Lessons Learned

Now that I’m safely back at home in North America here are some conclusions and lessons learned:

1. Three weeks of a seat of the pants touring may have been too much of a good thing. What I found adventurous when I was younger and more full of piss and vinegar is now more of a grind.  Wandering was more satisfying when I didn’t get sore feet and when I didn’t conk out as easily. But I’m still not ready for a ring through my nose organized tour.

2. Because I arrived in China without maps I had to take the time to find a map in English in each city. That meant seeking out a book store and having Eleanor ask in Mandarin if they carried any city maps in English, a time consuming chore.

3. One nice tool that I had in my travel arsenal was a WiFi equipped cell phone loaded with Fring and Onesuite. When I needed to call customer service to bitch at Orbitz when our hotel in Shenzhen didn’t have our prepaid reservation my 120 minutes of phone frustration to a phone number in Chicago cost me a cool $3. Sprint says that they charge $2.29 per minute (plus taxes and fees) to call home from China so 120 minutes would’ve cost me a frightening $274.80. Fring just reaches down into the contact list of my phone so no editing, no addition and then links you to the SIP provider of your choice. Once I had WiFi I could call any phone number in the US for a cool 2.5 cents per minute.

4. I used Boingo to access WiFi sites in China with mixed results. In Chengdu and Shanghai I was easily able to roam on China Mobile, in Shenzhen only in Starbucks. In Hong Kong outside of Starbucks Boingo was worse than useless. That’s because most of Hong Kong, including MTR stations, is covered by PCCW WiFi. The Boingo app would vibrate and chirp my phone, sometimes every few seconds, to ask me if I wanted to roam on PCCW, only to fail and spit up an error screen.  It would then ask that I send the error report back to Boingo. But without access to WiFi, Boingo’s only purpose, that isn’t possible. Then the phone would chirp, vibrate and start the whole annoying process all over again. 

*Update*  Boingo's customer service folks found this critique of their service almost instantly and as you can see below they requested more information, which I provided.  And I never heard from them again.  When I first signed up for Boingo I had an annoying problem with their software on my Android phone, it totally disarmed all wifi access on my HTC Hero.  The only cure was to wipe the phone and start all over again which I found highly annoying.  I called Boingo and they sounded very concerned and requested a detailed trouble report, which I quickly sent to the address that Boingo provided.  And I didn't hear from them again until they read the paragraph above and commented below.  Result: I cancelled Boingo.  Nice idea, poor execution.  Concerned sounding customer service is no substitute for actual tech support.

5. This ain’t your Father’s communism. I was hard pressed to find so much as a hammer and sickle in China, in three weeks I spotted just one.  Chairman Mao wouldn’t recognize the place.  I’m sure that the Chinese Communist Party is firmly in control of the country and would stomp any and all domestic challengers with the full force of the one party state. Security was tight in spots and being behind the Great Firewall is a great pain in the ass.  But China seems too busy making money or looking for ways to spend it. Who thought that China would be shopping at Wal-Mart or preoccupied with this kind of cultural revolution on state run TV?

6. I may not go back to China. The cultural gulf is so wide and the language so unintelligible that my ability to understand what I see and hear is stunted and more visits might only give me more jet lag on both ends.  At some point I just to have to shrug my shoulders and admit that there’s much I’ll just never understand.  But no organized tour could fill these gaps for me.

Taipei: One China Policy

The US government may follow the mainland’s one China policy but there’s no such policy here at Strange Taste Horsebeans. I’ve visited Hong Kong and it’s a wonderful orderly yet chaotic contrast to the mainland. Hong Kong prospered while the mainland suffered under communist dictatorship and economic ham handedness. At the time of suffering and deprivation on the mainland it was same people, different system. Now Hong Kong and Macau are considered “Special Administrative Regions”, or SAR’s of China. Or as Beijing now describes the curious situation, “one country, two systems”. But there’s still one more China. While the mainland was ruled by the whims of Mao the Republic of China on Taiwan was ruled by Chiang Kai-Shek, the loser of the long and bloody Chinese civil war and only a slightly lesser despot than Mao. Both Chiang and Mao remain only on having their regal mugs on the face of their country’s money but the division between the People’s Republic and Taiwan remain, the mainland still considers Taiwan as a rebellious province of China, Taiwan sees itself as an independent country (others see it differently, it has official diplomatic relations with only 23 countries). And when China was mired in economic Commie chaos Taiwan blossomed into a first world economy of innovation, creation and comfort. Once again, same people, different system. For me the question is simple: what’s Taiwan like and why is it like that?

Axis of Evil - Part 1

That's Chairman Mao himself outside of the train station in Dandong. When I decided to focus much of my travel on China I knew that a must see destination would be the northeastern city of Dandong. I wanted to get as close as an American citizen can to Asia’s founding member of the “Axis of Evil”, North Korea. I’ve long been fascinated with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea or DPRK. The DPRK has been described as a Stalinist Theme Park. If the communism in today’s China can be described as Communism Lite, the DPRK is old school Commie Classic. Stalin’s USSR had no cell phones and neither does the DPRK, they’re banned. Electricity is a sometimes thing as is food. After a bad harvest a few years ago and resulting famine that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives one of the government’s slogans was, “Let’s all eat 2 meals a day”. Anyone with a fast Internet connection can watch canned broadcasts of the nightly news from Pyongyang (http://www.elufa.net/) and understanding Korean isn’t a requirement to notice that things are just a wee bit odd in the DPRK. Since the DPRK is a one party state ruled by the Korean Workers Party and the head of the party, Kim Jong Il, is known as the “Dear Leader” most of the news is about his comings and goings, such as his visits to army bases or to collective farms to dispense “on the spot guidance” and tell farmers in person what they ought to grow or not grow. Or the historic comings and goings of his father Kim Il Sung, the “Great Leader” because the DPRK is the world’s first communist dynasty. In the dead of winter the news often shows office workers in winter coats and vapor streaming from their mouths because in the energy poor DPRK if it’s cold outside it’s cold inside. Does a rocky hillside have to be moved in preparation for new construction? No problem because although the DPRK lacks modern earth moving equipment I’ve seen workers on TV breaking big ones into little ones with sledge hammers and chisels while others dutifully carry off the debris in baskets. I’d love to go and see all this for myself but there are several obstacles:

• American citizens are forbidden entry because although there's an armistice the US and DPRK are still technically at war.

• Tourists that do make it into the DPRK are assigned minders and their itineraries are set by the government, wandering off alone and mingling with the locals is strictly prohibited.

• Why give money to to aid and strengthen brutal dictators? We’re not talking Gitmo here. Read the Aquariums of Pyongyang; if you don’t catch snakes, lizards, rats and insects to eat while you’re in a North Korean labor camp you die of starvation. After a day of forced mining or logging committing the speeches of the ruling Kim clan to memory is mandatory.

OK, so I couldn't enter the country but I could get up close and peer in. To do so I had to go to Dandong. Dandong is on the Yalu River in Liaoning province and was once a staging ground for Chinese “volunteers” who fought in the Korean War against the US. Today there’s a museum there with the pretentious cold war name of Museum Commemorating the War to Resist American Aggression and Aid Korea.

Dandong is a Seattle sized city of roughly 500,000 people and is the eastern terminus of the Great Wall of China. The Yalu River forms the border between China and the DPRK, right across the Yalu is the North Korean city of Sinuiju. I booked a "Riverview" room at Dandong’s only 4 star hotel, the Zhonglian, a room with a view, a view of North Korea.

See those 2 bridges that my riverview room looked out on? Actually it’s just a bridge and a half. The austere bridge on the left connects Dandong and Sinuiju with one reversible lane for motor vehicles and one railroad track. The half bridge on the right was built during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria and was bombed during the Korean war by the US Air Force in 1950 and was never rebuilt. On the DPRK side only the footings remain. Today the “Broken Bridge” is a tourist attraction, admission 20 Yuan. My admission ticket is below.

 

Sinuiju has a slightly smaller population than Dandong but at night it might as well not exist, it's absolutely invisible. At night Dandong is alive with lights, cars and people on the streets or in their electrically lit homes living their lives. At night Sinuiju appears to be dead, maybe the Dear Leader sucked the life out of it. I saw no lights at all except what appeared to be somebody welding. I did see some diffused light off in the distance, I’ve since read that it’s the statue of the Great Leader Kim Il Sung which has the only artificial light in town.

Directly above and below is Dandong as seen from a boat on the North Korean side of the Yalu. It's so prosperous it even has air pollution.

  

There's not much to see on the Sinuiju side of the Yalu. Plenty of rusting hulks, a few propaganda slogans (this one supposedly proclaims that Kim Jong Il is the light of the sun) and not much else. If rigid communism has any benefits they weren't evident from just offshore.

Truck traffic between Dandong and the DPRK. No clue on what's in the trucks. I saw carpeting heading into North Korea and a refrigerated truck from a Japanese meat company come out.

The Great Helmsman bids you farewell.