China in Africa

We take a break from the travel blog today for this piece - a documentary (on Al Jazeera, interestingly) about the growing number of Chinese expats in Africa - in particular in Senegal. It's quite shockingly prejudiced and racist on both sides, but provides an interesting glimpse into China's global expansion and African involvement - or colonization, as some people call it.

Xichang, August 5

Monkeys!!! Real, wild, mischievous monkeys! We saw them close up, only a couple of meters away! Of course, none of the (Chinese) tourists gave a damn about the "do not feed" signs, and some of the monkeys got very pissed at a fat boy trying to tease them by throwing stuff at them (we were quite tempted to throw the fat kid himself).




And that's all there is exciting to say about Xichang. It's next to Qionghai Lake (a night train ride south of Chengdu), which could be nice if it wasn't entirely gentrified and over-crowded with tourists and kitschy boats. The first time we had trouble finding a hotel - everything nice seemed booked out. Glad to get out of here and on to Yunnan, even if it means another 8 hour bus ride.

Chongqing, August 2-4

We hadn't planned on coming to Chongqing at all, but we sorta got stuck in Chengdu - there was no train onwards to our preferred Yunnan destination for the next few days, so we decided to make a little eastern detour... And now we like it so much we wish we could stay longer! I can't say what it is, but Chongqing has a really cool vibe to it. It's insanely hot though, 36 degrees during the day and 29 at night. In contrast to Chengdu it's sunny (well, hazy), which makes it seem even hotter.

"Green" seems to be his city's new "thing" :) Our hotel is "green," meaning they encourage you to save water and they turn off the Christmas light-like decorations at 11pm (or did I miss something?), the Intercontinental's restaurant has a green special - organic pork, chicken, fish, veggies... I guess it's because Chongqing has already been through all the growth and modernization (as one of the special development zones), so they need to find something new. It does have a very "Manhatten" feel to it - skyscrapers and narrow roads - but even more vertical. I guess it's the fact that the peninsula is very hilly that makes for the charme of it - there are many small winding lanes full of tiny old house hugging the hillside and on top of the hill you suddenly find yourself looking into the 10th floor of a new apartment building that is built right into the steep hillside. The new is just built atop the old, the city seems to be endlessly growing upwards. Older buildings are swallowed by the muddy waters of the Yangzi (which has risen in the last few years because of the Three Gorges Dam). It all feels very SciFi but real at the same time.

Chongqing's setting is quite spectacular, the city center lies on a peninsula between the Yangzi and Jialing River, from the tip of the peninsula you can watch the "jade green Jialing river meet the less photogenic, brown Yangzi." It was more of a "yellow-brown meets dark brown" at our time of visit, but to be fair, this might be due to heavy rains that wash a lot of mud into the river. We got a pretty frightening demonstration of that on our way through the mountains in northern Sichuan.

Our hotel is quite... special :) We seem to live in Disneyland :) It's a hotel/restaurant/shopping complex built into the cliffs facing the Jialing river. The lobby is up on the street on the 11th floor and we live beneath on the 8th. We have our own private balcony with a stunning view - if you ignore the plastic pirate ship and fake waterfall it's really quite scenic. There's a restaurant street on the 4th floor and "folk art" (translate "tourist kitsch") on the 3rd. It's really weird to have your hotel exit onto a street in the middle of the building, so to speak. On the other side of the river we can see a huge, ship-shaped new building. No idea what it is, but they project commercials on it at night. Very spacey...

We watched the sun set from a bar on the 39th floor, sipping sake-cocktails and quite liked the city...

And the interior designer of our hotel certainly had a good sense of humor! :)

Zigong, August 1-2

"Zigong is a pleasant surprise" - for once we agree with the Lonely Planet. There's really nothing much to say about the town, it's mostly "harmless" but certainly not touristy. It deserves the title "least gentrified city China's". It seems not to have arrived in the 21st century yet. Not that it's traditional in any way, it just looks like 1990s a lot.

Zigong

Just strolling around through the hilly lanes is quite pleasant, there's street food everywhere (tasty crispy pancake), people catch fish in the muddy river or play Mahjong in the tea houses (one in an old temple is quite cozy, another in a former guild house quite impressive). The city rose to fame because of its salt, there's a museum in a former guild house that exhibits methods of drilling and such fascinating things... the complex is beautiful, the old building has not been over-restored, so there's still original paint on the walls here and there and a layer of green moss on the stone courtyard.

And I think that's all I have to say about it.

For foodies only!

So, when I said that Chengdu has good food... hell, did I ever mean it! :) One restaurant that definitely needs a review is the Yunmen, the only Nouvelle Cuisine Chinoise restaurant we have found so far. It simply blew our minds (well, also our credit card... but still cheaper than any comparable restaurant in the West and you would be hard pressed to find this kind of crossover/fusion executed at such a level anywhere in the west). Basically, their dishes fall into three categories - traditional Sichuan/Cantonese/Hunan dishes executed as they were meant for heaven, Mediterranean inspired Chinese and... molecular cuisine! I'd never thought to find this in China, so let's jump right into it...

[Disclaimer: we did NOT eat all of this in one evening!]

Molecular Cuisine:

Salmon-Papaya Tartar served with milk that was poured over dry ice in a glass... that's what the bubbles are :) Ok, that was just for show, but a lot of fun. The tartar was maybe a teeny-weeny bit over-seasoned instead of letting the fish speak for itself (har, no wonder!)... but then I can only name a couple of restaurants worldwide that don't do this.

Chicken strips in chili oil, served with mushroom sauce. The gadget is the sauce, which is the thing sitting on top pf the chicken that looks like a mushroom head. Burst the bubble (I should stop writing when drinking, or drink more so my jokes get better) - really, it's a spherificated liquid :-P - and you have chicken in tasty sauce! Not that there was anything wrong with chili oil... actually, one of the other memorable dishes we had in Chengdu was lotus root served in orange juice with a layer of chili oil atop the juice. Yum! So simple, so effective, makes the perfect amuse gueule!

Peas with bacon next to Listerine... oops I mean, mint extract. This is really a play on the Italian pasta recipe for peas/bacon/mint, I believe, but since the mint extract had a foam and the peas were interlaced with starchy balls (tapioca? Chinese desserts seem to have an infinite variety of the little texture spheres, I could never figure out their purpose), it counts at least as crossover in my book, I mean, blog. Apart from the mouthwash, quite tasty.

Low-temperature salmon with nuts. The fish was great, apparently cooked at long time at low temperature, so very juicy and melty, just a little overwhelmed by the Chili-"Bolognese" (not sure that's what they were aiming for). The colorful bits'n'pieces are pickled radish and carrot, which pulled the dish back into the oriental direction. Couldn't figure out the foam... probably just skim milk.


Heavenly Chinese cuisine:


Tea smoked duck. Really, it's a classic. But I have never tasted so much actual tea flavour inside the duck meat. As a nice little extra, the duck was served on a tea tray with a tiny bit of 红茶 black tea on the side. The smoked, warm meat rested on crispy-fried tea leaves. The skin was perfectly crispy and not fat. Light BBQ aromas... Not sure whether this is Sichuan, Cantonese or Beijing style roast duck? I have seen tea smoked duck on menus all over the place. But if given the choice, I'd eat it here again any time!

Three steamers - from left to right - pork belly (just melting...) on 莓干菜 preserved vegetable, rice flour steamed pork, pork in sweet sticky rice. I am at a loss of words to describe the harmony of flavours of the sweet pork fat with the salty preserved vegetable or the satisfying richness of the sticky rice, drenched in molten pork fat. Now I understand why one of my Chinese friends loves the rice flour steamed pork... I guess the key is that the ground rice has the most surface, so it can absorb the most fat :)

The dish in front is goose with stinging nettle... not really that Chinese, there were no bones in the meat! And we could not figure out what the crunchy little worms were...

Rice pot - highly recommended by our waiter. It looks so simple, it is so simple, but ohmygod does it taste good. The whole thing was stirred with a dash of soy sauce before serving, so it just had the right saltiness to the steamed preserved meat's sweetness. The iron skillet was still hot, so the rice formed a crispy layer at the bottom... pork fat crispy :)

Spicy tea tree mushrooms. They were so spicy, we had trouble eating them, which makes me guess this was a Hunan dish (the restaurant actually has three different menus, and it's clearly indicated what is what, but hey! Do you expect me to sit there with a little notebook, writing down what we eat?! Well, I do, of course :-P, but occasionally I miss a detail)

OhgoodlordIthinkImdying mushroom soup. This baby was actually the most expensive item on our bill (500RMB) but man was it worth it! I have no idea how many little mushroom animals they had to kill for it, and I'm sure it also involved a phoenix or some other bird (we think the yellow colour comes from the bird's fat), three days of stewing, blood sacrifices and fortunate moon phases. The addition of morels and a black truffle (I'm still not putting it in the Italian-inspired category, because the truffle really wasn't that great and didn't add that much to the flavour - only to the bill) before serving didn't hurt either.

Crab mushroom soup served in clay tea pot, to be drunk from tiny tea cups. Another mesmeric flavour orgy.

Calligraphy set dessert - the "ink slabs" were really black sesame sponge cakes. The ink was black sesame paste, which you could use with the pastry brushes (filled with red bean paste) to paint on the waver-thin, flower scented crepes. Not sure what the sugar-sesame bars would represent in an actual calligraphy set.

Mh, I wonder... Can you tell I enjoy writing about food much more than about travel? :)

Yunmen Emerald Restaurant
Block 1, no. 27, section 4, Renmin Nanlu, Wuhou Qu, Chengdu, Sichuan,
tel +86 (0) 28 8602 6999/ 8535 3888



[they do have a rather... interestingly... decorated lobby :)]

Chengdu, July 27-31

It started off as a love affair - the hostel has clean, new (hotel standard) double rooms for the ridiculous price of 120 yuan (=$20) and we have the famous "pock-marked Grandma Chen's bean curd" right around the corner. The love wore off a bit after we discovered that their internet connection is a joke and practically useless and electricity is not a given - there's a power outage for several hours every night. They must be scheduled because the power comes back at 1am, so I guess it's to save electricity on the really hot days (of which we had a few recently, probably around 37C). But then, the roach we spotted crawling over the table in the common room didn't help...

Ah... Chengdu :) Finally back in the city! I feel much more like a fish in the water here :) It is really nice - full of parks and temples and tea houses - they're really everywhere! We went to the People's Park, which among monuments for the Martyrs of the 1911 Railroad Protection movement, also houses several tea houses that were packed to the brim. We spotted a string of white sheets of paper - at closer inspection they turned out to be personal ads for soliciting marriage. On the form you were asked to list you age, income, educational background, whether you own an apartment and if you were ever married/had kids. There were a lot from elder men, but also young people aged 27-30 were among them. The salary range I saw was 1,500-5,000RMB (so a postdoc would be in the middle range - thank goodness I don't have to worry about that anymore ;-)). I wouldn't be surprised if most of the people reading that were not looking for themselves but for their sons or daughters.

We also visited a Taoist Temple - they are becoming my favorite :) This one was called the green ram temple and is pretty huge. It has a copper goat statue which is highly revered by locals and therefore has a very shiny beard. Next to it is another statue which supposedly represents parts of all 12 zodiac animals... but we couldn't figure them out.

For dinner we tried our old strategy - go to the best hotel in town. In this case a Sofitel. The food was pretty good, but did not live up to our hopes. And they sold us something that clearly tasted like pork as deer - maybe some kind of tapir? ;-) The braised eel with preserved pork (air cured and salted) was pretty good though, it came with mushrooms. And we have to give the hotel credit for it's great cocktails (that's a first in China!) and wireless internet. So they pretty much satisfy the needs we can't get met in our hostel :) The Sheraton has the better ice cream though (chocolate ice cream over caramelized bananas? Try this at home! Topped with caramelized nuts, whipped cream and shaved chocolate) - but what are Buddhist monks doing there? Admittedly, they were only drinking what looked like apple juice, but what prompted them to go in there in the first place? Did they stay there? We already witnessed senior monks/masters being driven around in their cars and of course every single one owns a cell phone, but it's not the typical yak-butter scented image of monastic life, is it?

Chengdu is also full of street food and fresh fruit (many different kinds of melons and we had an awesome mango). Somehow it reminds me of Nanjing, though a bit less chaotic and cleaner (public toilets are actually usable - you don't faint from the smell within 5min). It feels bigger and it's more spread out. Space is maybe not so scarce here as in the east. The outskirts look a lot like Shanghai, actually - apartment buildings over apartment buildings, all at least 20 stories high, clustered in parks. The only difference is, there's more space between them (and they're not that many). I guess they'll fill that in in the coming years. We drove by one apartment complex that looked definitely American, very much L.A. like, and even the 4 lane highway with nothing left or right reminded us of the States. Downtown has older apartment buildings, many seem to be from the sixties, and although they seem to have a nice living atmosphere, the habit of just throwing garbage out of your window (sometimes onto the neighboring roof) also prevails here. Sadly.

Trip to Huanglong Xi - another yellow dragon. A village that is so picturesque, allegedly over 150 films were shot here. Well, If you ever wondered why the backdrop in Chinese films looks so fake - there you have it. According to the Lonely Planet, this place has been "beautified for tourists, but by and large it's been done right." What does that mean about wrong?! Nevertheless, we got some pretty good fish and tofu in a riverside restaurant that also had cold beer - what more can you ask for? Maybe for a little less harassment from the people offering massage or ear cleaning in tea houses. But it's quite fun to sit in this bustling atmosphere, with people gambling over cards or playing mahjong, others selling snacks, most just dozing off in the summer heat. Was it worth the one-hour bus ride here? Probably not, but we're not in any hurry...

Leshan - another touristy town that has acquired fame status, due to a 71m meter high sitting Buddha statue. The town seems to have cashed in proper, I have never seen so many fancy apartment buildings in a town this small. Well, good on them, but why can't they have something good to eat for lunch then? We followed a Lonely Planet recommendation for something "a little fancy" - did I mention that this book SUCKS???? Big time?! That was the most insulting food I had so far. What a waste of a meal. At least we found a nice coffee house, it seems to be a chain "Good wood(!) coffee"whose theme is Austrian Kaffeehaus - or their take on it at least. Everything is decorated in cutest little flower designs and the waitresses wear light blue dresses with frills and apron - couldn't help but being reminded of Austria :) They must have stolen that concept from a similar place in Japan, though, because the deep bow we received from all the waitresses was neither Austrian nor Chinese... Coolest thing - they had a GO-board! So the afternoon was saved - at least for B. who was happy to have someone who'd indulge him in playing a board game :) It was just too unbelievably hot outside anyway. We had been watching a crowd, who - under Buddhist chantings - was releasing fish into the local river. They formed a row and handed bucket-loads (literally) of fish from one to another, all the way from the water-tank truck parked on the curb down the stairs to the river bank. A few monks and nuns were there to direct the spectacle, not sure if it was them who had bought the fish to be set free. Apparently, it's a Buddhist custom to buy animals from captivity and set them free - I guess it's good for your karma and stuff. At a sizzling 37 degrees outside, I am sad to report not all the fish made it alive down to the water (they also had been cooped up in the tank that was loaded to the brim, standing in the sun) , but I guess it's the intention that counts? What else? Oh right, the giant Buddha. It sits there alright. Supposedly pacifying the waters of the fast-flowing Dadu river (which locals use to jump in the river and let themselves be hauled along, just to climb out a few hundred meters downstream - a fun past-time if the river wouldn't look so damn brown - actually, they bathe in the second river, the Minjiang, but they're both equally brown), but probably it was the rubble that fell into the stream when the Buddha was carved out of the rock that did the job. We have to stop visiting places because there's something "there."

Sichuan opera - well, the touristy version of it. We got a compilation of genres - opera, dance, music, fire spitting and face changing... unfortunately, most of the music was not live, and the singing that was was pretty bad. The male dancers clearly have a basic kung fu training, it looks like martial acrobatics (watch "Farewell my concubine" for the more or less true history of Beijing opera). The female dancers basically just walk around in tiny steps and wave their long shawls, or head feathers in this case, which had a rather comical effect. The face changing was truly impressive though. With a wave of a hand or fan they change their masks - you can't figure out how they do it even if you watch very closely. I once saw a movie about an old face changing master. The key, as I remember, was that the masks are painted on extremely thin rice paper. But I don't remember what they do with them - suck them into the mouth maybe? That would not explain the whole body costume change though... We also got a "solo" by an Erhu-player (that's a two-stringed instrument, played upright held on one's knee, which can make sounds from a howling cat to a screaming horse), which might have been good if it hadn't been for the overly sentimental background music, that was clearly not played by traditional instruments and did not feel traditional at all. The part I liked best was an excerpt from a traditional opera - the fight of Liu ??? with three ???, something about the Han dynasty shall rule... I would like to see the whole story (with English captions) and have some decent singers for a change. Those were clearly not the freshest anymore, or they were quite drunk, they seemed to have a hard time moving straight in their heavy costumes.

All in all we liked Chengdu quite a lot. It's so relaxing to be in a place where not everybody gapes at you because you're a "Longnose" and you can just go about your own business... and enjoy the good food :)

Songpan, July 25-26

Back in Nanjing! It's gonna take a while to post all the blog entries I have written on our epic journey - I hope you'll bear with me :)

This place is totally over-hyped. Supposedly it's so cute, so historic (all fake, the city wall is full of kitsch statues of guards and reproductions of catapults). It's a "gateway" to Jiuzhaigou and Huanglong Parks, but the roads are so bad (through mountains and under construction) it takes over two hours to get there. We only went to Huanglong, because Jiuzhaigou is supposedly even more crowded. To do both just seems like more of the same and they both charge considerable entrance fees (200yuan and more). Huanglong means Yellow Dragon and the name is due to the yellow limestone sediments that wind along a valley like a long Chinese dragon... ok, you need quite a bit of fantasy to see the dragon shape. But the limestone forms pools in all shades of yellow, orange, brown and the water in it has all shades of turquoise - it's really pretty. Whenever a log, root or some other natural barrier is covered with the lime stone sediment it forms an edge and altogether they make for this web of natural terraces. It has to be seen to be believed. The Unesco thought the same and declared it a World Heritage Site (we're starting to realize just how full of those China is), which means your usual good infrastructure, bus loads of tourists and high prices. Sadly, you can only follow a board walk and not roam around by yourself, but given what we saw other tourists do - throw around litter, climb over fences - it seems very necessary to preserve the park. I hate to sound judgmental, but Chinese make really terrible, inconsiderate tourists. No respect for the environment. The park's high entrance fee is probably due to the hoards of garbage collectors they employ.

Songpan is also famous for offering horse treks - but B. declined :) There's a pedestrian street in the center, but it mostly has shoe stores. And on the outskirts they are building "New Songpan," it looks as if it will double the number of inhabitants once it's occupied. All in all, absolutely not worth the torturous bus ride. But it's nice to eat some Chinese food for a change! What's the hype with all the Tibetans? Their food is miserable and everything smells like yak butter! Why always Tibet, Tibet, Tibet??? Is it so strange if a tourist in China actually wants to see Han Chinese things and eat Chinese food? The Lonely Planet seems to think so. On the other hand, their guide book for Bangkok recommends you go to Chinatown there... notice a theme?