A thousand years ago, when Europeans first ventured to the Far East, crossing vast deserts and gigantic mountain ranges, the called the land they discovered Cathay. They found a nation of people who had a strong and complex culture, one which developed the use of paper money, gunpowder, and many other things unknown in the West. To the vast majority of Europeans, and later Americans, it remained a mysterious land until well into the last third of the 20th century. Only in recent years has travel to this huge country from the West begun to increase, and now it was our turn to journey to what was once known as the Celestial Empire: China.
Before we begin, a word or two about photos. Most of them are mine and Sue's; those marked with (WL) and (DH) are credited to our traveling companions, Walt Lee (and his daughter Bridget) and Dave Hershberger. You can click on any photo to enlarge it.
Thursday, May 5 -- to Minneapolis and east, then west. Way west.
It was back in the summer of 2015 that Sue asked if I would want to accompany her to China the following May for her Travel Leaders International Summit. Previous summits had taken her to Scotland (2015), Turkey ('14) and South Africa ('13). Let's just say she didn't have to wait around for my answer.
The conference would be held in Shanghai, and Travel Leaders had, as usual, provided its attendees with a tempting list of excursions to be taken before or after the meetings. Although tempted by the cruise on the Yangtze River, we decided to get off the beaten path and head to Gansu Province, in the far west of the country, and stay at a camp in the grasslands of Tibet, which sounded as exotic as we could get. We would soon find it to be even more exotic than we imagined.
The worst thing about going to China from America, especially the Midwest where we live, is the travel. Sue booked us for a short hop eastward from Minneapolis to Detroit, and then a long haul from there over the western U.S. and the Pacific Ocean directly to Shanghai. We were wheels-up in Minneapolis at 11am today and 90 minutes later were on the ground in Detroit. After a short layover we boarded our Delta Airlines 747 for the long haul, departing around 4:30pm EDT.
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| Our flight to Shanghai awaits. Hopefully they were topping off the tank. |
We were in the main cabin with premium comfort seating, giving us extra legroom, which was great for a long trip. You have to resign yourself to the fact that you'll be there for awhile. Wear loose-fitting clothes, shoes that can easily be slipped on and off, and bring plenty of reading material and a sleep aid. Dinner was served shortly after we reached cruising altitude and the schedule said there would be a midflight snack and then breakfast before arriving in Shanghai. And of course there would be plenty of movies available for viewing on the screens in front of us. I'd brought along my new Kindle Fire as well as my Surface laptop, so I could work on my writing projects.
Shanghai was 13 hours ahead of Wisconsin time, so we knew it would be Friday evening there when we arrived. There are lots of theories about how to deal with jet lag, and for me this would be my first time flying across the Pacific, so we would see how things worked out. Our plan was to try to sleep for four or five hours on the flight and then hit the hay around 9pm local time Friday. On this flight, we stayed awake long enough to have the midflight snack and then were able to nod off. When we awoke, we were only a couple hours from landing.
Friday, May 6 -- Arrival in Shanghai, China.
China is a huge country in almost every measurable way. It is the third-largest in the world in terms of land area (3.6 million square miles), trailing Russia and Canada and just a bit larger than the United States. In population, it is first with 1.375 billion people, 18.8% of the world's population. It is just ahead of India in that category and we are a distant third. In terms of coastline, we have 37% more than China does, and when it comes to inland water (lakes, rivers) we have nearly three times as much as they do, which makes China a much drier country than America. We didn't know going in that China has much less water than we do, but we would soon find out.
We landed at Shanghai Pudong International Airport, our introduction to the largest city in China. Indeed, at 25 million population, it is the largest in the world, just ahead of Karachi, Pakistan, but fortunately it has about half the population density of Karachi. By comparison with New York City (21st on the list), Shanghai's density is only about 40% of the Big Apple's. Pudong handles almost all the international flights coming into and leaving Shanghai and serves over 60 million passengers per year. That's a lot of people, but it is only the 13th busiest in the world in that respect, and trails Beijing, which is the busiest in China.
Pudong was our first exposure to China and it was a favorable impression. Ultra-modern and well-organized, it keeps people moving and offers virtually all of the conveniences today's international traveler expects from an airport. Signage is in English as well as Chinese, and we moved through customs without trouble. One of the first things I noticed was that there was a minimal security presence, at least that which could be seen. We were well aware that China is a totalitarian state, ruled by the Communist Party since 1949, but you wouldn't know that by Pudong, and indeed, we would find that the police presence in China was very low-key, less perhaps even than New York's.
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| No matter what airport you're at, the baggage claim wait is universal. |
Travel Leaders had contracted with EXO Travel to provide our in-country tours, and we were met at Pudong by a smiling young Chinese gentleman named Andrew, who escorted us to a waiting car and accompanied us on the hour-long drive to our hotel. Although Pudong is only 19 miles from the center of Shanghai, traffic can be a challenge, especially on a Friday evening. Travelers can take the maglev train from the airport, reducing the time to only ten minutes or so, but that was an option we weren't aware of at the time. This high-speed train operates with magnetic levitation, and the Shanghai line was the first of its kind in the world. The train reaches a top speed of about 270 mph in just over two minutes. We would soon discover that China leads the world in "bullet train" track, with nearly 12,000 miles in service and another 11,000 under construction.
Later on in our trip, another tour guide would explain that many young Chinese also have Westernized names, which they usually choose for themselves in grade school when they first begin their study of English. The great majority of Chinese learn English this way, and in Shanghai we would see street signs in both languages.
Our hotel for our Shanghai stays--we would have two nights on this leg, three nights on the back end of the trip--was the Jing An Shangri-La, located in the Jing An Kerry Center, a large complex of skyscrapers, shopping malls and restaurants. Our home for our first two nights in China was on the 39th floor, and offered an amazing view of the city. By the time of our check-in, we were ready to hit the hay after some 26 hours of travel since leaving our home in northwest Wisconsin early Thursday morning.
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| Our room at the ultra-modern Jing An Shangri-La was inviting indeed. |
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| The view of Shanghai at night gave us a taste of things to come. |
Saturday, May 7 -- Shanghai.
The day's original plan called for a bicycle tour of the city this morning, but Andrew had informed us the night before that our guide was ill, so he'd arranged an alternative tour for us: a walking tour of the Bund area. After a good night's sleep, I rose at 6am and hit the hotel pool for a swim, getting my first look at the Shangri-La's outstanding fitness center.
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| The lobby of the Shangri-La was modern and inviting, and the customer service was exceptional. |
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| Swimming in this pool was pure pleasure. |
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| On Sunday morning, Sue and I would get in a workout in the hotel's outstanding fitness center. |
Andrew met us in the lobby around 9am and asked if we would like to take the subway to the Bund. Having both experienced subways in major American and Canadian cities, we said yes, absolutely. Two blocks from our hotel was a station, and we were soon whizzing along the tracks of what by every measure was a modern, and fast, subway. Andrew told us that on weekdays some 10 million people a day ride Shanghai Metro, which has 365 miles of track, making it the biggest in the world. There are plans to double that size within the next ten years. Andrew told us the entire system had been built within the last 30 years. That was something we would hear over and over again in China, and as evidenced by the construction cranes and vehicles we saw everywhere, the building shows no signs of slowing down.
Our walk and subway ride made some immediate impressions on us. First, this is a very clean city, considering it has so many people. There is very little litter and no graffiti. Advertising signs are everywhere and the marketing is non-stop, even including signs on the handles you grip on the subway and buses. And as I would confirm later on by watching some of their television, their ads are just as slick as ours. The people are polite but they don't make eye contact like Americans are wont to do. Younger people are just as addicted to their smart phones as ours are. And they are very fit; we saw no obese people anywhere. That seems hard to believe, but when we got home I looked it up. The official obesity rate in China is about 5%, climbing to 20% in some cities where fast food (chiefly imported from America) is invading their culture. I read recently that in Japan, the obesity rate is only 2%. In America, it is about 33%. Although the sources I read said that one-fifth of big-city Chinese are seriously overweight, we didn't see any evidence of that in Shanghai.
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| The streets of Shanghai were modern, clean and very busy. |
Andrew escorted us from the subway stop to the Bund, sometimes called the Waitan. It is a district along the western bank of the Huangpu River and was the financial center of East Asia in the first half of the 20th century. Those were the days when European powers like Great Britain and France, along with the United States, pretty much ran the show in Shanghai and in much of eastern China. The colonial powers built banks, hotels and social clubs, leaving an architectural imprint that the communists, thankfully, decided to preserve and even feature as Shanghai's most prominent tourist attraction.
EXO had contracted with Shanghai Culture Tours for our visit to the Bund, and our guide was an entertaining Frenchman named Didier Pujol, who had resided in the city for several years. Check out his blog here: Shanghai Culture Tours. For the next few hours we strolled the wide pedestrian way on the riverfront beside Zhongshan Road. We saw many couples who had just been married, posing for photos along the Bund. Didier seemed to know everything about every building: its history, its architecture, and its present-day use.
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| On a hazy Saturday morning, the Bund was just starting to get busy. |
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| One of the many restaurants along the Bund: The House of Roosevelt, www.27bund.com. Owned by Roosevelt China Investments Corp., chaired by Tweed Roosevelt, great-grandson of our 26th president. |
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| A unique topiary garden across the Waibaidu Bridge, near the Astor Hotel. |
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| Across the Huangpu is modern East Shanghai, home of distinctive landmarks like the Oriental Pearl Radio & TV Tower in the middle of the picture. |
One of the Bund's most interesting buildings, with which our guide was very familiar, is the Fairmont Peace Hotel. Built in the early 20th century by Sir Victor Sassoon, an Iraq-borne Sephardic Jew of British nationality who is one of the unique characters in Shanghai history, it is the building with the green pyramid roof in the photo below, lifted from the hotel's site. Didier was able to take us inside and describe the history and distinctive features of the hotel. Take a few minutes to check out the hotel's website at the link above. Our next visit to Shanghai will probably include a stay here.
After our tour, we parted company with Didier and Andrew hailed a cab to take us back to the Shangri-La. Our afternoon activity was a massage treatment at the hotel spa, just what the doctor ordered to deal with our leftover jet lag. That evening we dined in the hotel restaurant and had a drink in the bar, 1515 West, where the house band was getting cranked up for the evening.
But we didn't stay too long, because the next morning we would be heading to another airport for the next leg of our journey. We would fly west to the city of Lanzhou in Gansu Province and after one night there, we would travel by road to the foothills of the Himalayas for our camping adventure in Tibet.
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| As we went to sleep that Saturday night in Shanghai, we eagerly anticipated our trip to Tibet. We would not be disappointed. |
