Chengdu

There has been some recent publicity about the posting of an Australian Consulate-General to Chengdu.  Chengdu is well known as being the location of a major panda reserve, the home of spicy hot Sichuan food and as a centre for the Sichuan opera (noted for its incredible face changing masks).     Australia already has a Trade Commissioner, Jeff Turner, based there, who gave a glowing write up of Chengdu on the business pages of the Australian this week - although I couldn't locate it on the newspaper's website (and yet they're trying to sell subscriptions for electronic access?)

Quiet side street

Turner mentioned Chengdu's expanding position as a regional hub for transport and logistic services, its "good food [and] urbane and civilised approach to life" and the fact that ANZ Bank has established its Chinese language support centre there.  And he didn't see any need to mention the pandas at all!


Having only spent one night there, I am certainly not in a position to comment on Chengdu's virtues or aspirations, but it wasn't until I started googling that I found out that, since February, there have been 3 non-stop flights between Chengdu and Melbourne each week, operated by Sichuan Airways.   This airline also operates flights between Chengdu and Vancouver, but there doesn't appear to be an English language version of its website.

Infrastructure under construction at Chengdu

It certainly reminds us that there is far more to China than the Hong Kong/Guangzhou, Shanghai and Beijing regions.   I suspect that at present the tourism flow is from Chengdu to Australia, but maybe the day will come when Australians looking for a short break at a different destination might head to Chengdu, especially as my quick look at airfares suggested that there are some good deals to be had and south-western China seems to have a lot to offer.

I was taken aback by the scale of construction activity

The obligatory panda photo!

The Maglev train

Our city tour of Shanghai included a return trip on the Maglev train.   It's certainly fast.  It reached 431 kmh for a short time, but it takes a bit of time to wind up to this speed and then to slow down again as it passes the other train before arriving at the airport.   It gets to from the airport to its city terminal in the Pudong area (which is some distance from the downtown Shanghai area) in less than 8 minutes. 

 
Contrary to some reports,  our trip was well patronised, although it must be said that were nearly as many tourists as there were airline passengers!

Pudong terminal

It all seems a bit "over-the-top" for such a short line, and obviously an airport to city connection isn't the optimal use of the technology.   I understand that there's a bit of history to it, and that the line is regarded as a "demonstration" line:    see Wikipedia.


 








 

China blog - moved

The postings in this blog about our China trip were made as we went.   I couldn't post images at the time, and a number of the posts didn't go into much detail.  After our return, I started to pad out the entries, but on further thought, I have now copied all the China entries into a separate blog (limited only to our China experience), and have added further images and, in some cases, some greater descriptions.  However, at least for the time being, I've also retained the China entries in this blog, but won't be updating them.

To see the updated blog, here's the link:
www.glimpseofchina.wordpress.com/

You'll notice that it's at Wordpress.   It's been interesting to compare Wordpress with Blogger/Blogspot.  They're fairly similar, and in particular, images don't always end up just where you want them in either of them.   However, as yet I haven't encountered in Wordpress some of the formatting issues (bugs?) that occasionally troubled me at Blogger, so that's a tick in its favour (so far).
I intend to maintain this blog for my non-China broodings.

China - impressions

A few thoughts occurred to me as a first time visitor to China, including --

Smoking – although it's quite common, it's not as pervasive as I had been expecting.

ID checks at airports – even on domestic flights there's an ID check as part of the security process.   For non-Chinese, this means producing your passport, just as if you're going through the immigration check on an international flight elsewhere.  I can speculate as to the reasons for this, but as I don't know for sure, it may be better if I don't!

Bridges and other infrastructure - nothing prepared me for the massive amount of infrastructure that has obviously been constructed in the past few years (and is still being constructed).  The Three Gorges project is an obvious case and is immense, but in addition there were bridges, roads (and road tunnels), railways (although we only glimpsed these), modern airports, metros in Shanghai and Beijing and massive housing developments. 

 
 

Domestic airlines and airports - our itinerary had 3 domestic flights (on, as it happened, 3 different airlines).   In all, we either arrived or departed (or both) from 4 separate airports.  Each airport was modern and efficient.   We didn't have any delays with check-in or, and baggage delivery was invariably prompt (I suspect that baggage handlers in China don't receive the same terms and conditions as those in Australia, so there are probably more of them!)     The aircraft were modern Boeings  737-800 (once) and A320s (twice).  We received a drink and snack on the daytime flights and a hot meal on the evening flight.  The catering was nothing fancy, but appreciated nevertheless.   On one flight, I saw one passenger receive a beer, but I didn't have the courage to see if I could obtain one.  However, there was certainly no wine, so perhaps on that score, Australian domestic airlines rank a little more highly!

A Group Tour of China

I  am, by nature, an “independent tourist”.   If at all possible, I prefer to research the options and make my own arrangements in line with my personal preferences.

Why, then, participate in a group tour in China?

Shortly stated, we wanted to see a number of the main sights in China, and we weren't confident about finding our way around a country with which we weren't familiar and where we were concerned that we wouldn't be able to decipher many of the signs (in fact, this wasn't the issue that I thought it would be, as many of the signs are in English as are even the spoken announcements on the Shanghai and Beijing metros). Hence, our choice of a package tour.   We reviewed a couple of the available offerings.  Our final decision was a Wendy Wu tour which included Shanghai, a 4 day cruise on the Yangtze, the pandas at Chengdu, the Terracotta Warriors at Xian and the sights of Beijing.

And we met .... Wendy Wu!

There are lots of other combinations available (both from Wendy Wu and others), and there are many, many things in China that we obviously didn't see, but one factor that particularly influenced us was the tour duration – 13 nights in China.   This represented the best balance for  us between seeing the things that were of interest to us without being too long.   We added a few extra days before the tour started to spend on our own in Shanghai (good decision!) plus an extra night at Beijing after completion of the tour (no regrets about this, it was great to get out and about but one day was enough).   In hindsight, the arrangements turned out well for us.

Although the publicity documentation refers to the tour as being “comfortably paced”, it was pretty “full on”!   We came to value the couple of hours “free time” that we were granted here and there.  We felt that by the end of the tour, we'd done enough!

Steps - Ghost City excursion

Some general observations may be of interest.

All the members of our group were “middle aged” or perhaps a little more!   So, had there been younger travellers,they might not have been entirely comfortable.   On the other hand, as the brochure clearly stated, there's a lot of walking, and  anyone not able to handle this would have real difficulties  A couple of the excursions involved a significant number of steps:  the “Ghost City” excursion as part of the cruise and the Great Wall component of the Beijing excursion.

As is probably the case of any tour of this nature, things would get “challenging” if someone couldn't keep up the pace.   A number of members of our group contracted a cold, and although this didn't interfere with their ability to participate, it did illustrate that, had something worse developed, it would have been very disruptive (an outbreak of food poisoning must be every tour packager's worst nightmare!).

It's interesting that Wendy Wu uses a lot of internal flights. A couple of this company's packages do have overnight train trips, but they're in the minority.  Our itinerary had 3 domestic flights (on, as it happened, 3 different airlines).   In all, we either arrived or departed (or both) from 4 separate airports.  Each one was modern and efficient.  

Beijing smog

The hotels were basically of a good 3-star standard, although they varied slightly in quality, but the locations in  Shanghai and Beijing left something to be desired.   For  tour members  content to confine themselves to tour activities (the majority, I think), this wouldn't be an issue, but especially for people who add a night or two extra in order to 'do their own thing', this isn't optimal.   However, I suppose people in this situation will be comfortable using taxis and or the metro (in our experience, easy to use).

All meals were included on our tour.   Hence, we weren't required to make our own arrangements even for lunch.   This was appreciated, although all meals (except breakfast) were “Chinese-style” and occasionally you hankered for a pizza or something!   Nevertheless, the meals were all of a high standard, and the dishes provided varied quite considerably.   All breakfasts included a range of “Western” options, although sometimes the queue for the toaster could be a little long!

One of the best aspects of our group was its compact size (16).   A parallel group of about the same size also operated.  On top of this, the national guide couldn't be faulted.  He  was across every detail of the arrangements, always followed up any queries, checked with you shortly after checking in to your room that everything was OK and so much more.     In addition, there was a city guide in each city, so on each excursion, there were always two guides present!   The quality of the city guides varied a little, but we certainly had no complaints.

The Yangtze cruise was the highlight of our tour.  This isn't to say that the other aspects weren't good;  they were.  But the cruise component was outstanding.   We were on the Victorian Jenna, which I gather is just a little more up-market than the Century line vessels that Wendy Wu also uses.

It's interesting how well the members of our group adapted.    I guess we sometimes (hopefully silently) deride tour groups that we see in Australia, but our group (including people from Australia, New Zealand and Britain) quickly adapted:  we wore our ID lanyards, we followed our guides (holding the flag) and we conscientiously assembled at designated meeting points!