Kristin Reporting!
Today the Queen Elizabeth docked in Shanghai, China. However, we would not be visiting Shanghai today. We were headed on an all day tour to Hangzhou instead. Unfortunately, this required two hours of travel time to reach our destination (one hour by bus, and one hour by bullet train).
I had high hopes for Hangzhou because it has been described by ancient Chinese scholars as "paradise". Sadly, the one day we were here it was heavily polluted! Shanghai was also heavily polluted today, so at least we didn’t trade nice weather for bad.
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| Hangzhou PM 2.5 Level |
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| San Diego Pollution For Comparison |
We didn't get enough sleep last night. We tried to go to sleep earlier than usual, and we did, but we simply had to get up too early for this tour– the meeting time was a ridiculous 6:15AM!
Annoyingly, it took until 7:20AM to get loaded on the tour bus and under way. It was a 1 hour drive to the Shanghai train station (one of four main stations apparently). I was shocked to learn that Shanghai is a city of 27 million people! As we drove through Shanghai, you started to get the feel for its size. It is a cross between Los Angeles (for its sprawl) and New York (for the number of people).
At the train station, we saw there was a KFC, a Starbucks, a McDonald's and a Burger King. The station was absolutely massive. Oddly, there was a Christmas tree on display! So, I can officially say that Scott and I weren't the last people on Earth to take down our Christmas tree! (Scott took ours down in late February.)
We loaded onto the bullet train. It was a nice smooth ride, and there was basically nothing to see thanks to the heavy smog outside. The pollution actually got worse going from Shanghai to Hangzhou. Hangzhou is unfortunately in a wind pattern that brings pollution down from elsewhere, especially in the winter. Apparently it is usually clear in the summer. Too bad for our visit! Since there was nothing to look out the window at, I started brushing up on my tourist Japanese.
In Hangzhou, we were loaded onto another bus and we set out to our first stop which was the Old Town district. This area of the town was historically very interesting. It was a few streets where the traditional wooden buildings had been preserved. It stood in stark contrast to the modern skyscrapers and apartment buildings that we saw in the rest of the city. The area did not smell clean however.
In the middle of this Old Town, we visited a Chinese Herbal Medicine Pharmacy and Museum. It was interesting to see the workers swiftly opening drawers and measuring our various dried herbs and placing them onto metal plates which were delivered to other people to wrap in packaging. Our guide told us that the pharmacy filled doctors’ prescriptions in addition to selling herbal medicine, and that they try to blend Western and Chinese Medicine together in a symbiotic relationship.
[Davin Interjection: I found the Chinese herbal medicine dispensary to be fascinating, but at the same time I have extreme skepticism of how much it is actually effective, and how much is nonsense. Apparently Chairman Mao promoted Chinese Medicine since it was part of Chinese national identity, but he himself did not believe in it and saw western doctors. Some of the herbs probably are effective, but without rigorous scientific testing to back it, it’s a good bet that a lot of hot air is involved, too. As poor as my experience with western medicine has been, at least it’s nominally built on a solid scientific foundation.]
We finished our tour through the Old Town by walking through the bazaar. It was amusing to see how the shops tried to draw in customers by having sales people wearing microphones stand on the street to broadcast messages to the passersby. They had some sellers of kebabs dancing to techno music, and guys with hammers shouting as they mashed what looked like some kind of candy dessert.
Back aboard the bus, we headed to a Chinese Restaurant at a 5 star hotel for lunch. I was starving at this point because we had only had a couple of small, sweet breakfast rolls at 6:00AM. For me that food wore off around 10AM!
Lunch was delicious! It was more good Chinese food. We ate around the same type of round table topped with a lazy susan that we had at Luk Yu Teahouse in Hong Kong. The round table is the Chinese family style way of eating. I think it is a very nice concept. All of the food platters are placed on the lazy susan, and it is slowly rotated around and everyone takes what they want.
[Davin Interjection: The lunch was very good, and quite possibly the best lunch I had on any of the ship tours (retrospectively). My only complaint was that some of the more popular dishes ran out before lunch was over, and they were not refilled. I didn’t ultimately get as much of certain dishes as I would have liked. But, overall, it was still a good lunch, although I hope most of the ingredients were imported (in addition to air pollution, it’s probably no surprise that China also has a problem with polluted foodstuffs).]
After lunch, it was time for our "scenic" boat ride on the West Lake. As you can guess, we pretty much saw nothing! We took some pictures of the different boats on the lake, and they were backed by the beautiful view of white. Quite a disappointment!
[Davin Interjection: The pollution was so bad that we could barely see from one side of the lake to the other. I’d estimate visibility was well less than a mile, and possibly no more than half a mile! It was an almost surreal experience. I feel bad for the people in China who have to breathe this pollution in every day. It’s actually kind of terrifying to realize that this much pollution is being generated– while it may not be this bad in Hangzhou everyday, that just means the pollution has been blown elsewhere. I’ve heard that pollution in Beijing is even worse, and I’m frankly glad I didn’t have to see that firsthand!]
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| The most beautiful Starbucks! |
The boat ride lasted about 45 minutes. When we were back ashore, we headed to our final stop: Ling Yin Temple. We almost didn't get to visit the temple because roadwork prevented the bus from going down the road. The guide tried to get us to all agree to go to the National Tea Museum instead, but he said that walking to the temple was an option. I had seen pictures of the temple, so I absolutely wanted to go to the temple. Happily, enough people were of the same mind and so the two buses of people on this particular tour split up.
The guide had claimed it was a 30 minute walk to the temple, but it was 15 minutes at most. It was a real shame that so many people chose to skip the temple. Once we reached the temple, there was quite a lot of walking, so it was hardly any additional walking when you added the short walk down the road.
The temple complex was amazing. There were Buddhas carved right out of the mountain rock. They were beautiful and impressive. Once we reached the temple, the complex of buildings was huge. They were primarily gold and red. The statues inside were massive and extremely detailed. It was just a great place to visit. Our entry included some incense for burning as an offering. Once we were familiar with the different Buddha's around the complex, we were prepared to burn our incense and ask for our wishes to come true. Davin and I burned our incense and asked the Laughing Buddha, the Medicine Buddha, and Buddha's 500 followers to consider granting our personal wishes.
[Davin Interjection: Actually, I only asked the Health Buddha for assistance. That is the only area where I’d say my life is going less than well. Unfortunately, I’m afraid that lighting a stick probably has less chance of helping me than eating some Chinese herbs. Since I don’t personally believe in it, I can’t even benefit from the placebo effect!
As far as the temple complex itself, this saved the day for me and made the excursion worth it. Before this I was really wondering what the hell I’d come on this tour for? The lake was far from “Heaven on Earth”. Saying it was “Hell on Earth” would be too strong– that’s probably some part of Syria or Iraq under ISIS control– but it certainly came closer to some manner of limbo or purgatory!
While interesting, the Chinese medicine museum and old district of the city was not worth the two hour travel time and putting up with the severe pollution. I suppose an argument could be made that seeing the severe pollution was itself worth it, but it’s not the sort of thing you remember fondly. But that combined with the temple made it well worth the time and money involved! Going to a random tea museum instead would have made the whole day a bust, in my opinion.]
After rendezvousing with the bus, we headed back to the ship. We repeated the process in reverse. Bus to the train, train to Shanghai, bus to the ship. At the Hangzhou train station, we had a few minutes to roam around and we finally found some postcards to buy! Our tour guide Mary was nice enough to trade us some Yuan for a $5.00 bill. If we hadn't found those postcards we would have failed to acquire a postcard for our door! By the time we got back to the ship it was 9:15PM, and it was too late to go anywhere else to look for one.
We froze our butts off all day, because we weren't used to it being legitimately winter! We went from hot and humid to ice cold in just two days. Next time we will be properly prepared!
We wrapped up the day with dinner in the ship's Lido buffet, and I watched a couple Babylon 5's and wrote this record of the day. D took a nice long shower.
I wouldn't mind coming back to Hangzhou someday to see it when it looks nice. But, I don't want to mess around with nasty unhealthy pollution. Maybe in 10 years the Chinese government will have changed their ways and things will be clearing up. Maybe someday we will come back again, but no time soon.
Next Stop: Pusan, South Korea (March 15, 2016)
Special Report! Davin’s Take: China- Portents of a Dystopian Future
I found our experience in China to be absolutely horrifying. It was like something out a dystopian sci-fi movie. Terribly polluted air, food and water. Millions of people clustered into a huge, ugly, unending city. No rights or freedom of expression. Everyone just a cog in some massive, impersonal machine.
Shanghai is by far the most terrible city I have ever seen. It was everything bad about Los Angeles (massive sprawl), mashed up with everything bad about New York City (huge population; cramped living). It took one hour for us to travel from the ship to the train station, and during that time we saw nothing but mile after mile of hideous, cookie-cutter high-rise apartment buildings. Even the train station was monolithic in size, inspiring both awe and terror.
The air quality was absolutely abysmal, with everything tinted a nice hazy gray, and the sky a solid white. This wasn’t just a rainy or cloudy day as we know them, it was a completely dismal, gray day. There was no evidence of rain at all, and the fact the buildings in the not-very-distance were obscured by a gray haze gave away the fact that it was pollution. In Hangzhou, the pollution was so bad and the train station was so large, that you could actually see the haze inside the station when looking from one end to the other!
Economists are all gaga over the fact that China has grown their economy at 10% per year for the past three decades, but that development has only come at a great cost. In trying to do in decades what took the U.S. and Europe centuries, they have absolutely decimated their environment. Their citizens can now afford iPhones, but they can’t count on going outside and experiencing a nice sunny day; they can’t count on the food and water they consume not being filled with toxins! As far as I can see, their absolutely breakneck pace of development wasn’t worth it!
Ten years ago China already had problems with pollution. So, what did they do? Did they change course? No, they just continued on as they were, building more and more coal power plants, and dumping toxins into their rivers. And– surprise, surprise!– things just continued to get worse. Are they changing things now? We can only hope so. It’s clear that things cannot continue to get much worse here without the country becoming completely unlivable!
It seems like half the things in the store today are “Made in China”, but it’s not just because of the low wages. They’ve clearly gone out of their way to trash their own country in order to make things at such rock bottom prices. And, in doing so, I firmly believe they have ended up with the short end of the stick. The unfortunate truth is that coal power plants, and dirty industries should never have been deployed on such a scale– it truly is terrifying!
Popular belief seems to be that China will be dominant power of the next century. The question in my mind is whether China (as we know it) will even be here in twenty or thirty years. I’m afraid they may not be able to come back from all the damage they have inflicted on themselves.
And the saddest thing is, none of this is really the fault of the Chinese people. They are basically powerless to influence their own government’s policies. Their lives are entirely at the whims of Communist Party technocrats whose policies have trashed the country, while they loot the spoils and move to other countries which are actually livable. It’s all very sad.
I just hope that China is not a precedent of what is to come in the future, because it is not a world that you or I would want to live in! Even if you take away the pollution, their population is clearly too large, resulting in sprawling, overpopulated and completely soulless cities. Economists dread declining populations since they are completely fixated on GDP growth, but no one in the real world lives on GDP growth. There are many more immediate concerns that impact quality of life. It’s obvious that China simply has too many people and everyone there would be happier if there were half as many of them.
The other thing that concerns me for the future is that if China continues to pollute so heavily, despite the very immediate problems they have with pollution and its effect on people’s health, then how can we possibly hope that they will make changes to address the far more distant and nebulous problem of global warming? We can only hope that the need to clean up pollution will indirectly encourage them to adopt clean technologies that will also combat global warming.
Of all the countries we visited on the entire trip (which, granted, were all relatively safe and stable), China was literally the last place I’d want to live! If you’re thinking of visiting China right now, I’d say don’t even bother. It’s not worth it when you’re entirely at the whims of the weather pattern blowing the pollution away from where you’re visiting. I understand that pollution in Beijing, which is probably the prime place to visit, is even worse than elsewhere in the country!
Hopefully in another ten or twenty years China will have gotten their act together. Otherwise, I suspect we’ll all have bigger problems than where to go on vacation.
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