Fishy hangover-cures & eternal damnation...

The Observer asked me to file an additional column this week to complement a special eco-travel edition, so I managed to write this effort below on my birthday before going out on the town to enjoy Hong Kong! The online article is here, but the text as always is below:

On my last morning in Tokyo I was determined to visit the world's biggest fish market, where 1,500 stalls flog the fruits of the world's oceans. Unfortunately in order to catch the tuna auction that is the highlight of the show you need to be there by 6am. I prepared for this exciting experience by staying up practically all night drinking heavily. This was perhaps ill advised.

My friend Joe, who had insisted an hour and a half earlier that he was 'still up for it', failed to rouse at 5am when the alarm rudely rang. Bleary-eyed, I navigated the Tokyo metro alone, silently praising the fantastic efficiency and accessibility of the Japanese system. I emerged blinking into commercial bedlam. A seething sea of trucks, wagons, handcarts and weird motorised trolleys surged in and out of the vast warehouse complex.

In the depths of the market a large building contained serried ranks of frozen tuna carcasses, lying in neat rows like icy torpedoes. A big fat auctioneer perched on a stool was calling the prices, his voice ululating, his arms flapping and his belly wobbling in synchrony as the value of each lot rose. Around him stood a gaggle of poker-faced bidders eyeing up the sashimi-to-be. Once sold, the frosty fish were dragged off for dismemberment and distribution by market workers armed with hooked metal spikes. I staggered through this chaos trying not to get in the way, slip on the wet floor, or get run over by a trolley or impaled on a tool of some description. In the end I took the safest option and stood with my back to the wall.

Stallholders armed with huge samurai-type swords were performing the dissection task, artistically slicing away at the soft pink tuna flesh in almost loving fashion. One vendor was proudly displaying his rare wares, fat chunks of bloody, ragged-looking steak. Whale meat. Just what your average environmentalist wants to see before breakfast. By the time I left two hours later, I had seen a bewildering array of cold wet flesh and was distinctly sober. As a hangover cure it was extreme but effective.

That afternoon another super-sexy Shinkansen Bullet train whisked me to Kyoto, where the famous climate change protocol was agreed. I sought out a Spartan night of zen simplicity, staying in a traditional Japanese ryokan guesthouse. It looked like the previous occupant had stolen all the bedroom furniture from my austere tatami room. It was empty but for a low table and two small cushions. I sat and ate my kaiseki meal, which turned food presentation into an art form of intricately prepared and arranged delicacies. I was unsure whether to photograph it or eat it. So I did both. After dinner the maid produced my futon from the hidden wardrobe with an illusionist's flourish. I then lay on the floor drawing up mental plans to destroy all my obviously superfluous furniture at home.

In the morning I caught the ferry from Osaka back to Shanghai. On board I met James, a Californian who'd been teaching English in Thailand. Deeply religious, he was sceptical about organised churches. 'I guess I'm still searching,' he said.

Being agnostic I engaged him in a lengthy philosophical debate on God, biblical prophecy and how likely it was that I would end up in the 'Lake of Fire' for all eternity. Quite likely, according to James, who added: 'Don't get me wrong, I don't think you're rotten to the core.' Gee thanks. It was a long, slow boat journey back to China.

Gay drug smuggling?

For those of you pondering the significance of the photo of me in the ganja field in Shanhaiguan - all is revealed in my latest Observer column. As usual there's an abridged version online here but the full text is below:

I stepped onto the boat in the Chinese port of Tianjin with some degree of trepidation. Our last ferry journey had been the voyage from hell; 72 hours of Force 10 winds, eight metre waves and wall to wall vomit. Onboard the Yanjing in my 16 bed shared cabin a message from the Captain outlined the safety procedures; “In case of emergency the urgency signals will be given by whistle or ringing bell. Kindly follow our instruction carefully and don’t get excited”. In the event of disaster I hoped to be able to contain myself.

My fears were unfounded however as the Bohei Sea did a convincing impression of a perfectly calm Norfolk Broad, bar the myriad squid fishing boats. Beautifully bright, clear weather blessed our 48 hour passage, once we’d cleared the industrial smog that hugged the Chinese shore. We chugged languidly through glassy, smooth water with an almost oily iridescence to it and past a succession of verdant rocky island archipelagos off the Korean coastline.

I made another Chinese friend on the boat. Despite the absence of any common linguistic ground we established a reasonable rapport. Our ‘chat’ consisted of him writing out reams of Chinese characters in my diary in the vain hope that eventually I’d understand what he was banging on about. I didn’t. My spidery scribblings were similarly inexplicable to him. But a connection was made as later he presented me with an odd gift of a small, glittery heart shaped cushion on a string. It was very kind but I was starting to question where all this was going. My initial unease was vindicated when he reappeared just as I was getting into bed that night with more presents; a ridged, knobbly cucumber and a large pink sausage. I thanked him rather sheepishly, drew the curtain on my bunk and pondered the rather worrying Freudian symbolism of it all.

As the only westerner on the ship the Japanese Port of Kobe customs officers had a field day with me, relishing the opportunity to practice their English. They gleefully picked through my dirty laundry bag, strewing the contents of my rucksack around the small interrogation room. On discovering a packet of rolling tobacco and some crude Chinese rizlas one turned to me and said ‘Marijuana?’. Despite my protestations to the contrary he flamboyantly produced a drug-testing kit. ‘If it turns purple, it’s marijuana’ he informed me. ‘I wish it was’ I stopped myself saying, being by now well acquainted with the sense of humour bypass that’s an essential character trait of customs officers everywhere.

Having disappointedly established that the tobacco was just that, attention turned to my digital camera. Flicking through the images a photo we’d taken last week by the Great Wall of China in Shanhaiguan popped up. It was a snap of me smiling in the middle of a large patch of wild marijuana we’d spotted growing at the Wall’s base. The officer pointed excitedly at the apparently incriminating pic, ‘Marijuana!’ he repeated. At this point my cockiness was shrivelling faster than male genitals during a dip in an icy lake.

Despite the certainty of my innocence I was succumbing to the guilt you experience when circumstantial evidence starts to stack up against you. I was trying not to get frustrated with their probing for fear that my frustration might tempt them to subject me to a probing of a far less comfortable nature. In the end they settled on confiscating all my fruit (including the cucumber ‘gift’), the sausage and some dubious Chinese beef jerky I’d bought. This was a present for the guy I was to stay with in Tokyo, in revenge for some decidedly challenging dried squid bar snacks he’d previously brought over to the UK. It was no great loss to either gastronomy or our friendship and I was almost relieved to be relieved of my wares (especially the cucumber and sausage).

Arriving in Japan is a strange experience for a Brit because everything is clean, new, shiny and works. As I navigated across Kobe by light railway and underground metro, plasma screens flashed greetings, polished, brightly lit vending machines offered tantalising titbits and drinks and the interchanges were seamless and synchronised. All the while a gentle symphony of electronic beeps, bilingual announcements and jingles, a paean to Japan’s modernity in the machine age, tinkled along musically in the background.

I caught a Shinkansen ‘Bullet’ train to Tokyo, a ride so smooth I could have safely performed delicate neuro-surgery during the journey. We tore through the countryside of the Land of the Surprising Pun then raced on raised tracks over the Tokyo rooftops. It certainly wasn’t slow travel but it was definitely slick, sexy and exhilarating. My friend collected me apologetically at the station in his convertible Mercedes. “It’s not exactly low carbon travel I’m afraid” he said. But as we zipped through the buzzing neon frenzy of downtown Tokyo with the roof down and the stereo pumping for once I wasn’t going to complain.

Big in Japan...

So Fi and I split up. It was perhaps inevitable that such a long, arduous trip would take its toll on our relationship but maybe this was for the best. I think she finally couldn’t take me banging on endlessly about the joys of slow travel so she’s flying home and I will go on alone.

(Just kidding)

On several occasions our announcement ‘to split up’ met with horrified faces from our travelling companions, or worried responses on email and Skype calls with friends and family. The ‘split’ wasn’t fundamental just practical and only temporary. I wanted to visit a friend in Japan (while I was in the neighbourhood). Fi wanted to stay in China. So we did the terribly mature, sensible, pragmatic thing and decided to part for 10 days. I am extraordinarily lucky to have such an understanding partner, especially as the timings of ferries between China and Japan meant we wouldn’t be together for her birthday. By the time I post this we’ll be reunited in Shanghai and I will obviously be treating her to a spectacular dinner and extravagant hotel to make amends.

So I’ve just been to Japan – The Land of the Rising Sun. During the ferry journey over I did karaoke with the captain of the ship for some ‘cultural adjustment’ therapy. He sang a screechy Chinese ballad, I insulted the memory of Frank Sinatra (and probably the Japanese) with my Oriental rendition of ‘Rady is a tramp’. I also met a retired battery engineer called Miura; “I’m into lead:acid”. He’d been consulting in China, ‘Why take the boat?’ I asked, ‘Killing time’ came the reply. Clearly Japanese longevity and the prospect of a long retirement is not all it’s cracked up to be.

Out the window the East China Sea was full of fishing boats. Miura was concerned about the new Chinese taste for ‘fruits de mer’. ‘There is a big debate in Japan about who taught the Chinese to eat fish’ he grumbled. The Japanese already devour 10% of the world’s total fish catch so they’re clearly concerned about the impact the potential appetite of the 1.4B mouths in their hungry neighbour may have on their sushi supplies.

Tokyo was mind-blowing. I stayed with a very old friend Joe from Norfolk whom I’ve known for over 20 years and who’s been in the Land of the Surprising Pun for the last seven. So he knows his way around, speaks rather splendid Japanese and knows how to show a guy a good time. Which is exactly what he did.

We sipped beers on the 41st floor of the Tokyo Park Hyatt Hotel (where Bill Murray got ‘Lost in Translation’) with a vertiginous view over the twinkling neon modernity below. We ate sushi (obviously) where waiters deftly flicked their order slips over diner’s heads into the central kitchen ‘pit’ for chefs to snatch, ninja-like, from mid-air. We strolled in Yoyogi Park where Japan’s finest rockerbillies hung out with their toweringly improbable quiffs. We took in the cultivated fashionista eccentricity and oddly conformist nonconformity of the infamous Harajuku girls. We rode bikes through the back streets in soft glorious evening light, not something I expected to be doing in Tokyo (bikes are also not technically allowed on the roads, you HAVE to cycle on the pavement – a policy you could be forgiven for thinking also applied in most of ‘Sarf Lahndahn’).

I also cooked a traditional English roast for Joe’s work colleagues to disprove (or confirm) the Japanese perception of the UK as somewhat culinarily challenged. Buying the groceries for this meal we spotted a mango for sale for 20,000 Yen. That’s £100. It was a very nice-looking mango, but at that price I’d want it to taste exquisite, get me drunk and drive me home at the end of the night. Whichever way you looked at it, it was just a piece of fruit. Next to it was a £50 melon. ‘Why is that worth £50?’ I asked Joe, ‘It’s just a melon’. ‘Ah, but can you not see the perfect curvature of the shape?’ he replied. It was a rather attractive and pleasing globe, but I want my melons juicy and sweet, not to stroke, admire for their physical qualities or have sex with. Maybe that’s just me. (N.B. There was no implication in the expensive shop that the melon was for fucking, it was just a fucking expensive melon).

And we drank. A lot. Which is not entirely un-Japanese, who seem to relish a good session judging by the number of ‘salarymen’ in suits we saw in various extreme states of inebriation. Kirin, Asahi, Sapporo, and Yebushi beers, Sake from cute little bamboo cups and Shochou (a sort of rice whisky), the alcohol flowed. Which meant many visits to the small boys room and the pinnacle of technological over-engineering that is the Japanese lavvy. I am going to break with the tradition of the great travel writer Paul Theroux here and talk toilets – he vowed never to discuss his bowels or the bowls he emptied them into whilst travelling on the grounds readers weren’t interested in these often distasteful anecdotes. Thus squandering some rich comedic opportunities IMHO.

A control panel on the toilet wall bore a variety of enigmatic buttons sporting Chinese symbols that are bound to arouse one’s inquisitive nature during a pissed up piss. Remembering what curiosity did to the cat may serve as a relevant proverb to recall at this point.

Some buttons had vaguely cryptic symbols that might be charitably interpreted as ‘bum fountain’ or ‘ladies douche’. As you sit down (of course I did) the seat begins to warm gently (so far so good). Next the ‘bum fountain’ rather forcefully washes your anus (apologies for the graphic nature of this description but its worth it…I think). A gentler ‘bum sprinkler’ option was available for the more sensitive patron, or sufferers of ‘Chalfonts’. Then you have to try the ‘ladies douche’ a button bearing a profile of a pink lady sat on a jet of water. Yes, you would too.

At this juncture the nozzle under the rim from which the water gushes extends to facilitate what rugby players may know as an ‘up and under’ squirt of the nether regions. Once suitably rinsed (and after testing all three options I can assure you my arse was polished enough to eat your dinner off…if that’s your thing) a blast of warm air dries your butt. Apparently on some ‘Techno Toilet +’ premium models you even get a quick puff of perfume to ensure a completely fragrant finish (though this may taint your food if you are planning a ‘crack snack’ as above).

But that’s quite enough scat chat for now…

Shanhaiguan

As our visa ineptitude extended our planned stay in Beijing we decided to escape the city for a day or two. Shanhaiguan where the Great Wall of China meets the sea sounded like a nice place to relax. We could complete our crossing of Asia by dabbling our toes in the warm waters of the Bohei Sea, check out the Wall and enjoy the historic city itself. That was the plan at least.

With hindsight our desire to travel in authentic Chinese style and go for ‘hard seats’ on the train might have been slightly misplaced. The seats were comfy enough; if ‘bolt upright’ is your natural position. Opposite us a fat man, shirt open to his waist, was displaying the full fleshy expanse of his imposing gut. Next to him sat a wiry guy with curly hair and sunglasses, like a Chinese Lou Reed. Jammed between Lou and Fatty was a thin, smiling man with an immaculately trimmed David Niven-style pencil moustache. ‘Tache man’ was reading the paper and kept grinning and gesturing to a particular headline, probably something along the lines of ‘Train Crash kills 400 foreigners’.

For no reason that we could fathom the train took 7 hours to travel the 170 miles to Shanhaiguan (the return journey was 2.5 hours). By this point the carriage’s curiosity about us had almost begun to wane, at least people were no longer staring with the usual heady mix of horror, fascination and pity.
Shanhaiguan wasn’t quite what we’d anticipated. Instead of the bustling main street of food vendors and historic traditional architecture we walked straight into one huge building site. The entire high street had been demolished and the centre of the town was now a tangled mass of scaffolding and trucks pouring concrete foundations. Why restore when you can just rebuild? This is the Chinese way.

Down where the Great Wall meets the sea things took another surreal turn. Sneaking for a quick wee next to the massive stone edifice we realised we were surrounded by small marijuana plants – growing rather successfully like the weeds they are. We took photos (right), which I was later to regret at Japanese customs, but more about that later…

In the evening we developed a new ordering technique in the street café we found ourselves in. Encountering the usual linguistic barriers the waitress handed me her pad and gestured for me to draw what we wanted to eat. I sketched a handsome looking chicken and a bloke eating noodles. She reappeared holding a piece of chicken in one hand and an egg in the other as if to say ‘Which would you like?’. Either that or she was trying to engage us in the timeless philosophical and evolutionary debate as to which came first.

We pointed at the meat and 20 minutes later a huge bowl of steaming chicken noodle soup arrived. It was delicious, with big fat juicy mushrooms bobbing happily in the rich stock. Fi then delved a little more deeply with her chopsticks and the hen’s head rolled ghoulishly up to the surface to confront us accusingly. In retrospect maybe I should have drawn a headless chicken.

Latest Observer column...

The latest Observer scribblings can be seen below or, as usual, a slightly abridged version is available online on the Guardian website here. We're off to Tianjin today, before I head off on the ferry to Japan on Monday morning (Fi is staying in China). Unable to obtain any Japanese Yen in China I am faced with a 48 hour ferry journey with no money! This might not be too much fun (I won't even be able to buy spamushi!).

Anyway, here's the column...

Two accidents, one death and a puncture marked our second sojourn into the wild Mongolian countryside. We’d not left Ulaanbaatar when at a frenzied traffic junction our van ground into the car adjacent to us. Our rugged Russian built ‘UAZ’ (‘Wuzz’) was unscathed, the car’s wing and headlight well and truly ‘dunched’ (as our Geordie travelling companion Claire informed us). Four hours of interminable Mongolian police bureaucracy later and we were edging through a solid jam out of the city. Next to us, in a grisly pick-up truck full of bloodied animal bones, a young guy in the cab was delicately applying lip-gloss.

We escaped the clutches of town and paused at a garage to stock up on fuel and food. There we met Menghis, a Mongolian sushi salesman. “Where do you get your fish?” I asked innocently, noting the spectacular distance of his business from the sea. He just laughed. As we left I understood why. Handing us a gift of a lunchtime sushi box we discovered that Mongolian sushi isn’t made with fish, it’s made with spam. I could almost visualise the marketing slogan; ‘Do you want sushi, but don’t like fish? Then you’ll love spamushi!’.

Many hours of dirt road took us to Khakhorin, site of Chingis Khan’s original Mongol capital Karakorum. This was totally trashed by the invading Manchu Chinese in the fourteenth century (what goes around comes around). The resulting rubble was used to build the nearby Erdene Zuu Khid monastery in 1586. So not a lot remains of Karakorum, bar two of the four stone turtles that marked the city boundaries and a curious stone penis sculpture. The latter is, ahem, erected so as to point up towards a supposedly ‘vaginal’ slope above. This was allegedly a deterrent to local monks overcome by ardour at the sight of such a provocative valley. I couldn’t quite see it myself but I will be more suspicious when ramblers talk about their ‘love of the hills’ in future.

That night we enjoyed a personal concert from a wizened old musician called Baska. Resplendent in a dark blue traditional Mongolian del with red and gold trim and rather camp knee high white leather boots, Baska treated us to a selection of Mongolian classics on an almost exclusively equine theme; “This is a song about a fast horse. This one is about a horse race. This is a melody about a man’s love for his horse”. The Mongolian wilderness can be a very lonely place. He mixed it up a bit with a ‘tune about a baby camel’ and topped his set off with some incredible throat-singing (‘Khoomi’). This is an utterly bizarre vocal feat that simultaneously generates a resonant grumble and a high pitched wheezy whistle from a no doubt over-worked larynx. Oddly ethereal and weirdly beautiful it still made a small part of you want to shout ‘just cough man, for heaven’s sake!’

We lunched the next day by the craggy chasm of Chuulyut Canyon, a deep, steep boulder-sided scar of river valley where curious hawks circled above. Just when you think the Mongolia scenery has blown your mind as much as it possibly can, it pulls another spectacle out of the bag and once again you are agog at the rare, rugged beauty of it all. In this case it was the Great White Lake (‘Terkhin Tsagaan Nuur’) and the huge hollow crater of the long extinct Khorgo Uul volcano. Beneath the typically hyperbolic Mongolian skies, all butch, puffed up cumulus cloud and weather fronts, we stood on the edge of the precipitous volcanic cone surveying the wrinkled black lava flows below. In the distance the partially frozen lake surface shone brilliantly in its own personal patch of sunshine whilst we watched a dark threatening blizzard drawing in. Magical.

We roused ourselves at 4am the following morning for a freezing scramble up the crag above our ger to watch sunrise over the lake. The breaking day edging the still murderous looking clouds with an incongruent delicate shade of pink. Back at camp I met an ex-pat Mongolian now returning to run a tour company. His real name was ‘Enkhamgalan’ and I ineffectively tried to repeat this a couple of times. After he’d stopped laughing at my attempts, he said ‘Call me Eric’. He’d learnt English at Shepherd’s Bush College and had had some strong views on the tension between nomadic Mongolian life and the urbanisation of Ulaanbaatar. “In the country you battle with nature, in the city you battle each other”. From the number of impromptu ‘handbags at dawn’ style punch-ups we’d witnessed in Ulaanbaatar I could well believe him.

Two days later we had our second accident that resulted in the one sad demise of the trip. A sheep zig-zagged recklessly in front of our speeding van before taking a fatal last second turn beneath the wheels. This reminded me of one of those, no doubt aprocryphal, car accident insurance forms where one claimant had submitted the legendary explanatory line for his prang; “I had to swerve several times before hitting him”.

Begin the Beijing...

...as a Chinese Julio Iglesias might sing.

So we’re staying at this gorgeous ‘hutong’ style hostel, all single-storey with little rooms facing through windowed doors and heavy red curtains onto a paved courtyard. There’s lacquered furniture, Chinese lanterns, a cage full of live birds, a fishpond traversed by a wee wooden bridge and even a life-size replica of a terracotta warrior in the corner (to make any deceased visiting Emperors feel at home, or at least comfortable with security arrangements). It’s lovely and at £5 a night and beers at 20p becomes lovelier with every passing moment.

Funnily enough the only flight I’ve taken in the last 5 years was to China, when I came on a visit in 2006 with the RSA and ended up staying for 5 weeks to work on a major climate change communications project for the British Council. I joked then that next time I’d come by train as it only takes a week or so from London. Well, I’ve done it by train now, but it has taken 90 days to get here (but we weren’t exactly rushing).

Thankfully our visas are now being sorted. Because this is my third visit to China and due to the fact that when you leave China for Hong Kong (as I did a couple of times during last year’s stint here) you need a new visa to get back in, I’m now going to have about six Chinese visas in my passport. This either makes me look like an obsessive Sino-phile or a disorganised pratt (guess which way the Chinese Public Security Bureau looks at it). And there’s going to be more. Due to our border cock-up from Mongolia we’re only being issued with a single entry visa which means next week’s trip to Japan and our visit to Hong Kong at the end of June will both generate a new Chinese visa – at this rate I am going to run out of pages in my passport!

Bureaucracy aside, being back here got me thinking about all the wonders of Chinese life so I thought I’d share with you some thoughts that I wrote, affectionately, last year:

Observations on China

Everything is edible and should be eaten with gusto (this includes tendons, offal of every obscure variety, lips, insects (scorpions especially) reptiles, and of course fish skin). Delving with our chopsticks into last nights chicken noodle soup caused the hen’s head to roll over rather ghoulishly in front of us.

It is not necessary for the surface to be even, continuous or indeed passable for a thoroughfare to be described as a road

In the context of neon lighting – more is more

The sun is a rare and elusive celestial body glimpsed only occasionally through the urban fug

‘Engrish’ or ‘Chinglish’ is a splendid and under-rated artform:
> Subversive sign in Bank - “Question Authority”
> Sign on Hotel door - “Remember Civilisation”
> Sign in Hotel Bathroom r.e. reusing towels - “Earth Needs Help!”
> Enigmatic logo on an electric hand-dryer - “Guangzhou Electric Company Protects Wine Shop Thing Limited”

But the winner has to be:

> Sign by Beijing Lake – “No dumping, No fishing, No bathing, No raise poultries” (which I think refers to feeding the ducks)

The techno version of the Benny Hill theme tune is a popular classic

Mobile phone ring tunes favour electronic versions of Christmas Carols and my personal favourite, and an appropriate cultural choice, ‘Chopsticks’

It is amusing to give your two year old a lit cigarette and watch them try to smoke it

Nappies are superfluous Western indulgences, simply cut the arse off your toddlers trousers and let them shit anywhere

Masticating with one’s mouth closed is purely a matter of personal taste

The totally naff menus with lurid or utterly faded photos of the dishes on them suddenly become an absolute godsend when faced with a selection of choices only in Cantonese or Mandarin

Foreigners (“laowai”) are an endless source of amusement and fascination and should be watched with a mixture of curiosity and contempt, preferably with one’s mouth slightly agape (sustain indefinitely or until aforesaid foreigner moves on)

How many Chinese does it take to change a lightbulb? As many as possible in order to maximise the collective opportunity for gainful employment

Railway stations are, by popular belief, some of the most dangerous hotbeds of scum and villainy in modern China and should be avoided at all costs (this is the Chinese perception, not I hasten to add, based on our experiences)

If there is a spare scrap of land cultivate it (includes railway sidings, verges and even temporary mud banks in rivers)

32.4 M people constitutes a city, not, contrary to conventional wisdom, a medium sized European nation

Trains run at scarily regular frequencies, on some journeys the time between oncoming freight trains is less than 2 minutes

When hot roll up your t-shirt to expose your midriff, preferably a large paunch if you are rotundly blessed, and walk around flapping your arms

Smoking is important and should be practised whenever and wherever possible

Spitting is a national pastime, the more public and the more rasping the expectorant rumble to produce the necessary phlegm the better

Massage = prostitution (some things are the same wherever you are). Confusingly in Beijing hutongs barber shops also equal prostitution, which brings a whole new meaning to “something for the weekend sir?”

Power station chimneys are painted in fetching alternating red and white horizontal stripes in order that you can easily spot how many of them there are belching smoke into the atmosphere

Air quality is an oxymoron

Manoeuvring between lanes on the highway, turning across in front of oncoming traffic, stopping suddenly at the side of the road, entering fast moving traffic from a feeder lane or sliproad do NOT require any form of signalling or awareness of other vehicles…if a collision is imminent they will make you aware by honking their horn or taking evasive action leading to them…manoeuvring between lanes etc (repeat ad infinitum)

Flyover roads are great and grossly undervalued in the west, the higher, more convoluted, more complicated to navigate and the more 10th storey apartment windows you can look into from a passing bus the better

Anything organic is agricultural fertiliser (includes domestic waste, sanitary rags, human excrement etc)

Factories should be encrusted with filth, spewing clouds of thick smoke and steam into the air and generally look as terrifyingly Dickensian as possible

Construction site safety is merely an option, it’s not necessary to wear hard hats on a building site, even if the site in question is part of the headquarters of one of the biggest property development companies in China

Bamboo makes brilliant scaffolding material and can be used on even the tallest buildings

At home to Mr F*** up...

Yes, you guessed it, another dumb-arsed visa error and we are in China. Having applied for our Chinese visa in London prior to leaving in February, the three month entry period ended 5 days before we left Mongolia (doh). We read 'entry before 26.5.07' as 'no entry before 26.5.07' so we were unceremoniously dragged off the train (albeit by a very sweet smiley Chinese immigration official) as everyone else was motored into the 'bogey changing shed' (This has nothing whatsoever to do with anything nasal; Chinese railways have a different gauge to Russia/Mongolia so the wheels (bogeys in the jargon) have to be changed when you cross the border). We were gutted to miss this no doubt thrilling train-spotters wet dream...

A journey in a minibus through the backstreets of Erlian, the Chinese border town, with half a dozen officers as escort was followed by an hour lingering in a bleak immigration office with an expectorant official. He tried repeatedly and unsuccessfully to clear some blockage in the back of his throat, and we were given 'special permit to entry' for 72 hours, branded 'incompetent foreigners' and allowed back on the train...whilst the station tannoy blasted out a strangely Chinese operatic version of Rod Stewarts 'Sailing' (which made Fi feel at home at least).

Just been to the Public Security Bureau in Beijing (Official name is 'Office of the Entry:Exit Visa Administration of the Public Security Bureau of the Municipality of Beijing'...try saying that in one breath) to get new visas so we are now sorted if left feeling we are doing a convincing impression of total muppets when it comes to getting across borders.

Am also having difficulty logging onto this blog for some weird possible Chinese censorship reasons. I can log onto my host site www.blogger.com and post content but I cannot get to view the blog itself www.lowcarbontravel.com at all. The connection keeps timing out (this is what happens with all 'subversive' websites, such as that bastion of scurrilous insurgent propaganda the, er, BBC). So, is low carbon travel seen as potentially destabilising to the Chinese regime? Who knows? But they now have my passport so I'm going to behave myself very carefully whilst in China.

; )