Alas, all good things must come to an end, and so it is with the trip to China.  We left the hotel for the airport with mixed emotions – sad that our vacation was over, but excited to get back home to see everyone.  The flight back to San Francisco was quite pleasant, and with the help of a little melatonin I managed to sleep most of the way in hopes of shocking the system back to a local time zone.  From San Francisco, Angela and I parted ways, with her heading back to Redmond, and me on a flight to Chicago for a few more days away.

As vacations go, it would be very hard to complain with any occasion that provided for three weeks in Asia, so from that perspective it was fantastic.  How did China compare to past trips?  That one is a little harder to answer, since the game plan was so much different.  Unlike past travels, China involved moving around a lot and day trips to different sights (like the Great Wall). So in that regard, we saw a lot more that we will take away great memories from than may have been the case in Thailand or Malaysia.  The flip side is that we were a lot busier, spent more time in planes trains and automobiles, and were on beaches nowhere as nice.  I don’t think that makes any one trip better than the other, just different.  Our only regret of this trip is that with the demonstrations, we didn’t get to see Tibet.

So what did we learn?  Well, a few things that we’re happy to share.

1. Nothing can prepare you for seeing the Great Wall and the Terracotta Army. Make the effort, it is well worth it.
2. China ten years ago would have been much different than it is today. Ten years from now it will be different again.  See it soon before it is just a polluted, hectic, Westernized shell of its former self.
3. Count your change before you get out of the cab
4. Unless you are in a fixed-price place like a department store, prices will start 3 or 4 times higher if you look like a tourist (which you will). Bargain relentlessly to get a price that you will be happy with and ignore that a local still probably only paid half of what you did.
5. Hire English-speaking guides when you have the option, it makes the places you will see much more interesting and it doesn’t cost that much.
6. Go west. The further west you go, the more of old China you will see.
7. If you plan on spending time at the beach, skip China. There are far nicer beaches in Asia.
8. Be prepared to eat things even though you’re not sure what they are.  Unless you stick to tourist restaurants, you’ll end up ordering by pointing at pictures of things you think you might recognize but really will have no idea about.
9. You will get ripped off. A lot.  If you know that going in, it will bother you far less when it happens.
10. Take time to explore. You need to see the famous sights like the Forbidden City and Summer Palace, but don’t miss the "road-less-traveled" experiences like walking through the Hutongs in Beijing, or visiting the  countryside in Yangshuo.

Our last full day today before heading him (or Chicago in my case).  There are some touristy things to do in Hong Kong (like the tram up to the Peak), but after three weeks, we’re a little burnt.  Even though it is our only full day here, we still only managed to straggle out of the hotel around 11:30.  With nowhere in particular to go, we walked a little deeper into Kowloon to see some of the city away from the tourist center (and all the touts pitching suits, handbags and watches).  Even there though the volume of people was oppressive.

After lunch we took the Star Ferry across to Hong Kong Island. For about 30 cents it is a great value as the trip is fairly quick and the view from the water going across is great.  The Hong Kong side is home to more of the financial district and foreign companies so it has a different feel from Kowloon.  In a lot of ways is feels like a cross between London and New York, and if the population were about half what it is, I could see it being a fairly reasonable place to live.

Wandering around we spent some time looking at old furniture and artifacts.  There were a few things we found interesting, but knowing know what they cost in Beijing it’s harder to justify paying the up charge just to get them here.  I fear for the most part we are going to return home empty-handed (save for the piles of gifts for the kids).

For our last dinner here we met up with some old classmates from Stanford at a very good Mexican restaurant (or it may have just seemed very good after 20 days of sometimes suspect Chinese food. It was good to see some familiar faces and to have a conversation in English with someone other than ourselves.

About this time tomorrow we’ll be touching down in San Francisco.  This has been a wonderful trip with many memories that will not be soon forgotten. But there’s something special about home, and after being gone for so long, it will be great to be back.

Final attempt on the great carpet quest today. Armed with the addresses of two stores we found online, we set off this morning to try and end this once and for all.  What we came away with though was more of the same.  Jumping out of the cab at the first address, a building of about 5 floors with shops on the bottom, nobody seemed to recognize the name of the store we were looking for (that the concierge had written on a card in Chinese).  Slightly frustrated (and $6 poorer after being shaken down by a Buddhist monk who we’re pretty sure wasn’t a Buddhist monk), we chalked it up to maybe the concierge translating it wrong and flagged a cab to the second place on the list.

We were cautiously optimistic pulling up in a neighborhood of higher end stores and figured this one would work out better. Even when the driver couldn’t find the actual building we gave him the address for, we were confident we could just walk the street a little and find it.  About thirty minutes later, and after some help from a local (who we of course thought was on the take somehow but was really just being friendly) we found the address led to a really sketchy door in a 6 story apartment block well off the main road and surrounded by stores selling things like chicken feet. It seems that in both cases, what we found online were people that worked out of small offices (or their apartments) taking orders and then, I assume, catching a train up to Beijing every so often to buy some products and send them.

Finally admitting defeat, we headed back to the hotel to check out and on to the train station for the 2 hour ride into Hong Kong.  The ride was very uneventful, with the only excitement coming at immigration where I got pulled aside to have a thermometer stuck in both ears.  I don’t remember licking any raw chickens, so I don’t think I’m carrying the bird flu, but I suppose I’ll find out in another day or two.

Hong Kong itself is a little surreal to us. It’s kind of like a big city (like Beijing) all compressed down into something a fraction of the size.  The buildings are all tall because land is so expensive, and there are hordes of people on the street.  Our hotel is on the Kowloon side with a view of the water so we can see all the buildings on Hong Kong Island (it is a very spectacular view).  Because we got here close to dinner time, we didn’t very too far from the hotel and plan on taking the ferry across the water tomorrow.  At night, they have a light show they put on where a bunch of the buildings on the island light up to music.  It was interesting to see and the people here really seem to like their lights (everywhere we have been buildings have had flashing lights up and down the sides).

Life in general here seems quite a bit more expensive than elsewhere in China, which in some ways makes sense, and in others makes me wonder why you would buy something here for 4 times the price when a 2 hour train ride or plane flight can get it for you much, much cheaper.  Maybe if you live here its harder to get back and forth across the border than I realize, or maybe people just prefer the atmosphere and comfort of Hong Kong.

Early morning today to catch a flight from Haikou to Guangzhou. The airport wasn’t that busy because of the time (which is a good thing as for other flights the lines have been VERY long and slow moving).  The flight was pretty much full though as all planes in China seem to be.

As the manufacturing center of China, we expected there to be a pretty think haze over Guangzhou, and we weren’t disappointed.  It seemed like an overcast day even though it was supposedly almost perfectly sunny.  Driving into town from the airport it was hard to see more than the outlines of buildings more than a few kilometers in the distance, even though many of them are on the same scale a the skyscrapers in any modern city. 

Since our only real purpose in coming to Guangzhou was to try and track down the elusive Chinese silk carpet, we connected to the Internet as soon as we arrived and found a couple of shops in the city that look like they have them.  Figuring things were breaking our way for a change, we stopped by the concierge desk to get a map and some context for where these places were.  Just to be sure, before we rode all the way there, we also had him call and confirm that they had what we were looking for.  Good thing we did as it turned out both of them were closed for the May Day holiday.

With that mission blocked for another day, we instead went to a few of the local markets trying to find a few gifts we still haven’t been able to buy.  While we were busy with that, the strangest thing happened – the smog pretty much disappeared. It turns out that without the layer of pollution blocking the view, Guangzhou is a pretty cool looking city, with a good combination of modern and old architecture and the great river walk by the Pearl River.  According to the concierge, the factories are closed because of the holiday, so without the thousands of them pouring smoke into the air and a mild breeze, things cleared up pretty quickly.  Perhaps there is hope for the Olympics where they plan on closing factories around Beijing to make the air quality not so toxic for the athletes.

Tomorrow most things are open again, so hopefully in the morning we can make a quick trip to the carpet stores and finish up that search.  As soon as we are done, we will be on the train to Hong Kong, which is about a two hour ride from here.

We’re going out with a bang here – literally.  Our last night here and out on the beach in front of the hotel they saw fit to send us off with about 20 minutes of fireworks.  I think its the closest we’ve ever been to a show like that and it rivaled anything we’ve seen in Seattle for size.

Today was a great day, probably the nicest one since we arrived. With the sunshine, it really felt like a beach resort. There were even people using the quad runners and jet skis on the beach. Out of curiosity, I asked what the rates were, and for 10 minutes on the jet ski, they charged 120 yuan (a little over $15).  We figured that would be a good policy to adopt in Bellingham as well, so come summer $100/hour seems like a fair price (Brooklyn save up your money).

We’ve decided to head out tomorrow morning for Guangzhou.  Not the most glorious of places I am sure (it is part of the area where all the factories are), but there are still some things we want to try and find to buy and it seemed like a better place to find them than Hong Kong (cheaper anyway). The plan is to spend a day there and then move on to Hong Kong for the last few days before the long plane ride home.

It like going to sleep in one place and waking up somewhere entirely different.  Where yesterday it was like we were wandering around a ghost town, today there are people all over the place (relatively speaking of course as I’m sure the hotel is still nowhere near full).  People are at the pool, in the hallways and in the restaurants.  With today being the May Day holiday, I guess there is a pretty big flow of people from Guangzhou, Shenzen, and Hong Kong looking to get away for a few days.  In any case, with a whole lot more activity it seems a lot more like a resort hotel, although the solitude of having the place to ourselves is gone.

Speaking of big changes, we walked a few miles down the beach today towards Holiday Beach (where the locals go), and to our great surprise, between yesterday and today, the beach had been cleaned up. No garbage. No dead fish. No light bulbs.  It was like a team of a thousand people came through during the night and picked up what would have been at least a ton of trash.  And not only the bits of garbage, where there were chunks of rubble from old walls that had collapsed, there is now only sand.  It looks much, much better, but the degree to which it changed overnight only adds to the surreality of this place.

For the most part we have done all that we can here, so we are talking once again about cutting our stay here a bit short and moving on to Hong Kong early.  With the holiday traffic it turns out the tickets are really expensive (about $250 each) so who knows.  As strange as our stay here has been, the place grows on you and there is certainly a part of me that will find it hard to leave.

Not a whole lot new to report as the days are pretty similar here.  We spent most of the day in town today wandering around the old part of the city, sampling street food here and there (staying away from the more adventurous chicken hearts on a skewer, blood cake, and intestines).  We have mostly given up on finding the things we hoped to here and will try instead to find them in Hong Kong, although the prices will assuredly be higher there.  We did find a massage place (there seem to be far fewer here than in Guilin) and for the equivalent of $3.75 spent an hour watching Chinese television and getting rubbed down.

The part of town we ended up in for dinner was a street full of different kinds of restaurants, Chinese of course, but also Korean, Japanese and so on.  Before they open for business, they have big meeting out front with all the staff where they play music and do some exercises.  I have taken some pictures so that I can evaluate further such a policy for PDA Verticals.

Being in China, we figured it was still appropriate to go with a Chinese restaurant. Here, none of the menus are in English so you pretty much have to do the best you can choosing from pictures.  We picked the place that seemed the busiest and pointed to a bunch of things that looked safe (the whole carp head seemed to be the most popular dish, but not being in the mood for fish brains, we took a pass).  Of the dishes, we’re about 90% sure one was chicken, 50% sure one was pork, and 50% sure one was beef. It all tasted good and we convinced ourselves we knew what it was so all was well.  I think for my next trip though I am going to print up a laminated card with pictures of different animals on it so just to be sure, when we point at something on the menu we can also point at the animal we think it is made from and see if everyone agrees.

It is coming up on May Day here so the hotel seems to be getting a little busier. We actually have people in our wing now.

A better day today with the weather which was nice.  From the forecast, it looks like most of SE Asia is going through the same overcast kind of days we are so we’re giving some thought to maybe heading to Hong Kong a couple days early.  The hotel here is nice and we have a great room, but without the sun being at the beach just isn’t the same.

Still no people to speak of here which remains very puzzling to us.  With the sun out, we did see a few other guests, but even around the pool there were no more than 5 or 10 people.  With hundreds of chairs spread out around the 4 pools here and the beach, it is surreal to see them all empty.  Seeing the kids pool with the waterslide and waterfalls we couldn’t help but think of how much fun the boys would have.

We went for a walk on the beach in the afternoon, past the three or four other hotels that are set up next to this one.  There is a nice path that connects them all together so that if you were inclined you could move between them to try different restaurants or whatever.  Of course, like this hotel, all of those ones seem empty as well. It’s kind of like being Will Smith in I Am Legend.
All we need is a dog to complete the picture.

On the beach itself, the sad part is that no one seems to take care of it.  In front of our hotel it looks like they make some effort to remove the garbage that washes up during the night, but even the places next to us seem to have given up.  Walking along the tide line it is pretty common to see old toothbrushes, lighters, juice boxes, fruit rinds and other interesting pieces of trash.  There are also a fair amount of dead fish, which seemed odd until we realized that there weren’t any birds to speak off (our assumption being that anywhere else, the birds would eat the fish).  Finally coming across a dead bird, we wondered if maybe that was the only one dumb enough to eat the fish.

It is sad to see what they do have here as a natural resource (a sandy beach that is several miles long, warm weather) and what could be a very nice place to visit is in such poor condition.  Everything we read talks about how they want to position this island as a tourist destination, but there is so much work for them to do here to make it anywhere close to resorts that are only an hour or two away that it will be many, many years of effort if it is even possible to pull off.

As expected, a pretty quiet day here today.  The weather is overcast so not much appeal in spending the day at the beach. Instead we decided to go into town in search of some silk carpets, figuring that in a town of a million people there must be a store somewhere that sells them their rugs.  Whether there is no good Chinese word for rug or that they call them something different entirely we don’t really know, but the disconnect is something that would plague us all day, starting with the concierge, who we asked to write on a card we could give to the taxi driver, the address of a place that sold carpets.  After talking this over with his colleague and looking up online a translation, he wrote something down and sent us on our way.

Whatever was written on the card didn’t exactly work out (the street we ended up on was a very sketchy old neighborhood selling mostly plastic housewares and paper lanterns), so we ended up walking around downtown Haikou flashing the same card to anyone we though might be able to point us in the right direction.  Where in most cases we found ourselves sent off to a shop that sold silk shirts, the most entertaining (for me anyways) was standing in a department store with 9 of its employees standing around us trying to figure out what we were looking for and pointing us in different directions.  While it didn’t really generate any good result, it did highlight the friendliness of the people here. It is unfortunate that the number of times you get scammed puts you always on your guard so even when 9 people gather around to try and help you out, in the back of your mind you’re wondering how they are going to try and shake you down.

With no clear idea of where we were going, we acknowledged defeat and headed back to the hotel. Hopefully tomorrow will bring some sun.

With daylight we get a full sense for the resort here in Haikou and our initial assessment is that it is more than just a little weird.  The hotel itself is very impressive, encompassing about 400 rooms surrounding a series of well maintained grounds and pools right on the water.  The funny thing is that there doesn’t seem to be anyone here, to the extreme case that it feels almost like being in a Twilight Zone episode. We were mostly surprised because back in Guilin, we though about trying to come here a day earlier but when we checked the hotel website it reported that the hotel was full.  Given that, we expected to see people all over the place, but walking around in the morning there was nobody on the beach, nobody at the pool, not even towels laid out by people who get up early and reserve the best locations before going back to bed that we have come to expect in other places we have traveled.

In many of the things we read before coming here, Hainan Island (where Haikou is located) is referred to as the Hawaii of the East. From what we have seen so far, that may be a bit of a stretch.  Like everywhere else, the smog is heavy enough that visibility is probably no more than a few miles (the good news is that we have found air pollution to be an effective blocker of UV rays, so our sunscreen bill remains quite low). It seems that the idea of beach resorts isn’t exactly part of the culture either as there are miles of beach running in both directions from our hotel, but very little of it is developed.  Instead, away from the hotels where the beaches are maintained, it looks like no one ever uses what would be considered prime oceanfront property in most other places.  Go back 100 yards from the water though and there is a huge amount of construction, with new multi-story buildings going up everywhere.

All that said, it is very nice here, and had we not spent time is Thailand and Malaysia before coming here, we would likely have only great things to say.  South of here there is also a much bigger resort area called Sanya that probably is a bit more resort-esque, so we gave up on some of that voluntarily when we chose Haikou over Sanya, in large part because we  wanted to be closer to a real city to experience more of the local culture.  We are debating whether we might spend a few days yet in Sanya before heading for Hong Kong, but intertia being what it is, I’m not sure the odds of packing up to move 100 miles south are good.

We did make a quick trip into town this afternoon to stock up on a few groceries (most notably, the always important Diet Cokes).  The store we ended up in was more or less the Chinese version of Fred
Meyer, with the full compliment off  food, clothes, electronics and so on.  They also had a big hot food counter where we bought a few dishes to eat for lunch. It was probably the cheapest meal we have eaten so far (about 10 yuan for the two of us), and ironically, it stacked up very well with meals we have had costing far more.  Loaded down with few bags of groceries, we weren’t really able to walk around town and see much else, so that will have to wait for another day. 

The hotel staff says the weather is supposed to get even better over the coming days whereas the computer says it is supposed to get worse. I suppose we’ll find out who is right tomorrow.