Day 96 Shanghai (day 4)

Our last day in Shanghai is spent at the People's Square and the enormous People's Park. Shanghai's "Central Park" and central square are built on the site of colonial Shanghai's horse-racing track (dating to as early as 1863), once a favorite amusement for the British community and upper-class Chinese. Today, the original 12 hectares (30 acres) of the racecourse have been parceled out into a quiet, pleasant parkThe girls are hopeful that it will be a place to run and play but are disappointed to find that on first impression it is a few patches of green but that the park is mostly given over to formal, Chinese gardens, huge lily ponds, flower bed lined linear paths and many and varied pagodas and pavilions.  

Besides being a magnet for locals who come here to feed the pigeons, fly their kites, and gossip on the benches, the square, surrounded as it is by some of Shanghai's tallest and most modern buildings is a refuge in the busy metropolis.

 Consulting the park map we find there is a designated  "old people's" exercise area, amusement rides, and clusters of old folks playing mah-jongg and chess, and to the girls' delight a children's playground. This turns out to be a kind of state owned permanent fun fair for the "entertainment of the masses". It is relatively expensive in comparison to  the cost of a meal but we relent and the girls choose 2 rides each.

 

They both enjoy the old fashioned swing chairs and then the mini dragon roller coaster. We are learning that Tiegan is a closet adrenalin junkie and is the one who is keen to try the more daring activities we encounter. She was disappointed in NZ that she was below the age and/or weight limit for bungee jumping (even with our consent) and also that her parents were too wallet conscious to pay for a tandem skydive! In the park she has been eyeing a particularly vomit inducing pendulum spinny thing (hard to describe!) and convinces us that she would like to ride it.

 

Apart from one other very unlikely candidate she rides alone - we take our hats off to her utter bravery and watch in amazement as she enjoys the experience!  

We leave Shanghai by our second sleeper train and head overnight to the mysteries of the capital, Beijing. 

Day 95 Shanghai (day 3)

We finally make it to the Yuyuan Gardens located in the centre of the Old City and considered to be one of the most lavish and finest Chinese gardens in the region.

 It occupies an area of 5 acres, and is divided into six general areas laid out in the Suzhuo style, each area separated by "dragon walls" with undulating gray tiled ridges, each terminating in a dragon's head.
 We try to take the metro but find Line 10 closed when we reach our station, there are officials barring the way and they tell us the station and Line 10 is closed till further notice. We are a bit stumped and we are not alone, even the locals don't seem to know what is going on and there a noisy exchanges as people try to find out what has happened. We eventually manage to hail a taxi to take us the rest of the way. The driver does his best but we find the road gridlocked - there is traffic chaos, nothing is moving. A combination of his picture phrasebook, our Chinese/English dictionary and lot of pointing we gather that something more serious has happened - initially we suspect a road accident. Despite a series of turns, side roads and back doubles, we eventually walk the rest of the way.

 

It is only as we leave the Gardens and try to make our way back to the hotel via the adjacent Line 10 underground station that we find a gathered crowd, police cordons, the media and TV crews filming live that we find out that there has been a train collision just minutes before we tried to board this morning.  Thankfully there were no fatalities and as we slowly make our way across the city we realise we have had a lucky escape.

We take our minds off the days events with a show at Shanghai Circusworld - ERA -  a large, indoor modern circus that showcases performances. The performance targeted at travellers is ERA - Intersection of Time, a journey into the history of Shanghai with acrobatic acts and motorbikes.

 

 

 

It was utterly breathtaking, captivating and jaw droppingly good and we ooh and aah and applaud. Truly amazing stuff!

Hong Kong to Shanghai Day 92, 93, 94

This morning we visit our first Chinese temple which is located on the next street and so seems a shame to miss. It is the Tin Hau temple which is dedicated to the Goddess of the Sea.The hanging incense coils in red and yellow last a week and are lit by families to bring good fortune.

We collect our bags and catch the bus to Hung Hom before entering what can only be described as a customs scrum. Here we have our first insight on what was to come. Sheer and utter madness! Fortunately we make it through the sea of pushing, barging and charging Chinese and locate carriage 9 and our little home for the night. In the coming days "make like the Chinese" will become well used for queues, rail platforms and crossing the road as the only way to move from a to b seems to be in a hurry, with force and a total disregard for fellow man. We are in a soft sleeper compartment which has 4 bunks, a lockable door, air conditioning and a refillable jug of boiling water. Top ups from the boiling water tap at the end of the carriage. The washrooms are pretty dire, a  "squatty potty" as it becomes known and only halfway through the night do we discover that at the other end of our carriage there is a "sitter"! The guard visits us and checks our passports and paper tickets, exchanging them for a plastic version - this will then be exchanged back when she knocks again an hour before we reach our destination.  The girls enjoy a gourmet supper of Pot Noodle before snuggling down in the top bunks for the night. The bunks are firm (read hard!) and David and I contemplate the coming weeks as we enter China proper.

Shanghai - Day 1

 

An early start as we arrive in Shanghai. Another scrum to exit the train, go through immigration, ticket checking and then spill onto the street. There are hundreds and hundred of people in the area in front of the station and at this point realise that we have no Chinese RMB to pay for a taxi (only Hong Kong dollars). After an expedition of epic proportions and several ATMs later and cash in hand we make it the Shanghai Lange hotel and a room which is about 10 times the size of our room in Hong Kong. The staff, however, have almost no English whatsoever and this makes for several very interesting hotch potch conversations, them speaking Cantonese and us trying to point to phrases from the guidebook, comedy mimes and exasperation on all sides. By the end of our stay we give up even trying as it is just too frustrating.

 

We head to the Yu Gardens by taxi, but are dropped off in the wrong place and so end up in the very touristy, very busy Yunnan Marketplace. There is such a buzz of people here, so many sights, smells and sounds to take in. We wander for a bit, admiring the obviously restored (targetted at tourists) buildings and eventually find our way to the waterfront as the evening draws in. The girls have had more than their fair share of attention and Tiegan is feeling thoroughly hacked off and very self conscious as we fend off yet another native trying to surruptiously take a photo of her.

 

We watch the lights come on across the river in the Pudong - the business district and the neon light covered pleasure boats which criss cross their way along both banks.

Shanghai - Day 2
We start our day with a trip on the Maglev Train - travelling at 370 km an hour - all the way to the airport and back again! It is the first commercially operated high-speed magnetic levitation line in the world. Deceptively smooth as journeys go - and it is not until we watch the train pulling back out from the station and disappear into the distance that we realise just how fast we have been moving.

Shanghai - one of the fastest growing cities in the world in terms of skyscraper construction. We decide to visit the tallest building in China - the World Financial Centre, complete with the world's highest observation deck -but when we get there are shocked that it will cost over £100 to travel to the viewing platform on floor 84. We all come to the conclusion that having been at the top of other tall building, our money would be better spent elsewhere.

We seek the relative quiet of the  exclusive IFC plaza home to many top Western brands and the relative famiiarity of the "Apple" store as David's iPod has given up the ghost and we need to see if it can be mended. Sadly it is an ex iPod. While we are here Tiegan decides that she would like a  haircut; Rowan eventually agrees to a trim, and we travel to the 4th floor to Il Colpo - a Hong Kong based chain which appears to be aimed squarely at the more affluent and aspirational Shanghai "lady of leisure". The lovely Alex Shen takes care of the girls and they receive "star" treatment, hair washes in a very groovy darkened shampoo room with lights on the ceiling and reclining massage chair, as many elaborately decorated soft drinks as they could guzzle and quite a lot of sucking up!

 

Tiegan, thoroughly fed up with the attention of the masses, makes the drastic decision to have a big restyle... results below!

 By the time we leave our afternoon has slipped away and the evening has arrived. We head back to the hotel via the Bund Tunnel. A pedestrian transit tunnel crosses the Huangpu River from the Bund. Passengers board slow-moving powered vehicles which travel along the tunnel, with light effects projected onto the walls of the tunnel. Obviously someone somewhere saw a gap in the market to transform a perfectly ordinary commuter avenue into a money generating tourist attraction and so the Tunnel experience was born. Every inch of the entrance, stairs and walkways are lined with traders and hawkers selling their "reproduction" clothes, luggage, cds, dvds etc . Amazing to the western eye that it is so blatant, so accepted and so ignored by authority. It becomes a very common sight wherever we travel and we all comment about the sheer amount of stuff and tat on offer. Piles and heaps. Where has it all come from, where will it all go and what will happen to it when it is finished with?  The tunnel itself is all a bit of a bizarre experience - a bit like the tunnel in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, all a bit surreal and a bit wierd!