A woman walking her water buffalo past some rice fields in rural China. The colors were breathtaking. You can just make out the karsts rising in the background. We took this near Guilin, China.
Kayaking the Li
You’ve all seen those Chinese watercolor paintings that hang in every Chinese restaurant and shop, that show the limestone karsts rising above a tranquil river. Typically, there’s a person on a bamboo raft, with a conical hat, on that painted river. Well, that Shangri-La actually exists. And it’s called the Li River.
The Li stretches between Yangshuo and Guilin, in the interior of China, in the Guangxi province.
The best place to experience the Li is starting from the village of Yangshuo (pop. over 300,000–i.e., a mere village in China), nestled in the tree-covered hills and karsts surrounding the river. It’s an hour or so from nearby Guilin (a small “town” of over 1.3 million). Now, be sure to get on the right bus to Guilin–unlike we did–because you could end up some 300 miles to the south, in Yulin, due to a slight pronunciation error. But that’s another story…
In Yangshuo, we stayed in a hotel called the Bamboo House. A double room with a view, A/C, a TV, DVD player and dozens of bootleg DVDs (why?) was only about $14 USD.
You can arrange to rent kayaks from the folks at the hotel. Early morning, they drove us deep into the country and let us off at the river’s edge with a couple of cheap kayaks and very vague directions on where we’d meet our pick-up later that day. We had the river to ourselves.
It was beautiful: white birds flew over the calm water. Water buffalo waded in to watch us pass. Storm clouds passed the nearby mountains. Occasionally, a fisherman on a skiff would pass by. There, we had the only peace and quiet we experienced anywhere in China. Just like in the watercolor paintings.
Just Fake It!
Many folks, these days, are traveling for more than just sightseeing, they’re going shopping. With the dollar lingering near all-time lows versus some major world currencies, many shopping tourists are traveling to the States. However, some real shopping bargains exist elsewhere, particularly in the rip-off goods category.
My trip last year to China was a real eye-opener: the major markets all sold knock-off goods openly, while big, red banners, hang across all entrances, proclaiming “Maintain Intellectual Property” (one of the few signs anywhere in China written in English). (I’m still trying to figure out what the banners that said “Striking Forbid Illegal Management Activities of Soliciting Goods” mean, but that’s another story …)
These huge open-air markets are enough to make brand-name companies fume, with brands like North Face, Nike, Victorinox, and Columbia Sportswear and others all featured prominently, for pennies on the dollar. They don’t even bother with the spelling errors (you’ve seen them: “Addidas”) or mismatched teams (e.g., “Atlanta Braves Football Club”). The rip-offs are so realistic, it’s hard to tell them from the real thing, and it’s all right there in the open. It puts Canal Street to shame for sheer audacity.
But it’s not just China that’s in the big business of selling black-market items. They’re being sold across Europe too, usually in Asian-run boutiques. The shoe pictured above was featured prominently in the window of a downtown Barcelona shoe store just last month. Note the altered swoosh. I can hear Phil Knight screaming …
Building or Chinese Menu Item?
Seeing pictures of the proposed new biomedical research center in Chengdu, China (Szechuan province) reminded me of some menu items I tried in that city last year. One reporter called the proposed building “the blob.”
The Szechuan province, of course, is home to that terrific spicy food that is ubiquitous in Chinese restaurants everywhere, usually on the menu right next to an asterisk or a nearby ‘chili pepper’ icon, signifying “this food is hot as hell.”
The traditional and most popular way of eating food in Chengdu is the hotpot. Basically, you’re given a large bowl of boiling, flavored oil that sits atop your table, while you cook skewers of various foods in the oil–kind of like fondue without the cheese. Most of the time, you have some rough idea of what it is you’re cooking, since you picked it off the shelf yourself. The best oil, we were told, was as old as possible: as oil burned off and was eaten, the bowl was topped up; if you cleaned the bowl and used fresh oil, you killed the taste. The older the oil, the better. The table has a hole in it and sits above an industrial-sized propane tank and burner, one to each table. With the cooking-oil-slick floors and open flames everywhere, it’s an American trial-lawyer’s dream.
Back to the building: the building, it seems, was meant to look like a cell, peppered with meeting room pods which were meant to look like embedded proteins around the outside. And the shape? You can see for yourself. Care for a dip in the interior’s “mitochondrial” pools?
Yep, looks and sounds like something I’d be dunking in a bath of ancient, bubbling oil, filled with chili oil and fish heads.
Kung Pao Chicken with Olives?
One of the great joys of traveling is undoubtedly the food one gets to sample. That applies not only to the local specialties. When traveling, I always like to taste how different cultures handle cuisines that are exotic to them. For example, how often do you see mayonaise on those fries that came with your burger? That’s how you’ll normally get them in Europe.
Chinese or Thai cuisines are my favorite ‘culture barometers,’ since they taste completely different everywhere: each culture injects a bit of their own taste into it. In Prague, for example, you will be hard-pressed to find a Chinese restaurant that does not automatically serve their dishes with parsley, cucumber and tomato (the two Czech staple vegetables) on the side. In the US, on the other hand, you almost always get the convenient ¨soup, eggroll or salad¨ choice with your Chinese meals. I certainly did not see that anywhere in China.
Today on the Costa Brava in Spain, I actually saw Kung-Pao chicken garnished with lettuce and olives. Part of the Spanish-Chinese diet, I imagine?