INTRODUCTION

In this WebLog you will find a chronological log of my trip to China in October 2007. Other than this brief introduction and notes along the way about where we were I don't plan to provide a blow-by-blow account of what we did. Instead, my goal is to tell you a little about what I learned about China and share some of my thoughts and observations. I hope you will consider this your own vicarious tour of China rather than a retelling of mine.

Rather than post the actual photos in the body of the blog I've decided to provide links to the corresponding Picasa Web Album where you can view all of the pictures for that segment of the trip. I will include links in the body of the log where you can find more information about some of the places we visited. I've also included links of other blogs and photo albums of interest.

As a side note, the majority of the photos here are mine. I've altered them slightly to make them more suitable for viewing in this format. If you want copies of anything I suggest you contact me (I'm happy to share) rather than printing from these images. I can provide you with a better version for printing. A few of the photos were taken by others in our group. I've used them here when they depict something I want to show but don't have a good photo of. I've also scanned in a few postcards for places where it was not possible to take good photos under the existing circumstances.

Melinda has been reading a lot about China for the last several years. She became more and more interested in visiting the country and after a nice visit with my friends Craig and Yoko during which they shared stories and photos of their 2005 trip our minds were made up. We soon booked a three week tour with the same company, China Focus Travel.

We left Seattle on the morning of October 3 and arrived in Beijing around dinner time on October 5 after being "on the road" for about 18 hours. After passing through Chinese customs and immigration and stepping out into the lobby of the Beijing airport the very first thing we saw straight in front of us was Starbucks! Unfortunately, I did not have my camera at the ready so I don't have a photo of that memorable sight.

There were several China Focus groups arriving at the same time so it took us all a little while to sort out who belonged to which group and with which guide. We finally met our national guide who introduced himself as "James Bond". His real name is Yuan Feng. It turns out that most of our local guides took western names as well. I believe the only two exceptions were Wen, our Beijing guide and Ling, our Guilin guide. At first I found that practice somewhat condescending, both for us and for them. Did they think that we couldn't pronounce or remember their names? Did they think we didn't value them enough as Chinese to care about calling them by their proper name? After talking with Melinda about it, I felt a little better. She suggested it was just sort of like a "game" any of us might play if we immersed ourselves in another culture - sort of like when students take a Spanish name while they are in their Spanish class. I guess that kind of makes sense but I would have preferred to use their real names.

There is a link to photos of the gang on the right in the Links list. The first one is a picture of James and the second is the one good picture I've seen of everyone in our group together. They are (clockwise from the bottom) Mae, Joey, and Jim (Joey's grandparents), Darrell and Lynda, Melinda, me,Elena and Tom, Dave and Brona, and John and Judy. This was a great group of people. We were quite lucky as I can't imagine a random group of people that could turn out to be more compatible. They were all interesting, intelligent, easy going and fun to be with.

ASIDE: Traffic in China is an amazing thing. The highways between the cities are relatively uncrowded roads in good repair so every thing went along as you might expect. In the cities it was an entirely different thing. In photos throughout this blog you will see examples of traffic in various cities. There is always a mix of buses (a lot in Beijing), cars (a lot in Hangshou), bicycles (a lot in Xi'an), scooters, various other contraptions like the 'Rhinos' mentioned further along and tricycles with flatbeds or sidecars and, of course, lots of pedestrians. And the flow of traffic is a thing to behold. There are lines on the roads but one guide mentioned that the Chinese just view them as decorations! And it's hard to tell if there are really any rules. There are some traffic signals and round-abouts but vehicles don't always mind them and pedestrians seem to cross the road wherever and whenever they want (or when they can!) And of course, every where we were there were tour buses which could squeeze into the most startling places and openings in traffic to move us smoothly from one place to another. The remarkable thing is it all seems to work!! We saw the aftermath of only one fender bender the entire time. Tom often referred to it as the Zen of driving.

BEIJING

We spent the next few days in and around Beijing visiting Tian'anmen Square, the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven, the emperor's Summer Palace on Kunming Lake, the Hutong district and the Great Wall. The first day was rainy and not conducive to taking photos so here's where I've included some postcard pictures.

Tian'anmen Square is the largest and most famous square in the world. I suppose you could say it is "infamous" after the 1989 pro-democracy protests that found one lone protester facing a line of tanks. As it turned out, we were visiting during China's National Day, a week-long commemoration of the founding of the communist People's Republic of China. As you can see by the photos, the place was full of people and decorated for the occasion with lots of potted flowers and shrubs as well as topiaries promoting the coming 2008 Olympics to be held in Beijing. Apparently, this is the one occasion on which the photo of Dr Sun Yet Sen is brought out to face Mao Zedong in "dialogue". I have to say, it was pretty darned cool to be in this place that is so famous and has such historical significance for China and the world. It was similar to the way I felt when I first saw Mt Rushmore in real life. You've seen lots of pictures of it and you know it really exists, but to actually be there makes it come alive in a way that nothing else could.

TIAN'ANMEN SQUARE PHOTOS HERE

The Forbidden City is just across the avenue from Tian'anmen Square. You have to walk through the gate right under the picture of Mao to enter from this side. If you have not seen the film "The Last Emperor" I recommend it. We watched it again just before this trip. The Forbidden City was built in the early 1400s during the Ming Dynasty and the last emperor of China, who came to power as a child, was imprisoned here during most of his life. This was during the time of Sun Yat-Sen who led the reformation of the Chinese government.

FORBIDDEN CITY PHOTOS HERE

TEMPLE OF HEAVEN PHOTOS HERE

Because it is hot in Beijing in the summer time there is a Summer Palace for the emperor and his family on Lake Kunming. It's a very beautiful park with spectacular views of a Buddhist Temple up on a hill and a pagoda across the lake.

SUMMER PALACE PHOTOS HERE

Beijing is obviously very proud to be hosting the next Olympics and they are working hard to spiff up the place in preparation for the event. They are doing lots of renovation work in the Forbidden City and other places in anticipation of the millions of visitors they will have during that time. They've built two very interesting new sports venues, the Water Cube for swimming and diving and the Nest, a stadium for track and field events. Beijing is the third largest city in China with a population of about 18million. Even so, they have lots of problems to overcome to be able to handle this event. The most obvious problem will be the smog. Beijing is a rapidly growing city with lots of diesel powered buses (it's no longer a city of bicycles.) Of course, being a country where the government has much more control than here and where people have a lot of national pride, they could just decide that no one will drive for a few days and that would make a big dent in the problem. It seems to me that there are other infrastructure problems as well. I don't know that the sewage system could handle such a huge influx of visitors. At this time the Chinese cannot even flush their used toilet paper down the toilet. There are flush toilets but the paper goes into a trash basket next to the toilet. (Not to mention that most westerners are not used to "squat" toilets!) And the passenger handling at the Beijing airport is extremely inefficient. You wait at the gate and then when they call boarding for your flight there is no orderly progression by row because, in fact, you aren't going to get on the plane! You walk down what looks like a ramp to the plane only to find yourself on the tarmac where you have to get on a bus-like vehicle. Then they drive around the tarmac to try and find your plane. At times, it seemed as if the driver was actually lost! Once they find your plane you have to walk up a long flight of stairs (depending on how big your plane is) to board. Heaven forbid if you have any sort of mobility problems or small children to deal with! Then, to top it off, the area where we waited for our San Francisco flight in the Beijing airport had several gates in the same area but only one restroom which had only two stalls!

OLYMPICS PHOTOS HERE

We had an opportunity to go for a walk in the area around our hotel one evening. I loved that part. What I enjoy most about traveling, especially to foreign countries, is just seeing how people live their everyday lives. (Unfortunately, being on this tour didn't afford us a lot of those opportunities.) I've included a few snapshots taken on that walk. The thing I found so fascinating in China is that there are few boundaries in their lives: public vs private, work vs play, home vs community… Except in some of the more modern cities most of the shops don't actually have any sort of "facade" that separates the shop from the street. No glass, no door, nothing. There is just something like a garage door that rolls up and down. (Some shops in Mexico and other third world countries are like this.) So there's not much separation between what goes on in the shop and outside the shop. Motorcycle repair shops do their work on the side walk and food stands cook in the doorway (presumably to keep the charcoal smoke from asphyxiating people.) I saw many shops with beds, tables and televisions where people were living their lives and "working" at the same time. (Though I guess that's not much different that me eating at my desk at work!) Walking down the streets near our hotel we saw girls dressed up on their way to some night club and people washing cars (taxis) in the stall next to the night club. Guys were cooking meat sticks in makeshift barbeques up and down the street in the midst of laundry hanging out everywhere.

AROUND BEIJING PHOTOS HERE

Walking on the Great Wall was certainly a highlight of the trip. This particular section is obviously visited by many tourists (both local and foreign) as it is easily accessible from Beijing. A couple of myths to be dispelled:

• there is not ONE long wall. There are many different sections built over many hundreds of years by many dynasties. There is a great article on the Great Wall in the January 2003 National Geographic Magazine. The section we visited was built in the Ming Dynasty in the Juyongguan Pass.


• You cannot see the Great Wall from the moon. It's unlikely that you can see it from anywhere in space. As you can see from the photos, while it may be long it is not so massive in width or height that you could distinguish it from it's surroundings from that far away.

GREAT WALL PHOTOS HERE

The last thing I really want to talk about in Beijing is the Hutong tour. In the rapid modernization of China many things about their past are being lost. The hutong areas of Beijing are among those things. They are the sections of town where people have lived for hundreds of years in small, tile roofed, single story homes. The streets and alleys of the hutongs are bordered by walls of courtyards with doorways in them. Most of the doorways lead to a courtyard that is shared by several families, each living in a small home that opens into the yard. If you watch many Chinese films you have seen these types of dwellings. These hutongs were especially prevalent in Beijing but many are now being torn down to make way for new, modern, high rise apartment buildings. The government of China has realized that at least some of these areas should be preserved so they have designated certain areas as historic sites. At the same time, they are turning these areas into tourist attractions. It's sad and ironic that places where people are living and have lived for generations are not being preserved as homes and communities so much as another way to attract tourists and make money. As you can see by the photos in the accompanying album, the "rickshaw" tour was more like a pedicab amusement park! It was just crazy! It was fun in the way an amusement park is fun but even though we visited a woman in her home, it didn't seem like we really got a sense of how people live and what their lives were like. She was very gracious and answered questions through our guide/interpreter. What was also interesting about the home we visited was that even though this woman has visitors in her home often, it was not "kept up for appearances". There was stuff piled around, shelves in the entry way that looked like they had years of clutter, dust, and debris piled on them, and piles of broken and unused stuff around the courtyard.

HUTONG PHOTOS HERE

WUHAN - YICHANG

We flew from Beijing to Wuhan, the fifth largest city in China and capital of Hubei province. Our guide, Wuhao (who went by Ivan) was a young man who was clearly excited about China's growth and modernization. Wuhan is an exploding metropolis on the Yangtze River that just 10 years ago was a small village. He took us to the Hubei Provincial Museum where we saw bronze Chime Bells and stone slabs used as musical instruments. The bells are hung from the 'handles' and the stones are hung with a cord strung through a hole in the stone. All are played by being struck with various sized mallets.

WUHAN PHOTOS HERE

We left Wuhan after lunch for a four hour bus ride to Yichang where we would board our boat for the Yangtze River cruise. Wuhan is surrounded by farm land, which we could see as we were flying in. All of China's farmland is still held by individual families and owned by the government. The size of the plot a family has is determined by the size of their family. On most of the plot they grow a single crop for selling to the commodity buyers and they keep a small portion for growing their own food (and to sell what ever is extra.) Farmers around Wuhan grow rice and cotton and have small ponds for farmed fish or freshwater eels. What is so striking about China is its contrasts. In this area there is a large modern city and just on the edge of town are farms where the land is still plowed with water buffalo and the rice is harvested by hand.

BUS RIDE PHOTOS HERE

YANGTZE RIVER

Arriving in Yichang, we boarded our boat and spent the night moored here. This was my first experience with any kind of cruise so I didn't know what to expect. The boat seemed sort of old and certainly not luxury but comfortable. Our rooms were a reasonable size with a little "deck" that you could stand on. As you can see from the photos, most of the outer wall of the room was window. That meant you could even lay in your bed and watch the scenery go by! The food was all prepared on board and was quite good. Breakfast and lunch were always buffet style with dinner being a regular Chinese family style meal. There was a gift shop, small hair salon, acupuncturist, Chinese doctor, coffee shop, bar, masseuse, and several artists on board. There were guides who provided narration about the scenery as we passed by.

BOAT PHOTOS HERE

Yichang is just downstream of the Three Gorges Dam. The dam is in the first of the three gorges, Xiling. The other two gorges are Wu gorge and Qutang gorge. We left the dock early the following morning and stopped for a visit to the dam site. This dam is the largest hydroelectric project and dam in the world. Besides power generation the other purpose of the dam is to control flooding downstream. The dam was completed in 2006 and the area upstream of the dam has been filling ever since. Since we started downstream of the dam we had to go through the locks to continue our journey. The locks are comprised of five levels and it took us about three and a half hours to get through the series of steps. We did not use the fifth and highest level. I'm not sure whether that is because the water level behind the dam is not yet at its highest point or whether the fifth level is for flood times when the water is unusually high.

DAM AND LOCK PHOTOS HERE

I think that this river cruise was my favorite part of the entire trip. It was interesting, beautiful and relaxing. I have never been a great fan of Chinese landscape painting but the scenery on this cruise gave me a whole different perspective. I believe I can now begin to understand what the artists see and are painting. As a matter of fact, I bought two small paintings from an artist who was on the boat.

CRUISE PHOTOS HERE

We saw many interesting sites along the way. Terraced farm land and stairs down to the river where it looked as if people were waiting for a boat to stop and pick them up, temples, fishermen, small boats, barges, new bridges, and brand new cities created just for the more than 1.5 million people being displaced by the rising of the river behind the dam. The river has already risen to a depth of about 160 meters behind the dam and it is expected to rise another 15 or 20 meters. Whole cities have been flooded. People who have lived on the land for generations are having to move to cities and find new homes and new work. Many are not happy about it. It's very sad for them and I'm sure the river was even more beautiful before the dam.

FARM PHOTOS HERE

While on the cruise, we had two different excursions to see things along the way. The first was a trip up the Shennong Stream where we boarded little wooden sampans that were rowed, and then pulled, by men of the Tujia minority who live in the area. They have used these sampans for fishing and transportation for hundreds of years. During the dry season much of this stream was too shallow to row so they would get out of the boat, strap a rope (which they make themselves out of bamboo) around their chests and pull the boat through the shallow areas. Now they only do it for tourists. And as the river continues to rise, they will probably have no more need to pull the boats because it will be deep enough to row. Then I don't know what they'll do for work. Perhaps they'll still continue the sampan rides rowing only. Many people in this area depend on the tourists for their livelihood. Another interesting thing about the Tujia people is the custom of their ancestors of placing coffins high above the ground in cliff caves. No one really knows why they used to do that nor how they got them up there! You can see some in the beginning of the photos.

SHENNONG STREAM PHOTOS HERE

The second excursion was to the Ghost City of Feng Du. We did not get to go into the main part of the village where the people live but instead visited an area where there was a Buddhist Temple and a beautiful old pagoda. The bamboo growing in the area is beautiful and was used as a location for the filming of "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon". But the place is being developed into another tourist attraction. The large white emperor figure in the photograph will actually be a five star hotel when it is completed! And while we saw some interesting things it's hard to say how much of it has any real historical significance and how much is being built and hyped to attract tourists.
In the southern part of China they eat more noodles than rice and there are many noodle soup stands where you obviously choose your ingredients and they put them together with the soup stock from the big pot and create a bowl just for you. As you can see there is a tempting array of various noodles, vegetables, pig snouts, tongues, and shellfish to choose from.

FENG DU PHOTOS HERE

CHONGQING - XI'AN

We departed the boat at the city of Chongqing (most westerners probably know its name as Chung King.) If you count the surrounding burbs (which they do) Chongqing is the largest city in China with a population of 30 million! We only spent the day here. We went to the zoo to see pandas and went to a small museum dedicated to General Joseph Stilwell and the Flying Tigers. Chongqing was the war capital of China during World War II. General Stilwell was commander of US troops in this part of China helping them to fight the invading Japanese. He is responsible for building the Burma Road.

CHONGQING AND PANDA PHOTOS HERE

From Chongqing we flew to Xi'an to see the Terra Cotta Warrior Army. The site is outside of the city so we had an interesting bus ride there and back. The area is famous for pomegranates and also grows a lot of corn. One of the drawbacks of being on a tour is not getting to stop along the way and explore or sample the local culture. It was pomegranate season while we were there and there were dozens of stands along the road selling them but we didn't get a chance to stop and buy any. We saw pomegranate trees in various places around China and whole groves of them here. Because the fruit is so sweet, they tie plastic bags around each fruit while it's still on the tree to keep the birds and insects from being attracted to them. It was also fascinating to see what they do with the corn. I don't think of China as being a big consumer of corn but they dry it to make flour and to feed to their animals. Since it was harvest season we saw lots of recently harvested corn. They tie it in long braids and hang it from trees or the eaves of their houses, lay it out on the driveways or rooftops, and string it on lines across the yards.

The site of the Terra Cotta Warriors was discovered by a farmer digging a well. The site of the well is marked in the museum and the old man sits in the gift shop autographing the book you can buy that tells you all about the site. It was discovered in 1974 and they've uncovered about 2000 figures but they've stopped the excavation. (One of our tour companions said it looks the same as it did when he was here ten years ago.) Apparently, when the figures were made they were brightly painted. Much of the color was intact when they were dug up but then immediately began to disintegrate when exposed to the air. They believe there are at least another 6000 figures still buried but are waiting to continue until they believe they can preserve them adequately. Interestingly, this tomb of the first emperor of the first (Qin) dynasty was not recorded anywhere in any historical documents or noted by any stone markings or anything. No one had any idea it was there until it was discovered just 30 years ago.

TERRA COTTA WARRIOR PHOTOS HERE

Though they all tend to run together after time, I think Xi'an was my favorite city in China. It seemed to still have some of what I imagined the cities to be like before the recent boom in the economy. There is an ancient wall around the city (which is true of several old cities in China.) We went to the north gate tower and had time to go for a walk along a portion of the wall. The section I walked had many older 2/3 story apartments backed up against it so I was provided an interesting close up look into the back "yards" of some of the residents.

XI'AN PHOTOS HERE

While in Xi'an we also visited a lacquer furniture factory and the Giant Wild Goose Pagoda with surrounding gardens and Buddhist temple. By now I have figured out that the purpose of much of the touring we did was to provide us with opportunities to buy things! During our trip we visited a jade carving factory, a fresh water pearl jewelry demonstration and showroom, a tea plantation, a lacquer furniture factory, a silk rug showroom, a silk factory, a few art showrooms, and various other shopping areas. Every site we visited had lots of individual hawkers all around ("Hello People") and was filled with shops or rows of vendors. Even on the Shennong stream ride our guide and one of the boatmen sang a couple of songs and then tried to sell us a book about them and a CD/DVD of their songs.

Normally I enjoy a bit of shopping on my travels but that was not true here at all. Sales people were very pushy and hovered over you constantly in the shops; and the whole "bargaining" thing was just plain annoying. They would start out trying to sell you something for 100 yuan and if you walked away or said no they kept coming down on the price (often to a quarter of the original price) and pushing you to buy. Now I understand that some people really get into this and it's all a kind of game but it's not how I like to shop. For one thing, I don't care to buy things just because they're cheap. When I shop I like to take time to look at things, pick through what's there and look for the perfect little treasure, either for myself or for someone else. This kind of shopping is the antithesis of that. You can't just linger and poke through things in private. Every time you look at something or, worse yet, pick it up, you are immediately hounded to buy it. The fun of souvenir shopping is the hunt and discovery, not seeing how much junk you can buy for how little money!

And it's also kind of sad that every thing in China seems to have turned into an opportunity to sell you something. Nothing seems to really have much historic or sacred value any more. The vendors at the Ghost City are selling cheap Hallowe'en masks and the workers renovating the Buddhist temple have their tea thermoses sitting on the Buddha's pedestal. It's hard to say if they have any reverence for anything any more!

Well, enough of that! One night in Xi'an we went to a wonderful Tang Dynasty show with dancers, singers, and musicians. It was great fun and afterward we had a fabulous dumpling dinner!

TANG DYNASTY SHOW PHOTOS HERE

Oh yes, in the "OUR GANG" photos (over on the right) you'll see one of Melinda with a group of Chinese girls. A funny thing about the Chinese, they love to have their picture taken with western tourists. I must be in at least a half dozen pictures with Chinese strangers! These girls approached us and wanted to take their pictures with us. They all took turns taking pictures so I decided to take one too!

GUILIN - LI RIVER - YANGSHUO

From Xi'an we flew to Guilin, a city that boasts having the most beautiful scenery in the world. I don't know if that's true but I'm impressed. You can see the view from our hotel window the morning after we arrived at the link below.

GUILIN PHOTOS HERE

The main reason for coming to Guilin was to take the Li River cruise but we also visited a kindergarten school and the Reed Flute Cave. The kindergarten was a government run school (there are also many private schools) and they obviously often have visitors. We went to two class rooms. The first was for 4 year olds and they sang some songs and then we played a game and danced with them. They were adorable and it was really fun. The second classroom was having art time. While we were there watching them and trying to talk to them each of them found someone in our group to give one of their drawings to. It was very sweet. All of the children we saw throughout the country were very open and friendly, even encouraged by their parents. They always said "hello" whenever they saw white folks and they never minded having their picture taken.

KINDERGARTEN PHOTOS HERE

REED FLUTE CAVE PHOTOS HERE

We went for a short walk in Guilin and discovered a little exercise park. We noticed parks in several cities that had both children's play equipment and adult exercise equipment in the same place. This one only has exercise equipment. It's sort of a low-tech, outdoor gym, in a lovely setting!

From Guilin we boarded a boat for a five hour cruise up the Li River to the town of Yangshuo. If you've seen the movie "The Painted Veil" you'll recognize the scenery. The movie was filmed there. It was an absolutely beautiful trip. Unfortunately it was overcast so the color is not that great in the photos but it does make for a misty, ethereal feel! You can see beautiful bamboo, fishing villages, water buffalo, and farmland. The fisherman use nets strung out through the water and they also still fish with cormorants.

LI RIVER PHOTOS HERE

Regretably, the beauty that attracts people here will also end up destroying the place. Our boat carried about 100 people and we made this trip with a string of other similar sized boats as far as you could see ahead and behind, all belching smoke from their diesel engines. You couldn't stand for long in the bow of the boat because of the smoke coming from the boat ahead. Just imagine what that smoke is doing to the people, animals, and plants that live along the river. And I don't know how the fishermen can still make a living with those boats churning up the water constantly and surely leaking fuel on occasion.

We arrived in Yangshuo in the afternoon where we spent the night. It was an odd little town; a combination of backpackers (there were several hostels), tourists like us, and Chinese tourists. The main area of town was definitely aimed toward tourist shopping, for both the foreign and domestic tourists. Here we saw many shops with knock-off brands such as North Face, Puma, Nike, Gucci, etc. However, if you examined the items closely you could see how cheaply they were made. It is a beautiful town, however, as you can see from the photos.

YANGSHUO PHOTOS HERE

While out on a walk we saw an amazing construction site. The sign over the entryway said "Holiday Inn" but I don't really know if that's what they were building. They were digging a deep hole with shovels and women were carrying the dirt out in baskets hung from bangbang poles. The Re-Bar was delivered tied to the side of a funny old vehicle that Tom lovingly referred to as a "Rhino". It was a type of truck (often flatbed) with a motor on the front that looked like a lawn mower engine. You can see a picture of one taken by Lynda or Darrell in the photos above. The Chinese are nothing if not ingenious when it comes to transportation.

There is also an amazing show put on nightly in Yangshuo on the Li River. It was put together by Zhang Yi Mou (famous Chinese film director) with music by Tan Dun (who did the music for Crouching Tiger…). It was a fabulous combination of lights, music, and dance using the river and surrounding hills and landscape as the stage. I didn't try to take pictures but you can see some here: Impressions of Sanjie Liu

From Yangshuo we took the bus back to Guilin for a brief visit to the Solitary Beauty Peak and art gallery on the campus of Guilin Normal School. The peak has quite a few very old carved calligraphy poems extolling the beauty of the area which you could reportedly see from the top of the peak. I was not tempted to climb the more than 200 steps nearly straight up to find out. (Photos are above in the Guilin group.)

HANGZHOU

Later that evening we flew to Hangzhou where we visited several nice parks including West Lake, Yellow Dragon Cave, and a tea plantation.

HANGZHOU PHOTOS HERE

YELLOW DRAGON CAVE PHOTOS HERE

We visited a Dragon Well tea plantation. Tea is made from the camellia shrub and the fresh, new, soft leaves are picked for tea. After picking it is dried in a metal basin over low heat while someone stirs it by hand. I'm not a big green tea fan but I learned this about green tea:

• One pinch of tea is good for one cup/glass
• You can make four rounds of tea with that one pinch
• The second and third cups are best
• The earlier in the season the tea is harvested the better it is
• Tea quality is judged by light color, fresh/sweet smell, and small leaves.

They brag that this tea is 'organic' and doesn't have any pesticide on it so you can eat the tea leaves. However, once again, the rush to tourism may ruin that purity. This plantation is in a beautiful, deep valley and dozens of tour busses spewing diesel exhaust visit daily. One can imagine how 'pure' this tea will be in a few more years.

TEA TOUR PHOTOS HERE

Hangshou is obviously a more modern town than most we visited. We went to one shopping avenue that was mostly for tourists both Chinese and foreign. There were shops catering to the Chinese tourists with calligraphy supplies, herbal medicine, and local specialty foods. The shops here were a little more like the older style but most of the city was not like that. In this city most of the shops we saw were much newer with good lighting, glass fronts with doors, and more upscale merchandise.

SUZHOU

From Hangshou we took a bus to Suzhou which is on China's Grand Canal. Like the other bus rides we've taken, all of the area between the cities is comprised of small individual farms. The pictures aren't great since they were taken from a moving bus on the highway but you can get an idea of what they are like. You may notice that most of the homes here are much nicer and bigger than the ones between Wuhan and Yichang. Our local guide, Kathy, said the farmers around Hangshou are "rich". They grow mostly nursery stock, which seems sad in a country that has so little arable land. As we got closer to Suzhou there was more rice, corn, sugar cane, and vegetables. (BTW, the silver balls on the top of the house in the left of the first picture is a TV antenna.)

BUS PHOTOS HERE

In Suzhou we visited the Garden of the Fishing Net Master (which was only named after him, not owned by him!) Some of the things I enjoyed most about these homes and gardens were the ways they use natural stones as art. They had small and large versions of 'scholar's stones' and they mounted marble slabs with natural images similar to Chinese paintings in frames on the wall and on desks. Here was also another art gallery where we were encouraged to buy things!

GARDEN PHOTOS HERE

Later we took an unexpected ride on a small boat along a portion of the canal. In many places the canal used to serve as a main thoroughfare for transportation of goods and people. If you watch the Chinese film "Together" you can see examples of this. Vendors of various sorts used to bring their goods (fish, vegetables, etc.) to the homes along the canal and the tenants would come down the back steps to the boat and purchase what they wanted (sort of like the ice-cream man in my day!) As you can see, we passed by many of the old 'back doors' and I was fascinated by them. Once again, a look into the daily lives of the locals. Of course, as always, this ride was also an opportunity for hawkers to try and sell their wares. One of the boatmen came back into the cabin during the trip to offer us postcards, playing cards, whistles, and an odd assortment of other things.

CANAL PHOTOS HERE

In Suzhou we visited the most interesting factory of all - a silk factory. Our guide, Yvonne, worked raising silk worms as a child with her family so she knew all about the process. Here are the bullet points:

• The silkworm (caterpillar) makes it's cocoon out of one single silk thread. There are wild and domestic varieties. The wild ones only produce small cocoons (a thread of 200 meters) but the domestic ones make threads up to 1500 meters.
• The cocoons are gathered and baked to kill the caterpillar inside. The cocoon becomes rather hard.
• The cocoons are soaked in hot water to dissolve the gelatin holding the cocoon together.
• They use a little broom-like tool to stir the cocoon around an then the end of the thread eventually attaches to the broom.
• Six to twelve threads are combined in one 'skein' and wound onto a reel. The cocoons float in water below the reel and when one runs out another is added and attached just by touching the end of the thread to those already winding.
  

They are working to try to fully automate this process but it doesn't seem to be especially successful yet. Sometimes two caterpillars will form one cocoon (a double) together. These are the ones used to make the silk comforters. The process for this is totally different. The cocoons are soaked, cut open, and stretched over a succession of frames. After drying on the largest ones, they are then stretched and stacked together to make many layers. This stack is then use as filling for a comforter. They refer to it as a 'quilt' but it isn't actually quilted. The nature of the silk allows the layers to adhere and stay put without any other process needed to hold it. I purchased one of these comforters an have it on my bed now. It has a wonderful feel to it. It is light weight yet 'drapes' over your body in a very sensual and comforting way.

SILK FACTORY PHOTOS HERE

After the silk factory we went to a village called Tongli, referred to as the Venice of China as it is situated on a number of small canals. It was an interesting little place and you can see how it was very cute and interesting before it was promoted as a tourist attraction. There are still lots of locals there living their lives and selling their wares (like the triangular shaped red water chestnuts) on the streets.

TONGLI PHOTOS HERE

Suzhou was one other place we had a chance to get out for an evening walk.

SUZHOU PHOTOS HERE

SHANGHAI

The bus ride to Shanghai was realitively uneventful except for the American style traffic jam (the first we experienced) with vehicles slowed to a crawl for a mile or so.

The first place we visited was the Bund with a view of the famous Shanghai skyline across the river. Then they let us loose for a couple hours of shopping on the Nanjing Road. Melinda and I hung out with Tom and Elena for a while. Melinda found a bookstore and Tom went wandering around while Elena and I sat amidst the Sunday shopping crowd of locals and just watched people. Then we wandered back to where we were to meet up to head to the Chinese Acrobat show and then dinner. The show was fabulous, with jugglers, magic, contortionists, plate spinners, balancing acts, gymnastics and ended with five motorcyclists riding around in a big steel cage! We weren't allowed to take photos though.

BUND PHOTOS HERE

NANJING ROAD PHOTOS HERE

Ironically, in Shanghai, the home of China's most famous high-rise buildings, our hotel was not the usual high rise affair. Instead it was a sweet place called the General Hotel because it had once been the headquarters of a military general.

HOTEL PHOTOS HERE

The last day in Shanghai we went to the Shanghai Museum. It was a wonderful museum and we wandered around for several hours on our own. Melinda and I visited the section on Ethnic Minorities, Chinese furniture (Ming and Qing dynasties) and calligraphy. I forgot my camera for this part but I did learn the difference between Ming and Qing dynasty furniture. Ming is much lighter with cleaner lines. As they moved into the Qing dynasty the furniture got much heavier and darker with more ornate carving and inlay of semi-precious stones. I definitely liked the Ming furniture better. The jade section was temporarily closed and we didn't even get to the painting. I would have been happy to spend all day there (instead of 'shopping' on the Nanjing Road.)

In the afternoon Melinda and I went for our last walk. There was an area near our hotel that was much like the hutongs of Beijing (without the pedicab tours!) We bought a bag of hot roasted chestnuts from a guy pushing a cart where he made and sold them. It's interesting how they do it. There is a small charcoal stove with a large wok mounted above it. The wok is filled with some sort of tiny black pebbles that are heated by the stove. The raw chestnuts are mixed in with the pebbles and stirred around until the roasting is complete and then they are scooped out with a sieve with holes large enough to let the rocks through. They tasted great and it was fun buying them. Communicating is not so much pressure (the kind I felt in Mexico and Italy) when neither of you expects the other one to know his language. You just work at it until you figure it out!

SHANGHAI PHOTOS HERE

Our last night in Shanghai was a dinner on our own. Tom, Elena, Melinda, and I took a cab to a vegetarian restaurant where the four of us had plenty to eat for only 81 yuan (about $10) and then topped it off with a soft-serve ice cream cone from the McDonalds down the street.

If you've made it this far and want to see other batches of photos that didn't fit into the body of the blog, please click on the links to the right. Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed your tour!