The one thing I have really missed while overseas is coffee with lovely friends at work. I arrived back at AUT to find Donna, morning tea in one hand and this poem in the other. Here it is – what more can I say (except that our Poet Laureate should watch her back!)
- Annie

Annie’s Back Hurray Hurray
From her three month holiday
First to Rome, real pizza and heat
Arguing with a German, a mighty feat

Vatican, catacombs, swimming pool
History, photography to make you drool
Down to the coast to swim on the shore
Jumpy our van dodges scooters galore

What are we eating?
Where’s the super market?
No washing machine and the van, where to park it?
No head for heights, a left hand drive van
Pronouncing Italian to embarrass the clan

Ferry to Albania with cockroches a-crawling
The deck for a bed, black soot is appalling
Two year old beggers, heat 40 degree fashion
No road rules, horns blaring and fresh water rations

Venice is calling, expensive ice-creams
The Austrian alps bring Heide for dreams
Switzerland civilized, Ursulina’s garden
Cows with big bells, hills make our legs harden

France and the marmots, London with friends
Hi-di-hi camping, the fun never ends
Liverpool football match, Glaswegian speech
Midge infestation, legs fly sprayed for each

Annies driving in Scotland, all one way streets
“This is NEVER Dad’s driving” each child repeats
Then Ireland, our castle, was given away
Flaherty’s history, we’ll back some day

Red London busses, Big Ben and the Tower
Robyn in Greenwich, we watch for the hour
France for Bayeux, and the Brittany shore
Fields of white crosses, explaining the war

Denmark’s expensive, but wait, there’s free biking,
2000 year bog man, and plenty of Vikings
Tivoli theme park, where Mum nearly died.
But treasured relief in a fairytale ride

Our last night in Europe, German smoke forms a cloud
The worry of luggage, gross weight not allowed.
Into Hong Kong, and it’s humid and hot
Old ladies as porters, and beggers do squat

Freshly squeezed juice, the orange is healthiest
We eat out every meal, we must be the wealthiest
Everything’s meat for a hungry vegetarian
No wordpress in China, to confound the librarian

Not much English in China, and they’ve vetoed free speech
Fish rights non-existant, with cramped space for each
Patrick’s blond hair, longish with curl
Inquiring Chinese asks “You boy or girl?”

No chewing of gums, no spitting nor piss
Chinese bean puddings, I’ll give ‘em a miss
Six Pedigree puppies, all in one crate
Guilin by night train, only 3 hours late

Home sweet home to Auckland, your own little beds
Green fields, clean streets, NZ rain on your heads
Leaving behind the strange sounds of Chinese
Home you come, bringing with you, great memories

Donna Jarvis

October 2008

The street sellers in Asia have many ways to entice you into giving them money, some more effective than others.

In Yangshou everyone one has their own turf and their unique “angle”. There are the fake Shaolin monks with their grey uniforms and conical hats, playing Chinese folk songs and Mull of Kintyre on flutes for sale; the guy who wanders along beside us cutting out our silhouettes on black paper; the girls who grab hold of your arm and won’t allow you to leave their shop till you have named a price; the old woman who follows us up Moon Hill forcing drinks and postcards upon us every couple of minutes.

In Guanzhou we meet students who want to show us “something interesting, please”; street pharmacists who wave tiger claws and buffalo horns at us; the clothes shop assistants standing on the pavement with a small amplifier attached to their waist, screeching distorted sale prices; a couple of real monks trying to shame Annie into paying for some prayers; even a couple of conmen playing the old which cup is the pea under game.

In Macau most of the money is spent inside casinos but we are still offered menus and shirts and drinks and sunglasses. Annie becomes firm friends with an Iranian kebab seller who charms her with curteous hospitality, shaking hands and offering the address of his father if we are ever in Teheran.

Back here in Hong Kong tonight we stroll past the familiar Indians hawking fake Rolex watches and offers of tailor-made suits; the middle aged housewives thrusting flyers for foot and body massages; the toy salesman in Temple St market who catches Patrick’s eye by hovering a flying saucer over his head.

Sometimes annoying, sometimes tedious, and sometimes very funny, but the streets in China are always colourful and manage to keep even tired, foot-sore children interested.

-Brian

Macau, a Portugese colony for several hundred years, was handed back to China in 1999. Like HK, it now has 50 years as a Special Administrative Region before being fully reinetrgated into China. We spend 2 days here and it feels very different from anywhere else we have visited.

Backpackers are nothing here – the main focus is gambling and it is wealthy Asians here to gamble, not tight NZers with tents in their baggage, who are targetted. We feel quite invisible wandering the streets, admiring the scraps of 17thC Portugese architecture that remain, enjoying the bilingual Portuegese / Cantonese signs everywhere, and sampling the local food.

E and P particularly like a kind of beef jerky that is a speciality sold by the A4 sheet. I love the street meals cooked up in tiny alleyway shops -you choose raw kebabs of whaterever ingredients on offer (veges, tofu, shitaki mushrooms, kelp, squid, and of course all sorts of meat) and they will boil it up for you in what I fear is a rich meat broth (I suspect this because I see slabs of pig stomach lining floating in the mix). I take a positive attitude, assume I am mistaken, and relish the delicious result – which is doused in a chilli flavoured sauce (gravy??).

We gawp at the incredible Lisboa and skip around waving at our reflections in the onion dome towering above us (not Joseph obviously). The Lisboa is a golden building, a casino and hotel, shaped like a hibiscus and soaring to the sky all angles and protruding edges. We return at night-time to gawp again, this time at the rainbow light shows chasing each other across both this building and the other casinos that surround it.

There is no shopping for us here in this Asian Las Vegas – it is all gold, diamonds, jade and rolexes for the wealthy gamblers. Luxury building complexes are springing up everywhere so business must be good. I wonder how the current financial downturn will affect it.

- Annie

The driver is a fool and a madman. In addition to his penchant for driving in the wrong side of the road (in China they usually drive on the right) and scaring oncoming traffic onto the verge with his horn, he also has a picture of Chairman Mao dangling over his head. You know, the middle aged balding one where his hair sticks out like Mickey Mouse ears.

Down the back behind the rear wheels we catch every bump and swerve. Three rows across, two high, the beds are built for dwarfs and little people. Patrick complains that his “smells of poo”. Joseph and Ellen are clinging on somewhere beneath me. Annie screws tight her eyes to approximate sleep. An hour backwe stopped for a meal at a roadside bunker. Too tired to eat we leaned against each other on a wall outside. The “country toilet” there is a concrete trench where people squat in knee-high stalls.

I”ve given up all hope, and stare blankly outside. For a moment it is 1973 and I am curled up in the back of the family station wagon on a night drive to Auckland. Back in the present, through a combination of hissing and vigorous head shaking Annie shames a couple of would-be smokers into returning their cigarettes to their pockets. The night is never ending…

Suddenly an eerie limestone peak looms out of the blackness, silver half moon and Venus behind. Bonny Prince Billy singing in my ears – “I See a Darkness”. The night gods rattling at the window.

-Brian

We all enjoyed Yangshou – not just the wonderful scenery and bike riding that the kids have described, but the cosy backpacker atmosphere of the place. We haven’t really experienced that much on this trip and it does make a nice change – and makes travelling very easy.  Banana pancakes and pizza are on offer in all the cafes lining the street at the heart of this backpacker suburb, everyone speaks a bit of English and everyone is keen to sell you something.

And people do come here to shop – young western backpackers, older western tour groups on day trips, and many Asian tourists too who don’t quite stick out like sore thumbs the way we do but are still easy to spot. We were warned to bargain hard – and it is exhausting when all the prices are inflated to such an extent that a fair price is 10-20% of the initial asking price. But I am pretty good at this and we make good progress!
- Annie

Yesterday we hired bicycles and went cycling. Joseph, Paddy and Ellen got bikes with gears but Mum and Dad got cruddy ones. We rode to Moon Hill for what felt like 50 km. It is massive with a big hole the shape of a semicircle in the middle of it. It was dead flat getting there but we were lucky with the roundabouts because there wasn’t too much traffic when we went through them – there are no lanes on the roundabouts and they are huge.

As we cycled along we saw the huge hills – they are extremely steep like jagged sharp teeth. There are hundreds of them, row upon row, covered in bush. They are amazing because they are just so steep and narrow and crowded together, and come up out of no-where. This is what the area is famous for, along with the river, which is very broad and slow moving filled with bamboo rafts. When we sat at the top we thought “where’s Grandma when we need her?” She would be able to explain all this geomorphology stuff.

We noticed that there were lots of old people being farmers, using hoes to dig up the earth, and wearing big straw Chinese hats on their heads. It looked very hard work. They also carry two huge, heavy baskets attached to a big stick that they balance on their shoulders. As well as vegetable fields we saw rice paddy fields, in inches of water, and Joseph saw people harvesting the rice by hand.

Everywhere you go people say “hello, hello” and want to sell you something. An old lady at Moon Hill followed us up the hill trying to sell us stuff. We noticed that she got a lot less jelly legged than Patrick, even thought she looked as though she was 134, and didn’t need to play “what would you do if you had $1billion” in order to get to the summit. (This game is losing its impact as Paddy used up all his best ideas in the Swiss Alps).

- Ellen, Paddy, Joseph

The public toilets are all elephant foot, tho in the hostels they are normal. But you have to remember not to put the toilet paper down the toilet. Instead you have to put it in the bin beside the toilet.

They have fitness playgrounds for old people like Mum and Dad. I noticed people doing push-ups and running and chin-ups and twists. I liked using the machines as well.

- Paddy

We are lucky to get on – hard class sleeper, all in one carriage, but in separate compartments. Joseph doing his chemistry, Patrick reading the Hobbit, Ellen a fantasy novel, and Annie looking for hot water for noodle cups. The carriage is noisy and happy with families playing cards and sharing food. Lights flash by the window in the Chinese darkness.

Earlier an English-speaking student helped us to find the correct waiting room upstairs – a large hall choked with travellers. It is nearing the end of a week of public holidays in China so millions of people are on the move Shortly before the train was due to depart an official with a megaphone screamed an order and a stampede began, out of the hall down stairs and on to the platform.

The train compartments are 3 tier bunks, and our beds are all top bunks crammed beneath the ceiling. Ellen and Patrick share their compartment with a family who ask lots of curious questions, though they speak Cantonese, have no English and Ellen only 20 words of Mandarin. In my carriage the parents try to hide their children behind bodies while nonchalantly playing cards.

I am awake at first light and sit by the window in the hall watching the mist lift. We pass a crumbling temple of four stories, ivy and vines climbing to its curled eves; farmers pulling carts along country lanes; village after village of low red brick houses; a dozen people clinging to the outside of a truck.

At a local station, an official stands to attention beside the track, royal blue and gold hat, uniform stretched across his rotund figure, half the buttons undone, red and green flags held at his side.

We seemed to pass most of the night stationary on sidings, but somehow arrive in Guilin only three hours late.

- Brian

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In China we have generally been eating at semi-touristy places where the menu is both in English and in Chinese. But when we were in Guangzhou we decided to eat in a place where only normal Chinese people ate.

The menu there was all in Chinese so the manager called over a lady who could speak a little bit of English – tho not that much because when J asked for sweet and sour pork she thought he asked for sprite (coke and sprite are everywhere). Eventually we got meals that included, for me, noodles and pork in a broth, and for everyone else meat or vegetables and rice. The meal also had lots of bok choy which is a slimy, leafy, bitter, soggy, green vegetable. We enjoyed the meal despite Joseph gagging on the bok choy.

In the evening we came back again. Patrick and I weren’t hungry so the lady suggested pudding. When they arrived mine was sweet red kidney bean and coconut soupy puree. It was disgusting but despite that I told the lady it was nice and I managed to eat a spoonful while she was watching. Patrick’s one was even worse. I am not quite sure what was in it – Mum says pureed mung beans and hard boiled tiny eggs (pigeon?) floating on top and sugar. Dad ate the eggs and mum said it was better than the red bean and coconut one but wouldn’t actually eat any herself.

I have been trying lots of different Chinese foods and have particularly enjoyed kebabs and spring rolls.

- Ellen

We walked around the markets in Guangzhou. We saw lots of aquariums with tropical fish and turtles for sale, some as big as your hand and some as big as your thumbnail. Even more surprising is that there were lion paws and claws for sale that people laid out on pieces of cloth on the road.

We walked on. Soon we came to lots of cages full of puppies and birds and kittens and lizards as big as tuataras. The puppies were all very cute and fluffy and little and were barking. Mum said they were pedigree puppies. I felt sorry for them because there were like six of them in one small cage and they had to lie there all day.

When we caught the bus to Yangshou, Dad made us move from the front seat to one near the back because the driver was too dangerous. He was driving in the middle of or on the wrong side of the road most of the time beeping his horn every three seconds very loudly and long. He kept overtaking on corners. Lots of buses drive like that here.

- Patrick