and bills, etc are forever stressed. God knows this is a lame comparison but when I was poor (this coming from an Old Harrovian!)– when I first came to HK and literally scavenged to get by for a while – I now look back as some of the happiest days of my life.
Back to Bicutan. I’d walked up and down the tracks, snapping away, attracting much attention – the typical Philippine call out ‘Hey Joe” – and was still getting to grips with the torrid smell when a loud whistle blew. Up ahead a slovenly, battered train made its way through the trash. As it passed me, kicking up near vomit inducing dust, a plane soared up overhead. I knew where I’d rather be at the moment.

First trip to Asia

2008-02-09T12:14:00.000+08:00

Onboard the air hostess made her way down the aisle. “I’ll have a vodka and…” I paused, checking her embarrassment, reminded myself that the cheapest flight I could find was a dry Arabic one with a stopover in the desert somewhere. “Make that an orange juice,” I corrected myself.
We’re going back more than a decade now to my first trip to Asia. At uni, there was a charity with the catchy acronym H.E.L.P. that posted people on the summer hols all over the world to do good, worthy things. It was always oversubscribed and it was potluck where you were assigned.
I got the call sometime in February. “Congratulations, you’re going to the Philippines!” Wow, fantastic. Elated, I put the phone down and only then wondered where the hell the Philippines was! A soggy four and half day bike ride from London to Edinburgh a couple of months later stumped up the cash for the alcohol lite flight. That summer I headed out.
I’ll always remember the huge round of applause plus many crossings of hearts as the flight landed in Asia’s only Catholic country, and one of the more superstitious places I have ever been.
That first night in Manila was intensely raucous (and distinctly non-religious); a pair of Australians saying we just had to go to the dodgiest bars imaginable down on Roxas Boulevard. The exuberance would wear off in the devout, basic surroundings of the mentally handicapped camp we were sent to build various things like greenhouses and ditches. Rice and rain were two constants that month. Before long mutiny broke out in our camp …

The killing fields

2008-02-07T11:48:00.000+08:00

His eyes lit up manically as we unfolded the map. Spread over his sparse wooden floor he pointed to the heart of southeast Asia to Cambodia and grinned wildly. “Kampuchea, shhfff, shhfff, shhfff, shhfff; Kampuchea, shhfff, shhfff, shhhfff,” he cried out in joy, miming a jeep held machine gun spraying all and sundry. He was delighted with his memory and also that we had at last been able to communicate between each other.
It was more than a decade ago. I was traveling with a lovely Scottish girl, slightly built, with braided hair, called Mary who was on her first big trip overseas and was determined to ‘find herself’. Thus far she’d managed to find me, some grotty backpacker dorms, mindblowing Cambodian weed and a sense of adventure that had led us to this backwater.
We’d hired a motorbike and trundled up to see some magnificent temples in the back and beyond of central Vietnam’s jungles. Coming back though along rural mud tracks flanked by padi fields we’d run out of petrol.
The gas pump had a padlock on it and somehow, via the power of point and mime, we’d worked out the gas attendant would be back in a couple of hours at a which point a friendly family invited us into their spartan hut on stilts for tea and rice.
Now I was kinda proud of my perfect dialect in being able to count from one to five in Vietnamese, but that was the absolute limit of my language repertoire so conversation with the male of the family, who had shooed away his wife and kid and pointed to the floor where we should sit, was going to be limited. And indeed it was, for a while. And then we unfurled our map by way of pointing where we had been in his country and the placid nature of our host changed, his eyes glowed and danced, his memories rekindled of mowing down countless soldiers of Pol Pot in the late ‘70s. “Kampuchea, shhfff, shhfff, shhfff, shhfff; Kampuchea, shhfff, shhfff, shhhfff,” he repeated endlessly and joyously. Happy times!

Kung Hey Rat Choi!

2008-02-03T16:03:00.000+08:00

Rubbish when wet and on the road, trodden down by thousands, turns grey and mushy. It was smeared thick on the unseasonably chilly streets of Guangzhou yesterday when I rocked up to gawp at the stunning volume of folk heading to the city’s main train station ahead of the Spring Festival.

The perfect storm had descended upon the world’s most populous nation just as people were turning their attention to the week-long holidays. The worst snow storms for more than 50 years wreaked havoc to the already strained Chinese transport system, just as the biggest human migration was about to get underway – where millions upon millions of Chinese head home from their factories, offices, farms for a well earned rest.

The taxi driver took me as far as he could. About one kilometer from the station barriers had been erected and swarms of police funneled the pedestrians from there on in. Looking ahead the street, Hua Shi Lu, was just jammed – a sea of people pushed, heaved, shimmied and shuffled their way forward, the swarms of cops becoming battalions – I’d never seen so much bacon in one place.

Barriers ensured progress was slow and irritation was high.

Hundreds of thousands of migrant workers had passed before me desperate to get home and still, with just a couple of days to go authorities estimated two million more had to process through the station.

An errant banker might have squandered €4.7bn in Paris a week earlier and the Federal Reserve may well have been slashing interest rates quicker than Freddie Kruger but the real story affecting the world economy these past days has been the frayed Chinese transport system. The engine of the world has blown a gasket and really it’s hardly surprising. Latest World Bank figures show that a quarter of all rail movements – both freight and passenger – take place in China on just 6% of the world’s tracks. Manufacturers here are on edge. Wait till they see how the Beijing Olympics messes with their crucial Christmas deliveries this August. At least then it will be hotter, though that’ll make the sodden, trodden trash wreak more.

In the hands of the blind

2008-01-26T13:56:00.000+08:00

You know you’re onto a good one the moment when you can’t breath for a couple of seconds, the pain is acute, and perhaps a sliver of saliva will slide out of the corner of your mouth uncontrollably onto the crisp white sheets that your body is pounding.
I’m no sadomasochist, but when at a blind massage joint they ask soft, medium or hard, I’ll always go hard and then ratchet up the pressure once underway. “Is OK?” they’ll say. “Harder,” I venture. Moments later they’ll inquire again, “Is OK?” and I wince back in a falsetto crescendo that yes it is OK.
The point that takes your breath away is invariably around either the fourth vertebrae or as your neck is needled.
Any trip to the mainland is always accompanied by regular blind massage excursions. I find their sense of touch is naturally that bit sharper, their keenness to impress is more noticeable and unlike the other massage parlours that dot most streets in the People’s Republic there is no hanky panky insulations, just a straight, hard rub down that always seems to make me taller and unwrap the knots and kinks in my crumpled body. And at roughly 1RMB a minute there are few better ways to spend your money than a one-hour blind massage.
In Beijing I go to a place just next to the old Red House on Chunxiu Street, where an albino, blind lady has such a fantastic grasp of her profession that she can tell you things like, “You use a computer mouse too much the wrong way so that is why this knot here,” cue sharp intake of breath to suppress the howl of pain on my behalf, “is so big and hard to get rid of.” In Guangzhou there’s a decent place on lovely old Shamian Island while this week I found a massage heaven in Shanghai that surpasses my old regular behind the Jingjiang Hotel. Next time you’re in Shanghai make sure you head to FeiNing Massage Centre at 597 Fuxing Road, near the intersection with Maoming Road. A cracking place, literally.

Cocktologists from Fitzroy

2008-01-23T15:45:00.000+08:00

Melbourne is a great city and the very best part of it (from the miniscule amount of time I have spent there) is the bohemian area of Fitzroy and specifically Brunswick Street (pictured). This throughfare is lined with brilliant bars, restaurants, shops – all colourful, slightly run down in a fashionable way and full of out of work actors working the tables. Think of a cuisine and Brunswick St caters for it – even Afghan food, and the quality of tucker on offer wherever you go is outstanding.
Then there are the brilliant bars. Half way down is Ginger, which lays claim to being one of the top 20 cocktail bars in the world. Certainly the wasabi capriosca the AsiaScribbler imbibed was suitably ingenious, blending spice and sour to drunken effect.
Still, just a few doors down is, for my money (and, doff of cap here to my sister and her boyfriend for steering me here in the first place) is an even more inventive cocktail bar – called the Black Pearl, oh aaaagh. So creative and inspired are the select number of drinks here that I took the liberty of purloining the menu, all in the name of journalistic/blog research, you understand.
What the alcohol chemists behind the bar do here is phenemonal in mixing certain ingredients that on paper make you wince at the prospect, but on supping make you drool with delight.
Take the Spring Martini, A$16, which according to the blurb is a “myriad palate of flavours activating every pleasure sensor on your tongue.” The ingredients are Hanwoods Port, Gin, Fresh Raspberries, a little Balsamic Vinegar (!) and Cranberry Juice. Vinegar in my martini glass? Are you having a laugh, as Ricky Gervais’s character in Extras might say, but I tell you what it works a treat.
Similarly excellent is the Marjini (pronounced Ma-hee-nee), which allegedly is a “margarita for ‘las personas del sol’”. El Jimador Tequila, Jasmine Syrup, Sauvignon Blanc, and Lime is served with a Corriander Salt lacing and is some of the best A$15 you will spend in Melbourne.
The Black Pearl is a treasure trove in a street lined with gems.

City of Dreams

2008-01-23T05:01:00.000+08:00

To be the AsiaScribbler is to lead a charmed life. Many people are often jealous of my lucky niche, roaming the world “like a French movie star” as one chum likes to put it. But every now and then I get that perverse feeling that perhaps I am in the wrong place. Normally, it comes on holiday. And so it came to pass once again yesterday as I spent a marvelous 24 hours wondering around the fantastic city of Melbourne. This place has so much going for it: clean air, parks, culture, fantastic food, a benign climate, huge sporting events, multiculturalism, good transport, top wines … the list could go on. Put simply, it is as ‘livable’ a city as I have ever come across.
Living in Hong Kong and indeed all of China, one has to contend with awful pollution, mega humidity and a very different paced and focused way of life. I love it, but, wow, Melbourne does make me pause for thought. The thing is I am chained to HK as a China scribe. Otherwise a life Down Under might be a serious possibility.

The weekly commute

2008-01-21T06:50:00.001+08:00

“The Colony had therefore become for him exactly what it was already for the rest of the journalists: an airfield, a telephone, a laundry, a bed.”
The Honourable Schoolboy, John Le Carré (1977)

It is one of the great pieces of inspired infrastructure in Hong Kong, yet for me it is now a bit of a bore. I’m on it now as I am pretty much every week.
12 years back Hong Kong’s airport was in the middle of town, the bellies of 747s nearly scraping the tall towers that dominated the then colony’s heart.
When they reclaimed land and built the gigantic and ultra efficient new airport out on the west of Lantau island, unlike other Asian cities with new distant runways (step forward Narita and Incheon) the authorities linked the city centre with Chep Lap Kok airport with a 23 minute, HK$180 return train. Travellers are able to check in downtown – a brilliant idea – and wonder around HK, bags free, while they wait for their flight before taking the train to fly out.
The route of the tracks heads underground straightaway off Hong Kong island across Victoria Harbour to Kowloon before passing the container port and onto crowded Tsing Yi island. It then veers around Lantau island crossing the truly impressive Tsing Ma bridge, sadly in the dark, and whips past a stop for Disney before alighting at Arrivals.
As useful as it is though after a while it can get boring. In this hyper commercial centre, nominally under communist rule, just like Orwell’s 1984 adverts blare out of the TV for Disney and Dior - you can turn the sound down via your headrest, but never off.
I always say to myself I’ll take the bus and that way get to see different things and no Mickey Mouses. Trouble is in fast paced HK the bus takes 22 minutes longer than the train, and, well, that’s just too long.

Grey nomads

2008-01-19T07:48:00.000+08:00

Grey nomads are what they’re called in these parts. You can’t miss them. They’re the baby boomers hogging the roads with the pride and joy of their lives – their caravans.
The highways and byways of the great Australian landmass are made up of these folk in their sixties who have cashed in everything, usually offloading their homes in the process, to live the, errrr, dream of becoming a roaming free spirit in later life. They are proud members of the SKI club – Spending the Kids’ Inheritance.
Their white plastic caravans are adorned with stickers, like war insignia, of where they have been and certain incongruous phrases – “Just cruisin’” or “Rock on” type spiel.
A grey nomad’s car is easy to spot because however dusty the terrain it is always shiny and spotless.
As they compete for spots at camping sites up and down the land you’ll hear them exchange banter about how long they’ve been on the road: “Yeah, this is our eighth time round,” they might say, in reference to circumnavigating the nation. Theirs is a life permanently on the road.

Way Ay, Man!

2008-01-04T12:38:00.000+08:00

Inside the darkened rooms of the cavernous Newcastle Arms there lies pleasant surprises aplenty for the average British pub goer. Premiership football blares out from countless big screens, a normally pretty tight rock outfit plays well-known tracks from yore, the pool table is always busy while perhaps the world’s largest shove ha’penny apparatus sits alongside the main bar, just to the left of the darts board. And from said bar pour forth many of the more mundane local lagers associated with this region, plus the rusty brown, welcome taste of McEwans Ale on tap not to forget, of course, Newcastle Brown Ale. All in all, a strange but highly appreciated sight in the world’s largest municipality, Chongqing.

A number of years ago Scottish and Newcastle invested in Chongqing Brewery, God bless ‘em!

Address: Bayi Road, Yuzhong District, Chongqing, China
Tel: 23 6373 1488

PS: Opposite is a McDonald’s – just to the right of that is an entrance to what looks like a another office block, go in, punch the number 8 button in the lift and, post copious ales at the Arms across the way, boogey away the night at the city’s best club.

The E Street Band

2008-01-03T11:26:00.001+08:00

“You buy me ecstasy.” These four words are perhaps what the average foreign bloke will hear most often on a night out in Jakarta.
I have never really had that much against MDMA and E really. I always thought it overrated and the comedown the following day easily outweighed the frankly dull high moments. Still, in Indonesia my viewpoint changed on seeing the sheer depravity and desperation caused by this drug. The streets are lined with gurning chicks, faces distorted by pills, words exiting their mouths in long, drooling fashion.
It used to be the upper classes that indulged in this drug through till the late 1990s where mass production and a perceived ‘coolness’ factor made it the pill of choice for the masses too.
Inside a cavernous warehouse that doubled up as a nightclub, the green laser lights darted across the huge dance floor, with techno music at full body-quivering blast, and the 2,000 strong crowd heaved to and fro as if filmed by an old fashioned Cinecamera thanks to the powerful strobe lighting. We perched ourselves at the back to take in the view and preserve our eardrums. No sooner had we sat down than dozens of girls came up, each one in turn demanding we buy them ecstasy. This rife drug doesn’t cost much in the Indonesian capital – around US$9 – but it sure dictates lives.

Another year on the road

2008-01-02T10:13:00.000+08:00

A quick glance at the 2007 calendar shows I was away a hell of a lot. 2008 is even more blacked out with escapades around the globe. Being the AsiaScribbler involves seriously pissing off Al Gore with all the air miles I accumulate, and genuinely it is something I think about a lot. I don’t drive being perhaps the only person to fail a driving test because of a screeching, tire burning emergency stop 13 years ago, and the house I own has solar panels. I take long, long train rides often to avoid planes, but more often than not time or oceans get in the way of taking my preferred way of travel.
There’s a guy on Fantasy Island, where I live in Hong Kong, who is often pilloried for his extreme hippy looks, yet credit where credit is due he has planted more than 7,000 trees on our fair shores since I came here. In a vain attempt to rid me of my green guilt, I think I’ll pitch in with his tree planting sessions this year … if I am around at the allotted time.
So 2008, the Beijing Olympics year, sees me avoiding that sporting fest like SARS given the expected 10,000 journos to be hanging around the Chinese capital this summer.
Still, I’ll probably visit Beijing at least four times, Shanghai a couple, Chongqing, Wuhan and Chengdu each twice, excitingly the China/Afghan border (all 76km of it), Xinjiang province in the northwest, a return to Yunnan via Guizhou, plus obligatory trips to nearby Guangzhou.
So that’s China! Then there’s Singapore likely 6-8 times, the Philippines countless times, South Korea twice, North Korea in March for their game vs the ROK, Japan twice, Taiwan once, Dubai once, France and the UK three times, Australia once, Vietnam once, Thailand once, Tajikistan once, and possibly Russia’s Far East. These are just the planned ones.
In other words, this year I got me self a lot of trees to plant!

New Year’s Resolution #362

2008-01-01T12:20:00.000+08:00

Must blog more regularly

Bobby D and Me

2007-12-29T18:57:00.000+08:00

NEIL
I do what I do best. I take
scores. You do what you do best
trying to stop guys like me.
(shrugs)

HANNA
You never wanted a normal-type
life?

NEIL
What the fuck is that? Barbecues
and ballgames?

HANNA
That's part of it.

NEIL
That's nice. That your life?

HANNA
No. My wife spends half her
time on the couch. My
stepdaughter's got problems 'cause
her real father's a world class
asshole. And every moment I
got, I'm chasing guys like you.

NEIL
A man told me once: you want to
make moves? Don't keep anything
in your life you're not willing
to walk out on in 30 seconds
flat if you feel the heat around
the corner.

De Niro and Pacino chew the fat in 1995’s Heat

Me and Bobby D’s character here, Neil Macauley, we aren’t that dissimilar, you know. You got to be sharp, always switched on, looking for the next story as a freelancer, just as Neil here is always on the look out for the heat coming round the corner. As a freelancer, you gotta be ready to drop everything at the drop of a hat for that next big front page.
Here I am on holiday, yet I am still always on the prowl for interesting tales – this blog has never been so busy, for instance.
Perhaps, that’s why journos so often burn out – never really being able to properly switch off, always antenna up looking for the juicy scoop round the corner.
Still, I guess there is a big, fundamental difference between De Niro’s character and yours truly.
Bobby D is into bank heists,
While I just write rank Scheiss!

Another Bus Ride in Paradise (or I Wanna Sledgehammer)

2007-12-28T19:10:00.000+08:00

I really only have myself to blame. We’ve been sitting in a bus for hours – now six to be precise – heading back from Bagiuo to Manila.
The bus is ok and, as is the way, after a few hours the crackly TV shows (they sure are bad here in the Phils) are replaced by a DVD. It ain’t great – but what do you expect for something called Skin Walkers? Still, this horror pic is a way to while away a couple of hours and though the TV shows seem to have been on at full, irritating blast, I can’t quite catch the less than Oscar worthy dialogue of this B movie so I make the fateful request to the conductor to turn the volume up. He does. I watch the movie content. Beaucoup tomato ketchup deaths. It’s a midnight TV flick at best.
Movie over, we’re that bit closer to Manila. Then I get my comeuppance.
A new disc goes into the player and there on screen is … Phil Collins, Live and Loose in Paris! Sporting a wicked widow’s peak, ultra hip chinos and a tight fitting white tshirt, a thin black belt and oh-so-cool white sweat bands, Phil belts out his tunes for the next hour and a half as we hit the interminable traffic of the Philippine capital. Distinctly uncool, however loose Mr C might purport to be.
Mental note to self, never, ever ask for the volume to be turned up on Philippine buses.

I want to play a game …

2007-12-28T19:06:00.001+08:00

It’s the same every December as we hove towards New Year. Like some twisted scene in the horror Saw series or yet another moment of carnage from Baghdad, newspapers and TV news here in the Philippines lead with graphic tales of kids blowing their fingers off with dodgy firecrackers.
Fireworks here are dirt cheap, available everywhere and to everyone, enormously popular and dangerous as hell.
Yet, despite the gory, blood spewing images every late December the number of firecracker injuries always rises. On the front page of today’s Philippine Star (December 28th issue) a report notes how the number of injuries is once again on the up – with 86 reported (including eight amputees) since the Dept of Health started tracking these wounds on December 21. Last year from December 21 to January 1, a total of 600 people were injured – a number authorities say will be surpassed this time around.
Among the most popular fireworks are the Gatling Gun-esque coils of firecrackers called sawas or pythons, which fire off 2,000 noisy rounds for under US$9 (at the bottom left of picture). Efforts to ban certain types of firework have proved nigh on impossible so widespread a cottage industry is the business of pyrotechnics in the archipelago. One particular type authorities are keen to outlaw is the boga, an improvised bazooka style canon made out of PVC – the risks of a backfire with these homemade devices being all too apparent.
Auld Lang Syne, prodigious quantities of spirits, and snogs all round might be the images and sounds most readily associated with New Year in my native country but out here the dawn of a new year is always tinged a ghastly red.

Four-month festivities

2007-12-26T22:17:00.001+08:00

Like moaning about how the English football season starts earlier and earlier each year, my Mum always used to tsssk when the first mailed Christmas catalogue arrived on her doorstep as early as September. Yet really us Brits don’t get excited about Christmas until December when there’s a proper chill in the air, Oxford Street is aglow with festive lights switched on by a C-list celeb and the advent calendar (preferably of the chocolate variety) is in doors open mode.
8,000 miles away, meanwhile, there is one nation, which is right at home with Chrimbo catalogues doing the rounds circa September. Nowhere celebrates Christmas longer or harder than Asia’s only Catholic country, the Philippines. You’ll spot the early Xmas celebrations by the way Filipino homes and buildings are adorned with beautiful star lanterns, called parol (pictured) coming from the Spanish farol, meaning lantern or lamp.
Carols kick off in September, no kidding, and don’t end till Epiphany. Once the months start ending in –ber, the festive season is in full swing in this wacky archipelago. It is unique and worth checking out though interminable taxi rides in Manila’s legendary traffic listening to ‘We wish you a merry Christmas’ in October can be a tad testing at times.

Purple haze

2007-12-26T21:40:00.001+08:00

As I attempt to write this, the bus negotiates yet another knife edge, hairpin bend, my laptop almost squirming out of my grasp.
Night has fallen on a mesmeric journey, the fourth time in ten years that I have taken this particular route in the far north of the Philippines. Heading from Bagiuo across the nation’s Cordillera to the wonderful Alpine surroundings of Sagada is a treat and the little town of Sagada, perched 1,500 metres up in a wooded valley surrounded by mountains, is, as far as I am concerned, the perfect Xmas getaway.
Today, though we are heading back to Bagiuo. The weather had been fairly inclement to begin with as we whipped through the tight, muddy roads. Patches of low-lying cloud swathed many of the jagged peaks.
After around four hours or so, having just passed the highest part of the nation’s road system (7,400ft) we enter the most spectacular part of the journey where steep rice terraces compete with the forests for footholds on the cliff-like mountains – our driver nonchantly, one handed caressing his huge steering wheel around the tightest of turns, each sway left or right producing stunning panoramics.
The sun is going down. Violet hues vie with fiery oranges ahead of us, while a long, long way below a river wends its way through the steep terrain.
We’re high enough to be in amidst the clouds. And suddenly, whoosh, as we enter a new canyon, it’s almost as if our battered, ancient bus had ridden onto the stage of a rock concert. The dramatic sunset tinges the clouds purple, and like some gig by the artist formerly known as Prince we’re ploughing through shaded dry ice; the driver seems unpeturbed, he’s seen it all before. I’m blown away by the sight – my last shot in my roll of Kodak 100 unlikely to do justice to the moment. Baguio is now a couple of hours away.
I say it every time I am on this stupendous road: one day I really ought to bicycle this route. Who knows, one day I might just do that. Lord knows, I could do with the exercise.

Harrow Hos

2007-12-18T10:15:00.001+08:00

So I’m on the demon mailing list from my former school. They track you down to the corners of the Earth. You might have heard of it – Harrow, in northwest London, where Sir Winston Churchill attended miserably.
I get news that the school orchestra is on its way out here to Hong Kong to play. Curious. This school – annual fees now in excess of £25k a year – does not do things for free, ever.
Despite the costs – doubled since I left 12 years ago – the queues for signing up to this top school are so enormous that they can barely squeeze every one in. Diluting the brand, two ‘international’ affiliates have been set up in Beijing and Bangkok, while a 12th house for overspill students has been created at Harrow – aka the Dump on the Hump – with the unfortunate name of Gayton.
So just what are these guys doing out here in Hongkers – a top delegation including the Headmaster and perhaps key, the Burser, he of the purse strings.
Chez the Main Bar of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club last night all was revealed. Macau casino mogul, Stanley Ho, has recently sent his umpteenth son to attend the north London school, and as my senses proved correct, this trip was all about quite literally singing for one’s supper. It is a prostrating show for Casino Stanley, with a begging bowl asking for some severe cash injection to build another house on the hill. Hos will go well alongside Gayton.

Dead Man's Puke

2007-12-17T12:48:00.001+08:00

Dead man’s puke – that’s how a Canadian I was traveling with at the time described it. Seemingly it was the elixir of life, its name being Deoxyribonucleic Acid or DNA, yet its taste was as filthy a spirit as has ever passed my lips.
The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, aka North Korea, has a multitude of fiendishly outrageous spirits to go alongside more mundane brands of soju – the national spirit of the entire peninsula. But DNA counts as the foulest. No kidding, it immediately tasted and smelt of puke and came close to inducing chunder all round.
Forget purported weapons of mass destruction in Pyongyang, a bottle of DNA is way more dangerous.

The South Pacific Scientology Road Show

2007-12-17T12:46:00.001+08:00

A dashed vote in a far-flung colony of New Zealand in the depths of the South Pacific had left us scrabbling around for any, literally any, story to sell as we hung around waiting in Samoa for a few days before our return flight to Sydney and on to Hong Kong.
Gleaming plastic yellow tents on the grass lawn in front of parliament in the capital, Apia, looked like offering a chance to make our money back.
We’d noted that from the airport to Apia there were more churches than you could shake a crucifix at. Missionaries had well and truly done their job here from the 19th century onwards and a rainbow of Christian denominations lined the streets. Sundays were dead – nothing happened, bar citizens dressed up in white flowing clothes gathering in the countless churches across the island. They don’t even sell booze on a Sunday – the outrage!
Anyway, I digress. Back to the prominent yellow tents. The Scientologists were in town and had set up camp with the blessing of the prime minister in a prime location as part of a road show across the Pacific Islands. A regional commentator, Michael Fields, had told us earlier that in Samoa, “There’s a hell of a lot of competition for people’s souls.” The religion of Ron Hubbard was looking to muscle in on this act.
The taxi stops opposite. I set my mobile on to record and slip it into my pocket. We stroll across the road. The play, I say, will go as follows: We’re down and out, in search of salvation and interested in this Scientology malarkey. In the end I don’t have the cahonas, nor acting skills to play this role, but we go in looking for a wacky religion nonetheless.
A slim, attractive, black-haired lady in her mid-40s with a glistening white set of gnashers greets us. Mary, a former model from New Zealand, signed up to the sect that boasts stars such as Tom Cruise and John Travolta as her modeling career faded. She now promotes the religion around the region. Inside lots of funny fake smoothie looking models posed in photos – the typical tale being how when depressed or out of sorts Scientology gave these folk a lift.
All along our tour round the tented sect, Ron Hubbard blaring out of a TV in the centre, Mary was depressingly sane, offering absolutely nothing in the way of wacky, funny, scary Scientology pastiches. I probed, I pressed, but to no avail. She was all too normal, and what she was saying was nothing extraordinary whatsoever.
We left on favourable terms, though I was annoyed I couldn’t get anything out of her. Outside, in the fierce midday sun, the photographer turns to me, pointing at my expanding midriff. “It’s hardly surprising,” he says, “Look what you are wearing.” I gaze down at my bright green tshirt. D’oh! It’s the one I picked up in Tokyo a couple of years ago – The Tokyo Foreign Correspondents Club one!
In the end, we make do with schmaltzy wedding destination stories.

Brand Mao

2007-12-17T12:44:00.000+08:00

It was teaming down in Shaoshan when I got there in spring 2006. Just bucketing. The paddy fields shone electric green with all the water, the drains struggled with the torrents and most locals were taking shelter.
That didn’t stop the hundreds of coaches pulling up though. Come rain or shine, this little slice of western Hunan province is mobbed day in, day out with an armada of mainland tourist buses at this quasi-religious site – the village where Mao was born. Nothing can prepare you for the old world propaganda and tack that lies in store in this otherwise charming slice of Hunanese countryside; it is a throw back and a must see in China’s fast changing society. The streets are lined with all manner of Mao tack, from badges, clocks, watches, posters to lighters, lasers, and VCDs. Brand Mao is very much alive and well.
The mud-walled house where Mao was born on December 26, 1893 and brought up with his two brothers is surprisingly large, facing south with pines behind and paddy terraces in front. It is free to enter unlike the Na’Nan school next door which is rather dull at 10RMB to see where Mao started his studies. Slap bang in the middle of the village is Bronze Square where, in something reminiscent of Turkmenistan or North Korea, tour groups line up to bow in front of a large Mao statue. Across from the statue is a museum on the life of Mao, costing 30RMB to enter. Next to this and costing 10RMB is Mao’s Ancestral Temple.
To the east of the village is Dripping Water Cave, (entrance 33RMB) where Mao and his entourage decamped to in 1966 for a fortnight amid the Cultural Revolution. Set at the back of a lovely forested, watery park where patriotic music blares from speakers secreted in fake rocks, the cave is more of a dacha. At the end of the tour you can have your photo taken alongside a lifelike Mao mannequin for 5RMB.
Finally, on a rutted road two km south of town is a chairlift to ascend Shao Shan, an impressive mountain. The lift, open 0800 to 1730 all year round, costs 23RMB single or 45RMB return.
China might have changed beyond all belief since the Great Helmsman popped his clogs, but he still makes a top tourist draw.

Urban Jungle

2007-12-17T12:43:00.000+08:00

Let’s be clear, Singapore ain’t my favourite place in the world. Far from it, in fact. Yet it was the place where I realized begrudgingly that I am a city boy.
I’d grown up my whole life in the idylls of the Weald of Kent, in a small village with a post office, a couple of shops, three pubs, where conversation was decidedly agricultural. From my bedroom window I looked out at rolling wooded farm land, weekends were often spent ‘twigging’, picking up the detritus from my father’s pruning efforts, while in a field nearby sheep were being sheered.
Yet in 2005 after five years in the helter skelter concrete jungle that is Hong Kong I traveled down to the South Island of New Zealand to see my elder sister and her family. For two weeks I traveled around the fantastically beautiful New Zealand countryside, taking in mountains, glaciers, lakes and seemingly half of the Lord of the Rings shooting schedule. I enjoyed it tremendously. Yet the lack of people I just found weird. Likewise, the severe lack of anything I had come to associate with news finding itself into the local newspapers was strange to me. ‘Sheep stuck in tree’ type thing might make a page lead in the bucolic surroundings of Dunedin. Alright that’s an exaggeration, but you get what I mean!
Flying Singapore Airlines back I stepped out in the sweaty Lion Republic and immediately, the noise, neon lights and elbow jostling just felt right. I am a city boy.

A yabadaba doo time

2007-12-17T12:42:00.001+08:00

Flintstones, meet the Flintstones … you’ll have a dabdabadoo time, a yabadaba doo time, you’ll have a gaaaaaay old time.
We were reaching the absolute depths of our karaoke knowledge in the most astounding of surroundings. Having been present at a narrowly failed vote for independence in one of the far most far flung places on earth, we were heading back to Samoa, initially downcast at leaving behind the pristine paradise we had encountered for the past few days, numbed too by the one percent failed vote which might have made selling our South Pacific odyssey tale that bit harder. However, onboard the 30 metre long MV Tokelau, spirits were enlivened by the genial head of the UN’s decolonization programme, Robert Aisi, Papua New Guinea’s ambassador in New York.
The stars shone bright, the waves pelted against the bow and the Vailima beer flowed freely as we made our 32 hour boat ride back to civilization and Samoa. We hadn’t seen land for around 12 hours and we were unlikely to see the green jagged hills of Samoa for another 12 or so. Leading from the front Robert commandeered his merry band of UN apparatchiks and journos to sing. There was no karaoke machine – just memory and much backing vocals. It counts as one of the most memorable karaoke sessions ever … yet no karaoke machine I have encountered since seems to carry the barnstorming Flintstones tune.

Beijing Blockbuster

2007-12-17T12:40:00.000+08:00

So long as you can put up with your favourite brand names being occasionally misspelled, the Ya Show market near San Li Tun in Beijing is a haven of all things pirated. Whether it's a ‘Tommy Hilfiger’ jacket or a ‘Siny’ pair of speakers, this den of Chinese covert capitalism has it all.
I was there the other day on a crisp winter’s afternoon perusing my normal DVD joint. Having amassed a decent selection of the latest crop of Hollywood hits I strolled to the counter and for a second thought I was in Blockbuster Video. “You have club discount card?” the lady at the till asked me. A membership card for knock off DVDs?! Wonderful, and only in China.
Quick witted I fumbled through my pockets, turned to my accomplice, who was scanning a rack of DVDs in the corner, and with a sly grin I asked him if he’d remembered to bring his club discount card this time. He played along, rifling through his pockets, and said he’d forgotten it. We still got the 20% off, though.

Lunch with the Pentagon

2007-10-31T16:39:00.001+08:00

To the American Club, high up in Exchange Square, Hong Kong, for one of the more surreal lunches of my life.
A week prior the naval attaché from the US consul general is on the blower. “Hey Sam, long time…,” he intones. “Say, I got someone coming in Washington and they’re keen to know more about China’s merchant fleet. How does lunch on the 24th grab ya?”
Intrigued, I could hardly refuse but I added a caveat, asking that I bring along an American known to all who have worked with him simply as The Agent, much like Harvey Keitel was known as The Wolf in Pulp Fiction. The Agent grew up in Conneticut, attended spook central university aka Johns Hopkins where one Dr P Wolfowitz was his dean. Thereafter, The Agent worked “for the government” in DC for a couple of years before heading to East Asia where after a spell with Dow Jones he joined a shipping newspaper, gaining access to highly sought after intelligence targets such as shipyards and ports. The Agent was an asset, and if I was to powwow with goons from Washington I wanted him on my side.
We met with the attaché on the 37th floor and were introduced so a young, crew cut, earnest fella from the Department of Defense. What ensued I look back on as frightening in hindsight at how little knowledge or understanding the world’s current superpower has of its heir to the throne, China. ‘John’ from the DoD was a China specialist and he wanted to know about Beijing’s naval capabilities.
While I knawed on a roll of soft bread, keenly anticipating the arrival of my spare ribs, John cut to the chase and asked his most important question; the moment where we sang for our luncheon. In a veiled reference to the vexed issue of Taiwan, he set forth his poser. “Let’s say,” he mused, “there was an ‘incident’ in the East China Sea,” he said, adding inverted commas with a manual flourish like Dr Evil might to the word ‘incident’. “Just how quickly could the government commandeer the fleets that are quasi-state owned?” A malicious mischieovness overtook me and I nodded at The Agent to say I’d answer this one. “Well, ‘John’,” I replied deadpan, “If, indeed, there was an ‘incident’ [yes, dear reader, I couldn’t help myself and manually added inverted commas too] in the East China Sea then by the time you woke up the next day, they would have strung all the Chinese tankers up from Xiamen to form a landbridge across to Kaohsiung.” There was a pause, both the naval attaché and the man from the Pentagon taking on the ramifications of what I had said. They mulled it for a while, and said “how interesting”. Lunch careened on with countless moments where I had to stop myself from gasping at the DC guy’s ignorance as a China specialist. The Agent and I made our farewells, got in the lift and boomed out laughter, each of us thinking that night in some darkened basement of the Pentagon, war simulations involving hundreds of Chinese tankers may well be taking place.

Enter the damp squib

2007-10-31T16:36:00.000+08:00

Looking back, it was a momentous occasion for the Asia Scribbler. My first ever trip to mainland China. It was 2000 and I had been drafted in, because the editor felt Guangzhou, formerly Canton, was not a significantly flashy enough destination for him. I, on the other hand, was not fussy. The chance to travel anywhere was and still is like a red rag.
I was running late due to some late production issues on the magazine I was working for. It was my first foreign trip with the company I had joined and I was excited. Hopping on the train at Hung Hom I made the two hour train to Guangzhou. It moved slowly through Hong Kong, like the southeast trains in the UK do though London, only to pick up speed across the border. Sitting on the top floor of a double-tiered carriage the scenery that greeted me on passing through Shenzhen into the no man’s land up to Guangzhou, I admit deeply depressed me. Endless factories, tiled housing complexes, dark grey, heavy skies, lacerations of polluted deltas, blasted hillsides; Guangdong province might be leading China economically, but at what cost, I wondered peering out the window as the heavens opened up.
Guangzhou East train station is a maelstrom for the unititiated such as yours truly seven years ago. Move with the tidal flow of humanity or risk being trampled upon. Look fast for signs, and elbow your way to the necessary exit point, this vast monolith of a station in the heart of the central business district is dull on the eye, quick on the heart and heavy on the irritation if the queues don’t work in your favour.
The rain was pouring so hard it made a platoon of Gatling gun firing maniacs sound like a monastery. I was late. The taxi queue was long. The rain brought little relief to the humidity. My suit was damp.
A Volkswagen finally drew up. I jumped in the front seat. My right foot immediately was immersed to the ankle in rainwater. The car had one hell of a leak. Late to the Garden Hotel and the largest ballroom I have ever seen for a Singapore government function I waded in. My right foot left an imprint wherever I stepped. Quite an entrance on my first visit to China.

Sozzled on soju

2007-09-28T23:06:00.000+08:00

The shrill ring of the phone went through my ear and rocked the core of my sleepy head. ‘Good morning, this is your wake up call,’ an automaton droned. The seemingly bleary alarm clock showed 10 after 7.
I stumbled out of bed and, wallop, it hit me hard. This was a hangover that only soju, the Korean national drink can induce. In one word: epic. My mouth was drier than a birdcage, my legs barely strong enough to allow me to walk and my head felt as if it was wrapped in cotton wool. Tsssssk, I tut tutted myself and made a mental note once again never to touch the stuff.
Where had I been? What had I been doing to suffer such pain? Total memory loss from about midway through last night’s dinner – not a good sign.
I shuffled meekly into the toilet, dispensed with the previous night’s barbeque, mused as to the incredible shredded state that kimchi brings to one’s ablutions, noted the familiar post-heavy-soju-night shaky hand and got up to brush my teeth. Big day, big day, I was saying to myself, annoyed that I was in such a state with so many interviews to carry out all over Seoul for the next 12 hours, and then I peered, eyes barely alert, into the mirror.
From deep within my muffled head alarm bells started to ring LOUD. Panic, horror, shock! What the hell was that on my face? Oh my God! A black eye! Nee na, nee na, nee na – alarms sounding off in my convoluted brain, urgently trying to rekindle any memory from the previous evening. Had I got into a punch up. Surely not, I figured, I am six foot six and it’d be darn difficult for a Korean to swing that high. Jesus, I thought, maybe I’d got into fisticuffs with my advertising colleague and friend, Victor. Soju does make you do strange things. But hold on, I reasoned, I don’t get into fights ever.
What on earth had happened? I desperately wanted for this elusive moment in time to return to me, but the power of soju had rendered my brain into a sieve. Another even more worrying thought entered my by now utterly bamboozled head: how, oh how, was I ever going to be able to conduct all these interviews with respectable captains of industry all day. I shaved, showered and dashed downstairs to find Victor and ask for some rational explanation for the dark swelling around my left eye.
Turns out I got up to leave from one of those minute stalls in the outdoor BBQ place we always go to and promptly the knees gave way and I crashed down to Earth with quite a thump. The interviews that day were horrendous.
Sadly, soju sorry sojourns have since reappeared though without such a serious unidentified drinking injury.

Beneath the tracks

2007-09-13T23:35:00.000+08:00

Ch, chuk, ch, chuk, ch, chuk. Another train glides gently overhead. A plate of the meatiest tuna sashimi arrives at the crowded table, struggling for space amid the litre glasses of Sapporo, heavenly inch thick asparagus, and grilled fish of the day.

There are few places on Earth that derive such culinary pleasure as Andy Shin’s Hinomoto, which lies under an arch of the Yamanote line just outside Yurakucho station.

Yurakucho itself is full of brilliant, smoky shacks selling yakitori, sushi, dumplings and all sorts but the stand out is Andy’s joint.

I have lost count the number of times I have been there yet every time I always spend 15 minutes walking round the block under the rail line (pictured) finding the place. He never used to have a business card, just a box of matches by way of a calling card. Yet, the last time I visited Andy’s I picked up a brand new card and attach the details below. Call in advance as places disappear fast. It’s raucous, good value and as fresh produce as you can get.

Andy, with a bald pate, is a jovial Brit who married into a Japanese family that runs this atmospheric eatery and has since turned it into a massively popular, elbow-by-elbow establishment that for me is the greatest highlight in all of Tokyo. Oh yes, did I mention they also have Guinness on tap?!

Open 5pm-midnight

Address 2-4-4 Yurakucho, across from the Yurakucho Denki Building

Phone 03/3214-8021

A run in with local government

2007-09-11T00:18:00.001+08:00

He sat there near the bridge, red faced, wiry yet with a small potbelly. Sweat dripped from his brow, no doubt caused by the copious amounts of alcohol imbibed. Bottles were lobbed indiscriminately everywhere among the boulders of the shallow river. Plastic bags and wrappers from the prolonged picnic littered this otherwise pristine slice of Inner Mongolia.

He was the local CCP boss called Mr Ho and was surrounded by a number of slobbering deputies and a couple of SUVs. His demeanour and attitude immediately smelt as much as trouble as the potent baiju being necked down.

We were there to track down China’s last hunter gathering society, a somewhat fruitless task as, by and large, the Orochen people have been assimilated into the Han Chinese majority way of life. He was there to be a little Hitler.

Hunting might have been banned since 1993, but that hadn’t stopped Mr Ho and his acolytes wolfing down deer meat. With a wave of his hand he told us in no uncertain terms that we didn’t have a permit to be here so we had to leave right away or else. We bade him a hasty farewell and left him in the late afternoon sunshine surrounded appropriately by carcasses.

Rainbow below

2007-09-10T00:05:00.000+08:00

The other day I had a totally unique experience, one I would wager very few people get to see. Atop a mountain in the far north of Yunnan province, in a Tibetan autonomous zone at some 4,700 metres in altitude after a mad scramble on scree to the summit we paused to catch our breath. Air when you’re this high is in short supply. We hadn’t exactly gone too far, a handy cable car doing most of the legwork for us. At the top station of the cable car we had headed another few hundred metres to the top; a guard en route bribing us for 100 kwai for the ahem ‘insurance’ to get there. At the top the view is simply out of this world, overlooking the valley basin of what the Chinese now call Shangri-La, after the mythical creation alluded to in James Hilton’s 80-year-old Lost Horizon novel.

Behind us jagged peaks loomed in the cloudy distance and then swivelling a little left it hoved into the view, a most wondrous sight. There, some 700 odd metres BELOW us was a rainbow! All seven colours fanned out in the valley below, providing some colour to the overcast day. The euphoria created by the altitude accentuated dramatically.

Plastic bags: environmental time bombs

2007-08-21T17:49:00.000+08:00

Just back from 7/11 down the road where on picking up a couple of items the lady at the counter pleasingly said almost apologetically, “Sorry, no plastic day”. What, no VISA or Mastercard? What she meant to say I learnt from my colleagues in the office is that every Tuesday in the Special Administrative Region is No Plastic Bag Day, an encouraging development.
A couple of years back a photographer and I headed to one of the largest garbage dumps in the world, in Payatas near Manila.
Amid the squalor, the atrocious smell, the squelching sensation underfoot, what sticks out most visibly in these mountains of rubbish are the plastic bags. They perforate every seam of the garbage hills, one of which collapsed in 2000 causing many deaths, and only on seeing these monuments to waste does the true disastrous nature of the proliferation of these largely superfluous bags hit home. Amid the decaying detritus, it is the plastic bags that refuse to break down, leaching chemicals into the environment.
Plastic bags, which are of course made using oil, represent one of the great stupidities of mankind — the damage they do, compared with the amount of use the average bag gets is shocking. The world uses up as many as one trillion of them a year, many of course are used just once.
So while the idea of a No Plastic Bag Day is commendable let’s go the whole hog and levy taxes on bags. Ireland did this and these environmental time bombs are almost a thing of the past, usage down by more than 95%.
On a recycling tangent: as a buyer of 750ml glass bottles of Perrier with a twist of lime most mornings why, oh why, is there no glass recycling whatsoever in Hong Kong? The government line, I am reliably informed, is that glass recycling is heavy and as a result the transport costs are higher. The glass cannot be crushed down or bailed together like plastic bottles and tins and sent across the border for recycling. This issue needs resolving!

A climate of fear

2007-08-19T16:41:00.000+08:00

“You’re not to stop walking, do not raise your hands or shout,” I was told firmly. Was I back in school on some outing to a museum? Kind of. The timepiece I was visiting was the last slice of the Cold War, what Bill Clinton in those hazy pre-Iraq War days of the 1990s called “the most dangerous place on Earth”: the demilitarized zone between the two Koreas.
I’d been whisked from Hong Kong to Seoul at the drop of a hat on the promise of a decent conference to report on for my former newspaper. Checking in at the Lotte Hotel then my eyebrows raised somewhat when the friendly, sweet receptionist handed me an envelope with a ticket to tour the DMZ the next day.
“Yeah, well, err, turns out the conference will be all in Korean,” said my former colleague turned conference organizer, “so it’s kinda pointless you sitting through it, but since you’ve come all this way I thought I’d make your trip worthwhile.”
Fast-forward 12 hours and after a bus ride through endless barbed wire partitions where the population thins to almost nothing I was in the vast CCTVed-to-the-max compound that straddles the border. Fear was the most pungent feeling that our military guides tried to engender in us.
100 metres in front of our building was the mad, bad Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, from where a bunch of frankly scraggy guards looked out; their uniforms hanging loosely from their frail physiques. In the awful ‘Arduous March’ as the DPRK refers to its heinous famine of the mid-1990s where hundreds of thousands died, South Korean guards used to waft the smell of their cooking across the border.
The hillside behind the DPRK installments contrasted poorly with their southern cousins, raped of any trees, barren and a clear reminder why this neo-Stalinist ‘Hermit Kingdom’ is so prone to flooding.
The largest flag I’d ever seen – the red star with white circle and blue lines of the DPRK - fluttered high in the sky, while on the ground the bullshit flowed freely: from the handpicked South Korean military guards all of a certain height and frame to give off the illusion that the South is far mightier (since the 70s it is true the South’s population has grown in height, while the impoverished North’s has stunted); to the fake village on the North side whose lights come on everyday at 5pm and which bares no resemblance to real life in the DPRK, more for the movie junkie Kim Jong-il, reel life, à la Stepford Wives trying to create an illusion of modernity, and comfort.
The South Korean guards in the centre of this pissing contest, shades on come rain or shine, stand in a firm tae kwon do pose. Fear, fear, fear: that’s what one takes away from the South Korean side.
Yet, as luck would have it, I had the chance to see the bipolar opposite just a few months later and for me it showed all that is wrong with, what my chum Paul French coined, the ‘Paranoid Peninsula’.
Midway through an unforgettable and highly recommended trip to North Korea our tour party trundled down to the border. There the guards couldn’t have been nicer, taking pictures with us, cracking jokes and not hurrying us along whatsoever. The CCTVs from the other side frowned back at us, the US and ROK guards glared down from their modern bastion, yet all I felt was a sense of camaraderie, of being in the presence of friendly, kind people.
To this day the two Koreas are still technically at war having never signed an armistice. Shots were traded across the border just a fortnight back and now President Roh will travel from Seoul to Pyongyang this year for only the second ever inter-Korean summit.
Here’s what I learnt from visiting both sides of the DMZ in the space of five months. The climate of fear suits many nations most notably the US so it can station troops strategically in East Asia. If the world only knew what wonderful people the citizens of the DPRK are this whole paranoia would ease up and the paper tiger that Kim, and to a certain extent the US, have created would cease to be.

The fire within

2007-08-18T15:56:00.000+08:00

So you think you’re pretty hard when it comes to all things spice, do you? You can wolf down a vindaloo with nary a peep of complaint. The hottest, tongue tingling creation from Chiang Mai barely elicits a bead of sweat from your brow. Kimchi doesn’t even register on the heat scale of your well-worn taste buds. You even laugh in the face of Mexican chilli.

Then it’s time for your comeuppance.
Chongqing, one of the four so-called furnaces of China, is home to the hotpot or huoguo, and dear God is it hot!
The experience is so bodily debilitating to the novice that countless parts of the human anatomy simply give up normal operations when confronted with this red menace.
First to cease functioning are your lips; they start to tremble, go numb and generally careen all over the place out of control.
Next to go is any form of decorum as you stretch across the table and neck any available beer in sight in a desperate attempt to douse the fire.
Finally, and often for days afterwards, your bowels are in a total mess. You will be uncertain whether or not it is safe to switch off your computer for all the downloading you’ll be doing!
A ‘Chongqing’ hotpot from outside of the world’s largest municipality simply isn’t the same thing as a Shanghainese friend recently related to me. “Sure they are warm enough,” he said of the various Shanghai incarnations he’d had over the years, “but really they are like hot water compared to the real thing.”
So what is it then that does the damage? It is not the mass of red peppers floating in the broth, nor even the pungent chilli oil. It is the local ingredient, hua, that sets the mouth on fire. These speckled little balls look like peppercorns, add a certain aniseed quality to the soup and never fail to numb. Local residents delight in showing silly spice-boasting foreigners, lao wei, like yours truly their cuisine. You’ve been warned.

Head down to Adriatico

2007-08-17T13:50:00.000+08:00

It is one of the greatest, yet least commended streets in Asia. Morphing from slums to bars Adriatico Street in the central Manila district of Malate offers the best that the Philippine capital has in terms of night life yet still manages to encapsulate all the faults, frights and frissons of this third world country. Running parallel with Mabini street, Adriatico is less overtly red light; more disco light.

Starting from the bottom end – where Quirino Avenue leads onto the coastal Roxas Boulevard -the street is slumville, with a welter of narrow lanes leading off Adriatico into crowded dens, where think bunches of electric wires hang overhead and foamy water flows along the pockmarked concrete.
In amongst this poorer part of the street though is a genuine oasis – Bianca’s Garden, formerly known as True Home. As the black gates swing open, a Spanish style villa awaits amid plenty of lovely trees, a swimming pool and the generous, friendly welcome of Jupiter and his team. The rooms are large but basic with great Philippine wooden furnishings, and though the price has gone up a lot in the last five years, it is still a favoured spot in this part of the world.
At the halfway point of Adriatico is Remedios Circle, a concrete park that despite recent renovation attempts still looks a bit duff. Nevertheless, this is the hub around which the street hums.
There’s the wonderous Café Havana, with mojitos that even Hemmingway would have approved of, and a cigar bar upstairs. Havana’s fantastic Cuban style band gets going after 9pm till the wee hours. Across the way from Havana is the Korean Palace, kimchi central, a place to gorge on barbeques and soju. The street in between Havana and the Korean Palace, San Andres, is full of outdoor barbeque shacks where blue marlin ribs or tuna belly can be rustled up for next to nothing.
Heading further up the street, past the booming music of Flintstones and Padi’s Point, a Starbuck’s juts out from the Malate Pensionne, a sad infringement on what used to be the backpackers’ mecca in this archipelago a decade or so ago; since then though the pensionne has gone a bit upmarket. Back in the day, it served as a great place to meet people time and time again after jaunts around the islands, because the number of travelers was so few you’d often bump into the same bunch at the pensionne where its freezer worked overtime to ensure the San Miguels were amongst the coldest in the capital.
Continuing the walk further north then, is the steet’s only properly decent hotel, the Pan Pacific where room rates start at US$120 and up.
Further up on the left is Mey Lin, perhaps the best Chinese restaurant on the street, with decent hand pulled noodles, dimsum and braised aubergine.
Just before that on the opposite side is Mocha Blends whose espresso serves to get you through the often exhausting Manila day.
At the junction of Julio Nakpil, where the cavernous Robinson’s shopping mall continues to expand, on the left is a barber shop, used to be known as Bruno’s, now under new management with the same staff but less exciting name, Barberos. Inside is the quintessential barber shop – leather reclining seats, mirrors everywhere, barbers in uniform ready with sharp single blade razors or scissors depending on what ‘Sir’ demands. For my money the scalp massage is pretty unmissable.
The street continues all the way up to Padre Faura, with the encroaching Robinson’s mall taking much of the right hand side. At the top is the much written about Kamayan restaurant, with its 400 peso buffet – avoid it, the service is slow, the food old and if you hang a left as Adriatico hits Padre Faura to Mabene where Watson’s is on the corner, just next to that is the supremely good value German establishment, Munchen Bar and Grill, whose goulash soup is well worth the walk. But the street of iniquity that is Mabini, with all its oddities such as the bar run by midgets, will have to be for a separate post.

Sun sets for the Red House

2007-08-10T11:56:00.000+08:00

The rooms were spartan but clean. The price - at RMB250 - a bargain. But it was the location of the wondrous Red House that made it my home from home whenever I was in Beijing over the last decade.
On the ground floor was a North Korean art gallery run by the wacky chaps from Koryo Tours, whose office was on the third floor. Also on a wing of the ground floor was the China Football Club, where Yanjing beer flowed freely, footie was permanently on the telly, and pictures of the likes of Ian Rush at the Great Wall adorned the walls.
Across the way was a great Xinjiang restaurant with scrumptious hand pulled noodles. 15 minutes walk took you to San Li Tun, the bar street, where, with its convivial atmosphere and wireless internet, the Bookworm café continues to serve as my de facto office when residing in the Chinese capital.
Shopping, in the form of the cavernous Yashow market, was similarly nearby to stock up on cheap clothes, even cheaper DVDs and ludicrous trinkets.
And two minutes to the right as you headed out the door of the Red House was a blind massage joint. An Albino lady there performed wondrous things to my knotty back.
So it was with no small amount of horror and indignation that I rocked up at the green doors of the Red House the other day to see rubble everywhere inside, the whole place gutted and odds and ends thrown out on to the street. The Red House, like far too much of my once favourite city in China, has been set on the ‘path of progress’. The character chai (tear down) stamped on its wall, like thousands before it, earmarked for bigger and supposedly better things once it has been pulled down.
I am told it will become a KTV bar. I’ll only be singing sad songs in there.

The short life spans of umbrellas

2007-08-08T11:32:00.001+08:00

'Big Red' was what I called it. A corporate gift from some shindig way out on Tsing Yi island from as far back as four years ago. It was so robust it could even handle typhoons. Given my giant frame (six foot six with an expanding girth to boot), Big Red's wide circumference made it the ideal tool to combat Hong Kong's stormy summer months.
I've been through more umbrellas than there have been typhoons in my seven years here in HK. Left at bars/ferries/meetings/more bars/yet more bars, umbrellas generally have had a lifespan of approximately one month. Oh yeah, I forgot to add just how many have been pilfered from the office over the years as the heavens opened and those less hard working than yours truly scuttled out to face the downpours with my brolly never to be seen again.
But Big Red was different -- it led a charmed, protected life as I looked out for it. All that changed a month ago when, on a truly gargantuan night out that ended circa 5am on a sampan back to the Fantasy Island where I reside, the umbrella somehow went missing at one of countless hostelries frequented on that tempestuous night.
All of which preamble brings me to my main point of all this drivel - the strange existence of that seemingly most constrained of business sectors in this roaring metropolis that I call home, namely the humble umbrella repairman. You see them in shacks around the lanes in Central, often next to a shoe shine/key making kiosk. Now, here's what I don't get: an umbrella costs all of HK$25 from the ubiquitous 7/11 stores that line our streets. How on Earth can you earn a living out of repairing an umbrella?
Now, if anyone has laid eyes on a large red umbrella with the letters HUD emblazoned on it, please let me know - that's one brolly worth repairing!