trip reports

Thoughts from an ordinary Aussie EV roadtrip

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Welcome to Victoria, the long way

During the summer holidays we drove our Tesla Model 3 from Sydney to Melbourne via the Princes Highway and back via the Hume, about 2500 km all in including various detours. We’ve now had the Tesla for a year and this was our third longer road trip (>1000 km), taking us across a wide variety of roads, terrain and weather conditions, so here’s some random thoughts about what I’ve learned and how it all worked out.

Charging strategy

Whenever anybody hears we did a road trip in an EV, their first question is “so how was the charging situation”? The short answer is it’s fine: not once on this trip did we have “range anxiety”, nor did this require extensive planning, Australia’s main roads are well covered by chargers these days. The long answer, though, is a bit more nuanced.

For a road trip, there are basically three kinds of chargers. The first category is really fast DC chargers, like Tesla’s aptly named Superchargers, that can zap you car with 120-250 kW and finish the job in 10-20 minutes. This is perfect for a quick toilet/coffee break, but it’s actually too fast for lunch or serious shopping, and several times I had to go move the car because it was fully charged and most fast chargers now threaten late fees if the car is charged up and there are others waiting.

Superchargers only take this long if you let your battery get this low

The second category is merely “fast” DC chargers, usually 50 to 75 kW. Most of Australia’s non-Tesla chargers (Evie, Chargefox etc) fall in this bracket, and I’ve come to the conclusion that they’re by and large useless. There’s often only a stall or two, and if you’re sharing one charger between two cables, the charging speed becomes an even more pokey 25 kW, meaning it may take hours to get anywhere near 100%.

And the rest is all the rest. In my early Tesla days, I used to obsess about “destination chargers”, which are basically the same AC 7 kW unit we have at home. In reality, they’re too slow to make a difference unless you’re staying overnight, in which case even a regular pokey 2 kW wall socket will juice you up.

Cheap accommodation and slow charging: both get the job done

So here’s our charging strategy: on travel days, do pit stops at Superchargers as needed (typically once a day), often having lunch nearby after filling up. Plug in overnight when possible (holiday parks are great for this, as was staying at the house of a friend with a home EV charger in Melbourne), but otherwise don’t worry about it. Here’s the stats:

NetworkSessionskWhPrice/kWhCost
Tesla6166$0.70$116
Evie230$0.50$15
Free8159–$0
Total8355–$131

For comparison, driving 2,500 km in a Toyota Corolla with 6L/100 km efficiency and paying the NSW average fuel price of $1.85 this month would have cost us $278, a savings of $157. So while it would obviously take quite a few Sydney-Melbourne round trips to pay off the car, I can see why Teslas are increasingly popular for Uber drivers.

Charging infrastructure

Evie: the least bad alternative to Tesla Superchargers

Princes Highway: A year ago, charging infra along this route was limited enough that doing this trip would have been tricky; not impossible, but not a whole lot of options if the Tesla SCs were down. In 2024, it still requires a little planning ahead, but things are much easier. There are also three new planned Supercharger sites at Kiama, Batemans Bay and Bega, so by 2025 charging will be a complete non-issue.

Heading down from Sydney, we drove past the Berry charger because it’s on the wrong side of the Princes Highway and it was pissing down rain. Batemans Bay has 9 (!) non-Tesla chargers now, with one pair of Evies conveniently in front of a Dan Murphy’s, although somebody else had found it too so we were limited to 25 kW. Still, by the time we’d selected two bottles of wine, we had juiced up enough that we had a comfortable buffer to get to our first stop for the night near Bermagui. The biggest gap remains the 244 km from Narooma to Cann River, which has zero fast chargers except a single NRMA 50 kW unit at Bega. But after reaching Orbost and the comparative civilization of Gippsland, chargers (Tesla and otherwise) are plentiful, although Phillip Island oddly has none.

Hume Highway: The Hume is Australia’s busiest long-distance highway, and also the one most amply supplied with Superchargers. With 11 stations already built out, there’s one every 100 km or so, and 4 more stations under construction. The newer sites are built for major growth, with Albury featuring 16 stalls and upcoming Benalla planning 20, but the busiest we saw, and in fact the only Supercharger along the entire journey with more than one other car, was 5 out 8 in use at Goulburn.

Driving long distances in a Tesla

Tesla’s happy place: adaptive cruise control on an empty four-lane highway

The Model 3 is a great car for long drives. Not perfect, mind you, but still pretty darn great.

The Princes Highway is mostly rural two-lane highway with lots of curves, intersecting roads and frequently changing advisory/legal speed limits, so we drove most of it “manually”. The Tesla excelled at this, it’s fun to drive and the cabin is quiet at lower speeds (80-100 km/h). The biggest pain point was driving in rain, where the “auto” wipers once again proved pretty flaky and we had to flick between wiper speeds manually, either using voice control or pressing the wipe button manually and then stabbing at the touch screen.

The Hume Highway is a proper four-lane mostly-limited-access highway, with just enough crossings to keep things interesting. At 110 km/h for almost all the way, there’s also noticeably more road noise than at 80. Autosteer (adaptive cruise control + lane following + one-tap lane changes) was brilliant on the quieter stretches like Albury to Goulburn, the car pretty much drives itself and you could overtake slower vehicles and get back in the left lane with one turn indicator tap right and another one light tap back. The biggest drama was deciding where to keep your right foot: my wife initially argued for hovering over the brake pedal, which proved very tiring very fast, but soon enough she too was convinced that resting on the floor nearby most of the time was fine.

The one case where we had to pay a little attention was when passing large trucks, particularly if the road was not dead straight, when Autosteer would occasionally get spooked and brake to match the truck’s speed (eg 110 to 90 km/h) instead of zooming past it. No big deal if there’s nobody behind you, but on exactly one occasion this led to a well-deserved honk from another truck breathing down my neck, and we quickly picked up the habit of hovering near the accelerator to counter this when needed. Past Goulburn, when the road got busier and both lanes were constantly in use, Autosteer was still useful for chugging along but I negotiated overtaking manually.

Things I Learned

When you take the Searoad ferry from Sorrento to Queenscliff near Melbourne, EVs get priority and are placed at the front, so they can be more easily pushed into the ocean if the batteries catch fire. Also, the (free to use) Portsea Lounge has excellent taste in Finnish designer bar stools.

On previous road trips, I would very often find myself talking to other excited EV owners at chargers, helping somebody else navigate an app for their first ever DC fast charge or comparing charging speeds. On this trip, the closest I got was a single casual wave from another Model 3 driver making the long haul in the opposite direction near Cann River, where EVs are few and far between. Commodification has its downsides.

Now to decide our next road trip: Sunshine Coast or Kangaroo Island, mayhaps?

Lady Jennifer Windsor: the hoax that fooled Singapore for over 11 years

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Many Singaporeans will have heard of the tragic story of Lady Jennifer Windsor, wife of Lord Windsor. One of many British residents in the colony, she and her wealthy family lived on a huge estate in Upper Thomson in the 1920s.

Yet this idyllic existence was shattered on one cruel day in 1923.  Lady Jennifer’s three young children, Harry, Paul and little Angela, were playing at a nearby bridge when out of nowhere, a flash flood suddenly swept them all away to her deaths. The bodies of the two little boys were found downriver, but Angela’s body was never found.

Soon people started to hear what sounded like the cries of a little girl near the bridge, and the desperate Lady Jennifer went there to comfort her lost child’s soul.  She ended up spending the rest of her life in mourning near the bridge, and that is how the Singaporean neighbourhood of Ang Mo Kio, or Caucasian Bridge, got its name.

It’s a tragic tale, retold in many places like New York Times journalist Cheryl Tan’s book A Tiger in the Kitchen, a Singaporean TV documentary, the Wikipedia page for Ang Mo Kio and too many blogs and tourist guides to count. There’s only one tiny flaw in the story: it’s unadulterated horseshit.

The story seems off even on casual inspection. “Jenny from the block“, the Cornish version of Guinevere, seems an unlikely choice of name for an aristocrat born in the late 1800s. The Windsors are nothing less than the British royal family, so what happened to that estate, and why are there no other traces of them in Singapore? If they had lived here, would they really let their young children play on a road completely unsupervised? And even if they did, are flash floods large enough to wipe out bridges but not accompanied by massive storms really a thing in Singapore?

Once this thread of suspicion had been pulled, the entire fabric of the hoax unraveled within days. A Google Books search revealed both precisely zero hits for the fair Lady before 2009, and that there were historical references to the name Ang Mo Kio as early as 1855, decades before her supposed birth.  Soon a Wikipedia sleuth tracked down the apparent original source, namely this shitpost by a “Michaelzhang68” in the Chit Chat room of the late sgforums.com on November 21, 2008. Nobody bought it there either, as the improbable tale was promptly torn to shreds and one reply even lampooned it by suggesting that Ah Hood Road was named when Robin Hood decided to swap Nottinghamshire for Singapore.

Nevertheless, the original creator seems to have persisted, since mere hours later, a verbatim copy of the post was added to Wikipedia’s “Ang Mo Kio” page by a “Paulchen68”, and that’s all it took for the legend to sprout seed. For 11 long years and 8 months until July 2020, the story sat there, occasionally embellished or reformatted, but essentially unquestioned until this ang moh happened to move next to Ang Mo Kio and started wondering where that name came from.

So where did the name come from? I subscribe to the least sexy possible theory: a bridge (桥 kio in Hokkien) was built from concrete (红毛灰 ang mo he “Western ash”), which then became Ang Mo Kio. But maybe you shouldn’t trust the claims of a random stranger on the Internet on this point either…

Picture of a suitably skeptical-looking “Lady Jennifer” from the Mardi Gras Museum at Arnaud’s, an execrable tourist trap in New Orleans.

 

Staycation in the time of plague: a night at Capella Singapore

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After months of lockdown, Singapore opened up some hotels to staycations by local visitors in early July. It had been 6 months since we’d gotten out of the house, the kids were on school holiday, and Capella Singapore of Trump-Kim summit fame had a pretty decent deal (20% off, free breakfast, late checkout and a $100 dining credit), so we decided to try it out. Make no mistake, this was still not a cheap stay, but we did also “save” on the cost of return flights for four people, or at least that’s how we justified it to ourselves!

This is not going to be a review of Capella: the place has been around for over ten years, so that’s been done to death. Instead, I’m going to focus on what staycations in Phase 2 Singapore are like when COVID-19 still stalks the streets.

Arrival

Luxury hotels put a lot of effort into making check-in as smooth as possible. COVID bureaucracy, unfortunately, does not. On arrival, every adult needs to do the SafeEntry QR scan before entering, get their temperature measured, fill out a lengthy health declaration form that requests everything from your reason of stay to your employer’s contact details, and only then to you get the to the normal hotel registration with NRICs, credit cards etc. No big deal in the grand scheme of things, but it did take a good 20 minutes and it’s always tedious to repeat the same info over and over — would it be hard to, say, extend SafeEntry to hotel stays?

In normal times, Capella serves its guests iced tea on arrival. These are not normal times, so we got sealed tetrapaks of “ecofriendly” water instead. The kids were less than impressed, and entertained themselves by watching a cockroach crawl up the wall.

Room

Our room was otherwise refreshingly normal, and the kids were relieved to hear you don’t even need to wear masks inside. However, all in-room snacks and alcohol had disappeared. The minibar was still stocked, but only with 4 cans of Coke and some fruit juice. I’m not sure if this is because of COVID, regular Capella policy, or just some reopening glitch. A welcome gift in the form of shrink-wrapped cookies was delivered, but there was no sign of the usual fruit basket.

Facilities

All pools were open, but with capacity controls: for example, 16 guests max in the family pool, with 2-hour stays. Enforcement appeared to be mostly on an honour basis, and in any case we only saw one other family using it during our stay. The gym was open, but access was gated via the (also open) spa. The business centre was unsurprisingly closed. Elevators, the front desk, and other places with even a remote possibility of crowding were annotated with big social distancing stickers on the floor.

Capella’s complimentary lounge, the Living Room, was open but again with capacity controls, so we had to call ahead to book. On arrival, heads were counted to make sure they were within limits (yes, barely), then we were guided to a table and presented with a fixed set of snacks, plus coffee/tea/soft drinks made to order.

Interestingly enough, while most guests were couples or families like us, there were a few Mandarin-speaking solo travellers in business wear. The Singapore-China Green Lane in action, perhaps?

Dining

Capella has two restaurants and a bar, all of which were open. However, since in-house dining charges like a wounded bull ($38++ for nasi goreng, anyone?), we opted to eat our meals on the Sentosa beachfront, which isn’t cheap either, but there are many 1-for-1 deals to dull the pain. (Pro tip: with the 1:1 pizzas at Trapizza Mon-Fri, you can feed a family of four for $22++.)

For the breakfast, we had to make an advance reservation for one of two time slots (7-8:30, 9-10:30 AM), which prevented table use and allowed a half-hour deep clean between guests. Instead of a regular buffet, which isn’t allowed under COVID rules, we had a choice of one of three set meals and/or a selection of “free flow” made to order items on the side, all brought to your table. The net effect was a bit like eating dim sum/yum cha, with trays of pastries and trolleys of juice floating past. At a fairly small and intimate place like Capella this worked very nicely, but I do wonder how large hotels with their massive champagne brunch spreads will convert to this new format. One more plus for Capella’s The Knolls: there’s plenty of spaced-out, airy and shady outdoor seating. Your average city hotel will struggle with this too.

Activities

Capella offers a wide-range of free “cultural” activities like Peranakan painting and brown sugar bubble tea making. These operated normally, except that everybody involved — including us — was masked up. Mmm, just look at that frothy mug of diabetes in a cup!

Crowding & staffing

We visited on a regular non-school-holiday weekday, and both the hotel and Sentosa were pretty quiet. Apparently this is set to change once the holidays start, and Capella is already booked full (!) on July 23rd, although I imagine they’re also operating at reduced capacity.

One thing which soon became clear is that the hotel appeared to be somewhat understaffed. The front desk promised to call regarding an activity booking but didn’t, it was 9 PM by the time turndown service was offered, a late night snack attack room service order never showed up, we were asked for our newspaper selection but it wasn’t delivered, etc — none of these big deals, but not what you’d expect at this price point. Did they underestimate the demand, or do they have staff stuck overseas? If it’s like this during a quiet weekday, next week is going to be a mess.

Overall verdict

Definitely worth it. Capella’s terraced pools are the closest you’re going to get to Bali in Singapore (just try to ignore the oil refinery flares in the background), and it’s closer to our home than Changi Airport. The COVID limits were reasonable and the adaptations well thought out. We also try to avoid busy indoor spaces (19x risk compared to the outdoors!), so Sentosa is definitely the place to be: it’s much nicer now without the usual crowds, and we really appreciated the chance to see some greenery, wide open beaches and lots of airy outdoor eating options.

It was not so nice to see some groups on the beach with way more than 5 people and not a mask in sight. There was enough space that we could steer clear, but here’s hoping these troglodytes don’t ruin it for everybody else again.

Manufacturing Bula: Mass Tourism in Fiji

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The first bula came at the airport check-in counter in Sydney.  The frequency picked up on board Fiji Airways, where every announcement was prefixed with a bula, and reached a feverish crescendo on arrival at Nadi, where every airport worker seemed oddly insistent on bula-ing every arriving tourist.  Only at the Immigration counter did the puzzle pieces fall into place: there was a HappyOrNot® Smiley Terminal™ enquiring whether you had been sufficiently enthusiastically bula-ed on your arrival, so there were clearly staff bonuses on the line.

Bula is the Fijian word for “life” and an all-purpose greeting much like its Hawaiian cognate aloha, but it’s also the centerpiece of a very successful Saatchi & Saatchi -crafted branding campaign that ensures it’s the first and often last word of the local language firmly imprinted on local tourists.  (It’s actually pronounced m-BU-la, but tourists and locals alike seem to delight in hamming it up as BOO-LAH.)   Hence you can ride a Bula Bus or a Bula Bike to the Big Bula waterpark, have a drink and a Bula Burger at the Bula Bar and then go island hopping with a Bula Pass.

Bula 1: Denarau

All these Bulas and more can be found on Denarau Island, which juts out of a peninsula near Nadi like an angry pimple.  The island was molded into its present form in the 1980s by rapacious Japanese developer Harunori Takahashi, who bulldozed its 850 acres of swamps and mangroves and replaced them with high-end resorts, golf courses, marinas and gated housing.  The only mosquito in the ointment is that mangroves grow in mud, meaning that despite decades of landscaping, including a few truckloads of imported white sand in strategic spots, both the beaches around Denarau and the water lapping at them are expanses of impenetrable slate grey muck.

The resorts thus expend much effort to distract tourists from this rather basic failing.  They’re all suspended well above the surf on concrete plates, angled so that you can Instagram the infinity edge pool and have it blend seamlessly into the palm-fringed Mamanuca Islands in the background, conveniently ignoring all that squelchy mud in the middle.  And if you’re shooting advertising for the Sofitel Denarau, as shown below, you can use a wide-angle lens to make the pool look like it’s actually the ocean and add in a young, nubile woman as a tantalizing hint of what awaits you.

home_waitui-beach-club1Of course, the young woman, too, is a lie: if anything, this is the one demographic striking in its absence at Denarau’s resorts.  (There’s a backpacker scene on Fiji too, but Denarau is firmly off that trail.)  Instead the pools are sardine-packed with tattooed middle-aged yobbos in wifebeaters, their morbidly obese offspring, the odd honeymoon or wedding anniversary couple regretting their choice, and one older lady whose coiffure and countenance bore a truly remarkable resemblance to Donald Trump in hot pink lipstick.

As a rule, tourists in Denarau are there to Get Away From It All™, including their kids, whom many parents opt to dump in Kids Clubs like the Sheraton’s Lai Lai Club, where Recreation Associates will watch your offspring from 8:30 in the morning until 8:30 at night.    The Lai Lai Club is a concrete cellblock with handpainted Nemos and Ariels on sweaty blue walls, giving it the general atmosphere of a children’s cancer ward.  While incarcerated, kids are explicitly not allowed in the pool, even the shallow one right next to the Club; instead, they are treated to amusements like Fish Feeding, which we attended early one morning out of curiosity.  The tots were lined up and marched off in formation down past the concrete to the mudflats, given slices of Wonderbread, and instructed to take exactly five steps forward and throw the bread into the ocean.  Nothing happened, unless you count the waves bringing the bread back to the shore and one of the kids asking: “Isn’t this littering?”  A Recreation Associate took some soggy returned pieces and flung them further out, where the water roiled a bit and rubbery lips attached to invisible sea monsters devoured the bread.  Fish fed!  11 hours to go.

So what do parents do?  Fear not, there’s plenty of activities for them as well.  One fine morning, a fit young Recreation Associate bounced into the Sheraton’s pool, declared himself to be DJ Bobo, and started leading aquafit exercises to the accompaniment of a tinny boombox.  I initially suspected the playlist had to have been selected with tongue firmly in cheek, kicking off with Avicii’s Wake Me Up (“…when it’s all over, and I lose myself”) and continuing with South African anthem Gimme Hope Jo’anna (“She’s got a system they call apartheid / It keeps a brother in a subjection”), but this theory was quickly quashed when it was followed by a techno remix of La Bamba.  The name of the game is maximal demographic appeal: take famous old tune, slap a techno beat on top, and now everybody from 20 to 50 can wobble their flabby arms in tune.

The one thing you’re not going to find in Denarau is, well, Fiji.  The island is separated from the mainland by a short bridge, with Denarau Security (a unit of Denarau Corp Ltd) supplying a small army of husky Fijian rugby player types in wraparound shades to man the gates 24/7 and drive around SUVs to keep the riffraff out.  The roads and gardens are manicured, the fancy housing complexes with names like Paradise Point and Sovereign Quays are behind tall, sturdy fences with more security out front, and the Port Denarau shopping mall has a Hard Rock Cafe, duty free retailers and a shoppe (sic) dedicated to Fiji Bitter couture.  (Local brew Fiji Bitter is, inevitably, owned by Coca-Cola.)

Bula 2: Nadi

The one cheap thing in Denarau is the $1 Westbus (note lack of cutesy name), which exists primarily to shuttle workers between the resorts and the nearby city of Nadi.  The air inside these no-frills buses is conditioned only by the open windows and most riders paid the driver in cash, ignoring the electronic card reader with its “PAYING BY CASH IS ILLEGAL” sign.  One other valagi (foreigner) family clambered on board with us, only to have a limpet-like Fijian attach himself to them, proffering his services as tour guide, inflater of shop prices and general fixer.

Nadi is not an attractive town.  A slice of the subcontinent in the Pacific, it manages to be simultaneously poky and congested, with main drag Queens Road snarled in a permanent traffic jam.  Indians and Chinese manned most shops, most of which had iron bars on the windows (never a good sign) and sold dollar store junk at high street prices.  Every block had a glassy-eyed Fijian sprawled quietly on the uneven pavement: it was unclear if they were begging, drunk, zonked out on yaqona (kava) or some combination of these.  Yaqona was definitely big business though, with fully half the shoddy but sizeable Nadi market devoted to selling the muddy, mildly narcotic roots.

His previous victims having managed to peel him off, our bus friend Mr Limpet now made a beeline for us and immediately started pitching the wonders of various souvenir shops, but slunk off after a couple of determined thank yous.  Next was our turn, as the Sri Siva Subramaniya Temple was celebrating Thaipusam and hence closed to meat-eating infidels, but the priest was so nice about it that I (almost) didn’t mind schlepping back across town in the sweltering midday heat.

On the upside, Nadi did have some of the best food we ate in Fiji, namely the $10 vegetarian thali at Mumbai Dhaba, served with a side dish of blessed air-conditioning too.  And the kids got some nice bula shirts without being subjected to a single bula while shopping!

Bula 3: Navini

The next day we hopped on a boat and continued to the Navini Island Resort, which makes a big deal of being not just a small family-owned operation, but inviting even their guests to join the big happy family.

What makes Navini unique? One answer is that our guests overwhelmingly remark on the friendliness and attentiveness of our staff.   Personal touches that surprise many include […] being known by name by everyone on the island.  We invite you to share the naturalness of Navini, Fiji and its people.

Like so many hotels and resorts in Fiji, Navini is owned by Australians, but day to day, this natural attentiveness is enforced by a formidable Fijian matron, who runs the family with a velvet-gloved iron fist.   In addition to the inevitable bula-ing, the staff indeed call you by name on every conceivable occasion, sweat over proper fork placement during the Western-style three course meals, and will drop whatever they’re doing if they have reason to suspect a guest wants anything.  For example, the island offers a “coconut service”: just ask, and one of the “boys” — their term, not mine, for adult Fijian male staff — will be positively delighted to shimmy up a tree to grab one for you.

Now even a salty cynic like me will readily acknowledge that the island is gorgeous, the bures (villas) are stylish and well equipped, and the combination of being almost entirely disconnected from the world with nothing to do but snorkel, read, and shovel food, booze and/or yaqona into your face is rather addictive.  What I found creepy, though, were the faint cultlike overtones of it all, this odd pretension of everybody being equal when there really is a massive power imbalance between the staff, paid to uproot themselves from their homes and actual families to live in dormitories on this tiny speck of sand, and us, the pampered resort guests paying close to $1000/night so we could send them climbing trees on demand.   Yes, it was heartwarming to watch Thomas, a two-meter gentle giant of a boy man, staying up late to teach my kids to play vidi-vidi with infinite patience, but while he may not have been a Sheraton Recreation Associate, this was his job too.

It’s tempting to ascribe this pretension of equality to be a purely Western phenomenon.  Observe Americans at a nice restaurant sometime: staff will make folksy smalltalk with customers, often reciprocated, only for the customers to then place ridiculous demands on staff and grade their performance with tips.   By comparison, if you go to a good hotel in Japan or Singapore, the service is phenomenal, but it’s at all times very clear who is a guest and who is staff: you will not be invited to join the doormen at the Raffles for a game of pool or tipple some shochu after dinner with the sushi chefs at the Park Hyatt Tokyo.

All that said, in much of Asia it’s considered perfectly normal to go to hostess clubs and pay by the hour to have attractive people sit next to you, laugh at your jokes, pour your drinks and generally pretend they enjoy your company, while in the West this is considered intolerably fake and the people who visit them sad and pathetic.  So who am I to judge?

In a final whiff of artifice, Navini has an eco-friendly veneer, with no air-conditioning or TVs, yet power is supplied by a diesel generator chugging away 24/7, which also runs the water desalination plant.  (Some of the resort’s more scurrilous TripAdvisor reviews allege either this or the sewage treatment plant is also responsible for killing off virtually all the coral around the island.)  This in turn is necessary because the island lacks any sources of potable water, which is why the island was uninhabited and, minus a few palm trees, essentially barren until it was developed into a resort in the 1970s.

Final thoughts

Fiji does not lend itself to snappy summaries.  It’s surprisingly complicated and quietly troubled, with iTaukei (Fijians), Fijian Indians, foreign tourists and increasing numbers of Chinese, all existing uneasily side by side but very much apart.  Our week in and around Nadi barely scratched the surface of these 330 islands scattered over 1.3 million km², and I’d like to poke around Suva, the Mamanucas, the much less visited other big island of Vanua Levu…   but all things considered, I enjoyed my previous visits to New Caledonia and the Cook Islands more.  Sure, French waiters are surly and Rarotongan bus drivers less than punctual, but perhaps being treated the same way locals are, without obsequious bowing and scraping or obnoxious touting and gouging, is the greatest luxury a tourist can have.

A Noob’s Guide to a Soggy Spring Cycle in Sydney

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The best-known cycling event in Australia is the Gong Ride, a rollicking 82-km ride from Sydney to Wollongong passing through Royal National Park and some impressive coastal scenery.  This has been on my bucket list for a while, but 1,000 meters of ascent and tales of horrendous bicycle pileups on the downhill stretches scared me enough that this year, I settled for the 2nd-most famous option, the mildly less ambitious Spring Cycle.

The Spring Cycle’s primary selling point is that it’s the only event where the Harbour Bridge and a large chunk of nearby freeways are opened up to cyclists, offering a great opportunity to take in the views without being on the receiving end of vehicular homicide.  The course comes in 10, 15, 50 and 105 km variants, but to scare off the Lance Armstrong wannabes, there’s no timing, winners or prizes, just finishers.

Now I ride to work a couple of times a week, but my commute clocks in at under 8 km and it’s been years since I last rode over 20 km, so I picked the 50.  As “training”, I tried adding a couple of extra laps around the Bay Run to my commute on a few days, the longest of which clocked in at 24 km in just over an hour.  (I was planning to train a bit more, maybe on the M7 cycleway, but travel coupled with a major bout of food poisoning put paid to that.)  Conclusion: a bit tough on the butt, but otherwise eminently survivable.

However, as the date approached, Sydney was swamped with unseasonal heavy rains and the forecast for the day was looking miserable, with 100% precipitation predicted throughout the morning.   What’s more, since my starting time was at 7 AM sharp, I had to leave home before 6 AM and ride 7 km just to catch the nearest train going to the starting point at North Sydney.  Was this worth the effort?  And would anybody else be crazy to show up?

The Big Event

img_20181014_054927

On Sunday morning, my alarm rang at 5:30 AM.  It was cold and pitch dark outside and pissing down with rain.  Why, exactly, was I paying good money to do this?  (Observe my selfie of delight as I contemplated this.)  But there was no backing down now, so I pulled on my gear and set off.

The ride to the station was eerie: I had never seen Sydney this quiet, and I could just fly along the deserted roads, an incredible feeling despite the driving rain.  As I rode, the sky slowly lightened up, the sun finally peeping over the horizon when I got to Summer Hill station. My train to Central had a smattering of other Spring Cyclists mixed with bemused early risers, but in Central it was pretty much all cyclists and from North Sydney you could simply follow the crowd to the starting line.

The website said you should get there 30 minutes early, but I arrived at pretty much 7:00 AM on the dot and that was plenty.   I was surprised to find thousands of others raring to go, but there was no registration or ID checking or any other hoo-ha, just line up in the funnel along and wait, with the starting pistol firing a few minutes past 7.

img_20181014_070025The first leg downhill was painfully slow, with everybody squeezed into a few lanes of road.  I tried to find a middle ground between the slow Sunday cyclists and the lycra brigade, but for most part this just led to various kamikaze idiots passing on both sides.  Riding in a dense crowd like this took some getting used to: any sudden changes in speed or direction, on your part or others’, could easily lead to a crash.

By the time we got to the on-ramp to the Harbour Bridge, though, the crowd had opened up and there were some nice views — with, once again, more driving rain.  The bridge was windy and the stretch of Cahill Expressway over Circular Quay (ooh, Opera House!) to the Botanic Gardens was directly into the wind, in retrospect the only bit of the entire journey where the rain was distinctly unpleasant.  The course does a tight U-turn here and heads back through a tunnel towards Millers Point, and with the wind now at my back and a nice downhill slope it was downright exhilarating.  You couldn’t help but think: “Look at all this incredible infrastructure we dedicate solely to cars!  What if just one lane of this was freed up for bicycles, not once a year for a few hours, but every day?”

At Millers Point the route had one gnarly stretch with cobblestone on a turn off a downhill slope, and one lycra champion going too fast did a painful-looking wipeout.  Soon enough we were back on the Western Distributor (whee!) and before I knew we had hit the 10 km mark in Pyrmont, where the City Ride ends.

Much of the rest of the journey was on shared roads, but bicyclists still dominated and there were a few amusing moments where a lone car found themselves trapped in a swarm of bikes at traffic lights, as opposed to the usual commute scenario where it’s the other way around.  The next 20 km were mostly on the back streets of the Inner West, with frequent turns and the odd hill.  However, the route is well signposted and there were volunteers posted at virtually every corner, plus police stopping traffic at every crossing of larger road, so the route felt quite safe and there was zero chance of getting lost.  Somewhat to my own surprise I found myself powering past almost everybody else on the ascents, but falling behind on the descents, where I seemed to be the only person using the brakes. Intellectually, I know it’s safer to go fast to try to match the speeds of cars in traffic, but I’m still freaked out by the idea of hitting a bump in the road or having to brake for a car pulling out at speed…

img_20181014_095418By this time the rain had slowed down from a urinous torrent to an incontinent dribble. After a very short break at the official 20 km rest area at Greenway in Haberfield (water available, none of the rumoured bananas in sight though) I plowed on, past my family who’s gotten out of a bed at 8 in the morning on a Sunday to cheer me on (thanks!), finally escaping the maze of minor roads at Sydney Olympic Park.  The final 20 km was almost entirely on dedicated bike trails and seemed to just fly by, although there were a number of spots where you had to slow down for massive puddles covering the entire road.  A final break in Meadowbank Park, where I finally peeled off my rain gear, then a madcap dash through a near-deserted Olympic Park, and before I knew it I was at the finish line.  Surprisingly painless and fun!

The Gear

Here’s what I used on the day:

  • s-l300Bike: Avanti Inc 1.  Flat bar “urban” commuter bike, cost me $700 new four years ago and pretty beat-up looking after near-daily use since then, but still ticking away nicely.  Professionally serviced about a month before.
  • Lights: Some random “8000 lumen” $10 flashlight off Aliexpress.  The lumen count is a blatant lie, but when paired with a genuine (non-Aliexpress) 18650 battery, it gave off plenty of light even for the pre-dawn stretch.
  • Other accessories: rear mudguard (mandatory unless you want a mud stripe to your neck) and bottle holder.
  • Rain gear: Altura Night Vision Hood ($10 on Wiggle) and the dhb Waterproof Jacket ($50 on sale at Wiggle).  These were perfect, the hood fit nicely under my helmet and the visor kept the rain off my face.
  • Clothing: Regular (non-bike) mesh sports T-shirt & shorts, both 100% polyester.  Kept me cool & dry.
  • Underwear: Pair of cheap-ass, ridiculous-looking “3D gel” padded cycling shorts (see pic) off Aliexpress.  Marginally better than nothing, but not by much.
  • Shoes: No cleats or clips here, I used regular sneakers worn with two layers: regular socks and — pro tip approaching — a disposable Coles garbage bag wrapped around each sock and cut to size.  Not perfect, but kept my feet nice and dry for the first 40 km or so.
  • Bag: A random Reebok fanny pack/bum bag borrowed from my wife, just large enough to hold my rolled-up rain gear, my phone in a ziploc bag and a few snacks.

That’s it!   You’ll notice that precisely none of this is high-end or features lycra.  The only thing that didn’t work very well was the combo of Avanti’s default rock-hard, near-unpadded seat and the crappy no-brand cycling shorts; I plan to investigate upgrading both before the next long ride.  (Screw you, Rule #61.)

Two extra tips gleaned from advice on the Internets about prolonged cycling in the rain:

  1. I use contact lenses and was very happy I did, since an earlier test ride had demonstrated that glasses and rain are not just a bad combo, but actively dangerous.
  2. To prevent chafing, I liberally slathered my inner thighs and groin with a combo of Vaseline & moisturising lotion.  Dunno if it was necessary, since the polyester shorts did an astonishingly good job of keeping my undies dry, but it certainly didn’t seem to hurt.

The Fuel

img_20181014_100042My thoroughly unscientific diet on the day:

  • Breakfast: One of those disgusting Up and Go “liquid breakfast” packs that taste like thick, oily, lukewarm cocoa, plus an oatmeal bar, both consumed on the train.
  • First break snack: Googy protein bar.  Has the taste, texture and general sex appeal of a slab of compressed coffee grounds, only minus the good part (caffeine).  Good thing I had plenty of water to choke it down.
  • Second break snack: A few pieces of good old trusty milk chocolate.
  • Celebratory arrival brunch: $10 spinach & cheese gözleme, served up at the rather sad arrival village.  It tasted like salt, grease, and victory.

Verdict

If you’ve been thinking about Spring Cycle but aren’t sure you can/want to/is it worth it, the answer is yes, you can and should.  For me, A+ would do again and I’m planning to, although next time I’ll probably drag along the kids and do the 10 km version.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

El Gringo Máximo en México

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I’ve been lucky enough to explore much of the world, but the Americas south of the United States have long remained a blank for me. I’ve nibbled at the edges — Bermuda, the Bahamas, a long-ago day trip to Tijuana — but until recently the closest I’d been to Latin America was a week in Puerto Rico, a not-quite-country which oscillates between being a Spanish-flavored piece of the US and and a US-flavored piece of Latin America.

But recently I finally had the chance to pay a quick visit on the company time to the real Mexico, namely Mexico City (Ciudad de México, aka CDMX; formerly known as the Distrito Federal or D.F.). Here are a few impressions from a maximal gringo.

Climate

Quick, imagine what Mexico looks like. Odds are you’re thinking a stretch of broiling sandy desert, where the inhabitants spend most of their time in hammocks suspended between two saguaro cacti, taking siestas with oversized sombreros covering their faces.

Well, turns out Mexico City is completely unlike this. It’s located high up in the altiplano in the mountains of Central Mexico, so I knew it was going to be cooler than, say, Texas, but being more accustomed the bone-dry highlands of Australia, I did not expect it to be soggy, wet and humid. So much so that, when the departure of my incoming flight from Houston was delayed, it arrived smack in the middle of a rollicking thunderstorm and we ended up having to divert to Veracruz on the hot, muggy, tropical coast instead. I soon found out that at least this time of year, these evening thunderstorms were a daily event and not a day of my visit passed without rain.

The result is that the city is lush and green, with large trees, green grass and moss creeping up stones. Mornings were cool (15 C), afternoons warm (25 C), although the 2,250m altitude amps up the strength of the sunshine.  I kept having unexpected flashbacks of Bangkok: in addition to being distinctly humid, both cities have pockets of wealth and quite a lot of poverty, but also a healthy, growing middle class, supporting a lively mix of street vendors, markets, hip little cafes and boutiques.  The World Bank agrees, as on a GDP (PPP) per capita basis, the two countries are almost at par.

Getting Around

Mexico City is enormous and lacks an identifiable downtown: being highly earthquake-prone, skyscrapers are few and far between.  I was staying the leafy but untouristy residential neighborhood of Anzures, which was convenient to the office, but nowhere near a metro station.  Ubers in CDMX are easy to catch and cheap, but they’re a pretty crappy way to experience a city.   ¿Qué hacer?

An easy orange answer was parked right outside my hotel: Mobike!  Turns out everybody’s favorite Chinese bike share company had just launched in CDMX, and while the allowed usage zone was limited to a few posh districts, my hotel, the office and many sights were in it.   While my monthly Sydney pass was no good, single rides were just 10 pesos a pop; pricy by local standards, particularly compared to the 50 peso monthly pass, but still a steal at around 70 Aussie cents each.  The city being by and large flat as a pancake, bikes are a very popular way to get around, with copious bike lanes and, much to my pleasant surprise, a large chunk of the Paseo de la Reforma was cordoned off for bikes & pedestrians only on Sundays.  ¡Perfecto!

To get to the Centro Historico, though, I ditched the bike and tried out the Mexico City Metro.  Still using very distinctive signage and coloring developed in the 1960s, when 40% of Mexicans were illiterate, the subway has a very retro feel to it, with paper boletos purchased from humans behind taquilla counters, although there is now a smart card option.  The trains are also best described as functional, with tunnel fumes gusting in through the open windows (there’s no aircon) and a whole lotta shaking going on despite the rubber tyres, with drivers accelerating and braking hard at every station.  Still, while it may not be luxurious, it’s a vital service and second only to New York in size in the Americas, with 12 lines criss-crossing the city and more passengers than London or Paris.

The Metro has a bit of a sketchy reputation, and I can see why.  Station entrances were often hard to spot, there were often dimly lit inside, and the trains themselves had endless processions of merchants, entertainers and beggars squeezing through the crowds, hawking everything from Silly Putty to mobile accessories and slips with Bible quotations.  But there also were plenty of whimsical touches, with staircases turned into piano keys and rather brutalist artworks here and there, and I can’t say I ever felt threatened — either in the Metro or anywhere else in CDMX, for that matter.

My biggest regret of this trip: not having the time to visit the Metro Museum in Mixcoac.  Have a read of Craig Moore’s trip report if you’re keen to learn more about this underappreciated system.

Speaking

My rusty high school español got a pretty good workout on this trip, and I was glad I had hit the Duolingo pretty hard for the previous three months or so.  Fortunately, while full-on Mexican Spanish is famously fast and slurred even Spanish standards, everybody I met was quite willing to switch to speed-limited Gringo Spanish for my benefit.

I was also a little surprised that virtually everybody assumed I could speak Spanish, despite being a two-meter-tall blond quite clearly outside the generally rather broad spectrum of Mexican appearances; quite the contrast to most of Asia, where nobody even tries to speak the local lingo with me.  What’s more, quite a few people actually had more than passable English, although I’ll admit my sample set was rather biased towards the leafy neighborhoods where I was staying.

History

I had one free day in CDMX before getting down to work, so I started it with a visit to the National Museum of Anthropology, which must surely rank among the greatest museums in the world. An average gringo like me has learned in history class about Mexico’s pre-Columbian rulers the Aztecs and the Maya (although they’re likely to mix them up with the Incas of Peru), but this single large building covers not just the big two, but the Olmecs, the Toltecs, the Mixtecs and many more. Nevertheless, there’s a clear thread connecting them all: blood. Or, rather, unfathomable amounts of hardcore gore of the kind that would be rejected as a horror movie plot for being too gruesome and implausible.

Consider this: the Great Temple (Templo Mayor) of Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Mexica tribe of Aztecs that is the predecessor to today’s Mexico City, was consecrated with the ritual sacrifice of several thousand captives every time it was expanded when a new king took power, or when there was a festival, or when a war was won, or whenever any other convenient excuse presented itself. And by ritual sacrifice, I mean strapping the victim down to an chac-mool altar, carving their still-beating hearts out with an obsidian knife, smearing the blood on the statues of the gods, then throwing the corpse down the stairs to be eaten. Meanwhile, the victim’s head would be skillfully flayed and mounted on the skull rack (tzompantli), with the main one (there were several) in Tenochtitlan (only one of many cities) having the capacity for 36,000 skulls. This was just temporary storage, mind you, once they had dried out properly the skulls were removed, decorated and passed around as handy decorative knick-knacks.

The museum consists basically of variations on this theme. Here’s Coatlicue, who wears a dress of live serpents and necklace of human hearts, hands, and skulls. Here’s a ball court where teams played pelota maya, which was kind of like volleyball, only you can’t use your hands and the losing team is sacrificed to the gods. Here’s the rain god Tlaloc, who was worshipped by sacrificing children, who first had to endure torture so their tears would moisten the earth.  And on and on, for thousands of years!

In case all this seems too abstract when presented in the dramatically lit but carefully cordoned off confines of the museum, or you doubt the florid accounts of the conquistadors who are our primary source of written evidence for Aztec/Mexica life, you can also go visit the actual ruins of the Templo Mayor, lurking right behind Zócalo Square in the heart of CDMX. The final incarnation of the temple was largely razed by the Spaniards, but as it was built like a Russian matryoshka doll with each version simply built on top of the other, some of the older parts remain. The chac-mool sacrifice altars, the stairs the victims were thrown down, the skull racks, it’s all there… including a particularly lovely hall where nobles practiced the art of auto-sacrifice, purposely bleeding their ears, tongues, genitals etc. This blood was collected and mixed with amaranth seeds to create an idol of Huitzilopochtli, which was ceremoniously eaten every year during the feast of Panquetzaliztli, with the accompaniment of (what else?) copious human sacrifice.  Delicious!

Food

Congealed human blood idols aside, I have long been a huge, tragic fan of Mexican food, the tragedy being that my chosen abodes for the last 16 years (Singapore and Australia) are both laughably terrible places to find any of it. It’s saying something that the arrival of Guzman y Gomez, a semi-decent burrito chain founded by a distinctly non-Mexican former hedge fund trader from New York, was a highlight of my culinary calendar.

So I was tickled pink to get a chance to visit Mexico and eat actual Mexican food, and I did my best to devour everything in sight.  Huaraches (literally “sandals”, because that’s what they look like, smeared with beans and salsa), sopes (small, thick tacos), pozole soup (“these days we use pork, but traditionally the Aztecs used human flesh!”, a colleague informed me slightly too cheerily), sopa azteca (tortilla soup), cochinita pibil (slow-cooked pork in achiote sauce)…

Yet the culinary highlight, in fact one of the most sublime dishes I’ve had anywhere, was chile en nogada at Angelopolitano.  I had tried this before (in Singapore, unpromisingly) and been somewhat non-plussed by a squishy stuffed pepper covered in grainy, cold walnut sauce.  Originating from the nearby city of Pueblo, they’re a rare, somewhat expensive delicacy in Mexico, and Angelopolitano, a place that’s very serious about poblano food, only serves them in pomegranate season between August and September.  The walnut sauce was smooth this time, studded with pomegranate seeds and still served cold, but it was the filling that made it sing: panochera apples, pera de leche pears, criollo peaches, minced meat and a complex mix of spices, all washed down with a shot of tequila.  Incredible.

The intended highlight was scheduled for Tuesday night, when I had managed to secure a seat for the taco degustation at Pujol, which is arguably the most famous restaurant in Mexico: think el Bulli, only with Mexican ingredients.  Alas, the plan went, ahem, down the toilet when, on Monday night, I contracted violent food poisoning, aka Moctezuma’s revenge.

I’m still not entirely clear what hit me, although odds are it was something in that pretty flower-like taco platter above.   Both restaurants I went to on Monday were really popular, so the food certainly wasn’t sitting around, although tacos al pastor, the porky Mexican version of doner kebab (bottom right taco), is somewhat notorious even among Mexicans for causing attacks of la turista.   I also wasn’t as careful as I should have been about fresh herbs and vegetables, which Mexican food uses with abandon even though tap water in CDMX is not safe to drink; in retrospect, piling raw lettuce into my lunch pozole was asking for trouble.  Or maybe it was something as innocuous as the fresh salsa accompanying the tacos.

Regardless of the cause, the end effect was that I spent the next two days unable to do much more than tap away at my laptop or ingest anything more electrolyte drinks and the occasional banana.  Fortunately loperamide worked its magic and I was able to survive the 24-hour flight odyssey back to Sydney, although I had to give the rather spiffy-looking Polaris lounge restaurant in Houston a miss.

So adiós, Mexico, I hardly knew ye.  I’d like to say I’ll be back soon, but that’s pretty unlikely — however, this did definitely kick my long-incubated first visit to South America (Chile, Peru, Argentina, Brazil…!) a few notches up the bucket list.

 

 

From Siberia to Tibet: Hong Kong and Macau

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Our road to Hong Kong was paved with disappointment.  We originally wanted to arrive by train, but the much-delayed Guangzhou-Hong Kong high-speed link was delayed again and the logistics of traveling from Lhasa to Guangzhou to HK without it didn’t look great, so in the end we opted to fly in directly via Chongqing.

Hong Kong 香港

It’s been 21 years since the handover, but after China, Hong Kong still felt remarkably British, with ubiquitous English, driving on the left, and (after China) remarkably polite people.  It rained pretty much non-stop for the first two days, which put a bit of a damper on tourism but did provide great soaked-neon Blade Runner streetscapes at night.

We went to Maxim’s Town Hall for the obligatory dim sum pilgrimage.  Since my last visit the place has clearly found its way into a few too many guidebooks, since it was heaving with people even on a weekday and we had to wait an hour to get in — next time I’ll need to find an alternative or at least book online.  At least egg waffles off the street were fast, cheap and cheerful.

Hong Kong is still very much a Chinese city at heart and much more that heritage seemed to remain than on the mainland.  The dull-sounding Hong Kong Museum of History was epic in size and ambition, covering the city from prehistory to today with floors of massive life-size recreations, and the temple of Wong Tai Sin showed that Taoism is alive as well.

Anorak bonus album: Transport in Hong Kong & Macau

Macau 澳門

Macau will soon be linked to Hong Kong by a shiny record-breaking bridge, which was scheduled to open two weeks before our arrival, but surprise surprise, that was delayed too.  So we ended up taking the Turbojet ferry, which plowed through the waters pretty much right next to this white elephant of a bridge for most of the way: the bridge has no provisions for trains, so the only way to use it will be buses.  Sigh.

To a first approximation, nothing had changed in Macau since I visited 10 years ago.  Senado Square was still there, looking like a chunk of Portugal airlifted into the South China Sea, as were the ruins of St. Paul’s, dense alleys much like Hong Kong’s, and tacky casinos on the outskirts.

To escape the muggy heat and sputtering rain, we followed a local tip and went for a surprisingly respectable Portuguese meal at Solmar, a restaurant too old-school to have a website.  Sopa de mariscos (seafood stew), galinha à africana (“African chicken”), bolinhos de bacalhau (cod balls), all washed down with vinho verde: not the stuff of culinary epiphany, but certainly a welcome change after a week in Tibet.  And for a snack we stopped off at Margaret’s, which as always was baking the best pasteis de nata (egg tarts) in the business by the trayload.

Lamma Island 南丫島

My personal Hong Kong highlight, though, was to an island quite unlike the rest of the ex-colony: Lamma.  Perched off the southwest coast of Hong Kong Island and only reachable by ferry, buildings taller than three stories and motorized transport (except for a few utility vehicles) are banned on the island , so the only ways to get around are bike or foot.  After a mercifully brief flirtation with the plastics industry fizzled out, plenty of hippies and other countercultural types escaping the rat race have found their way here, and the grubby village Yung Shue Wan now hides more than its fair share of organic vegetarian cafes and artisan gelato places.

Many daytrippers comes here for the beaches, which aren’t too shabby even by South-East Asian standards, but the island’s second major draw is seafood.   On local advice we parked ourselves at Andy’s Seafood, and hawt diggity dawg, everything we ate here was nothing short of incredible.   Razor clams steamed with noodles, scallops with veg, sizzling eggplant, a bottle of Yanjing Beer dripping with condensation and the sun setting over the South China Sea.  The perfect end to the trip…

And to this blog series.  Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for more!

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From Siberia to Tibet: China as a Tourist

jpatokalLeave a comment

So how is traveling around the less visited parts of China when you’re a tall, blond, distinctly non-Chinese-speaking alien?

Language

I have to state up front that my experience of China is likely pretty different from that of the average foreign visitor, since I’m reasonably fluent in Japanese and that gives a huge leg up for parsing Chinese: I can’t read larger chunks of text because the grammar is too different, but I can generally manage maps, simple websites and signage.  However, my spoken Chinese is terrible and my comprehension isn’t much better.

Nevertheless, I was positively surprised by the amount of English signage present.  Sometimes there was clearly a government edict at work — for example, every single shop in the villages near the Mutianyu Great Wall has English signs, just in case a tourist has a sudden urgent to acquire construction supplies or wholesale quantities of fertilizer — and equally often it was clearly run through an online translation tool, occasionally with hilarious results.  A large part of the “English” signage was actually just pinyin phonetics, so those Chinese who struggle with hanzi can still spell out SHE HUI ZHU YI and connect the red billboard with a hammer and sickle to socialism — but as a useful side effect, this meant that most trains, subways, buses etc were signposted in friendly Roman letters.

By comparison, English speakers were definitely on thinner ground.  We ran into a few in odd places, like a young Didi (Chinese Uber) driver in Xining, but when it came time to request a late checkout at one of Xining’s top hotels, the bellboy spoke more English than the three ladies behind the counter combined, and I still had to trot out my pidgin Mandarin.  Border crossings and security checkpoints were also invariably quick & wordless affairs, since staff vocabulary didn’t seem to extend much beyond “passport” and “ticket”.

Would we ever really have been in trouble without knowing Chinese?  No, but any scraps you can pick up beforehand will certainly helped.

Civility

China — and I’m referring specifically to the People’s Republic here — gets a pretty bad rep for being tourist-hostile, and if you read the Stay safe section on Wikivoyage it’s easy to come away expecting that your children will be kidnapped and/or run over while you’re choking on toxic air and sold overpriced tea by attractive but starving art students.

Now it’s fair to say that if it’s personal space you’re after, most of China is the wrong place to be: in a city like Beijing, with twice the population of New York, you’re going to get a lot of crowds and the occasional sharp elbow.  Interestingly, most of these belonged to the elderly, who were either taking their Confucian mores of mandatory respect for the aged seriously, or had honed their queue-cutting skills fighting for scraps of cabbage during the Great Leap Forward.  Overall, though, most queues were kinda-sorta respected (heavy security presence must help), people mostly waited for others to get off the subway before barging on themselves, and even train stations felt more like busy airports than the crush of desperate humanity that is an Indian train station’s waiting room or ticket office.  And while there are a few places like Beijing’s Silk Alley (now just a shopping mall) and that drinks shop atop the Mutianyu Great Wall that will happily fleece foreigners for every last yuan they’ve got, if you pick your own places, you’ll pay what the locals do: we never paid more than printed on the menu or otherwise agreed.

We did run into a couple of power-tripping bureaucrats, most memorably an attendant on our Beijing-Xi’an trian, who completely flipped out over my dad’s effrontery in using the bottom bunk in our 4-bunk cabin when his ticket said top bunk — never mind that we had purchased all four seats.  A friendly English-speaking lady from a nearby cabin was roped in to help translate, and after much foot-stomping and gnashing of teeth the attendant admitted defeat when we pointed out that this was a non-stop train, so it was physically impossible for anybody else to board en route and claim that bunk.

Toilets in China are also worth a mention, since the country has a reputation for unutterably grim facilities.  We found a few at some of the less visited Tibetan monasteries, but as a rule they were generally modern, tolerably clean and generally a cut above Russia or Mongolia.   You will, however, need to learn to squat and carry your own toilet paper, since Western-style thrones are few and far between and TP is a national treasure only grudgingly doled out once authorities have scrutinized your schnozzle.

One final component of the China experience is security, surveillance and bureaucracy, but that’s a topic large enough to deserve its own blog post.  (Coming soon.)

Internet

Speaking of security and surveillance, one of the more annoying parts of travel in China is the Great Firewall, which keeps getting higher and tighter: virtually all name-brand Western services (Gmail, Facebook, WhatsApp, Google Maps, Wikipedia, Reddit, Instagram etc) are now inaccessible.  I had prepared by setting up ExpressVPN in advance, and it worked fine when on wifi, but when roaming on my Australian SIM, the connection was censored and throttled to be hopelessly slow, making using the VPN nearly impossible.

In the end I bought a China Unicom prepaid SIM, which was several orders of magnitude faster and well worth the investment, but Western services remained glitchy.  For example, on Google Maps, local data is not just spotty and out of date, but places were often hundreds of meters in the wrong direction, and even if you could use WhatsApp, nobody you meet could.  So the only way to go is to dip your toe into the local ecosystem.

  • WeChat/QQ (微信 Weixin) is the local juggernaut and the de facto choice of messaging.  It also has the very popular WeChat Pay (微信支付 Weixin Zhifu) payment system, which has recently started accepting non-Chinese credit cards, but registration is complicated and apparently the rules vary continually.  When I signed up, I needed a Chinese number and a local trusted user to verify me, but no Chinese ID or bank account; others report being required to provide one or both of these though.  It’s also important to download the mainland China version of the app directly off weixin.qq.com, not the overseas version from App Store/Play Store.
  • Baidu Maps (百度地图 Baidu Ditu) is the local equivalent of Google Maps.  In addition to being Chinese-only, the UI is pretty busy and takes some getting used to, but place search and directions for driving, public transport and walking are all pretty good.  (Weird quirk: travel times for bus were systematically inflated by 30-60 min.)
  • Ctrip (携程旅行 Xiéchéng Lǚxíng) is your best source for long-distance travel information, including detailed train schedules.
  • Mobike (摩拜 Móbài) is great for booking some of the ride share bikes littering the streets of China’s larger cities.  Rides start from Y1 a pop and the same app & credit works fine in Australia too.

Transport

It’s difficult to overstate just how much investment China has put into planes, trains and roads over the past decades, or how much pent up demand this has unlocked.  For example, we took the CRH bullet train from Xi’an to Xining, fully expecting this recently opened line from a 2nd-tier city to a 3rd-tier city to be a white elephant, but no — the train was packed to the last seat. Xi’an has sprouted 3 lines and 91 km of metro in the past 7 years, all of it packed, and Beijing is still catching up after opening 22 lines covering 608 km.  Train stations like Beijing West are not enormous (just) because the government likes massive buildings, but because they have to be: the 34-platform, 60-million-pax-per-year Xi’an North is by some measures the largest in Asia, with a central concourse that puts most stadiums to shame, and it was still difficult to find a seat.  Even Lhasa airport was bursting at the seams.  The only empty Chinese transport hub during the entire trip was the shiny new international wing of Chongqing Jiangbei Airport, but I suspect we were there just at the wrong time during the afternoon lull, since CKG too has seen 1,000% (yes, three zeroes) international passenger growth since 2009.

Food

In short, the food in China was amazing, if often a bit hit and miss since we were traveling without much local advice and mostly choosing places by convenience.  The learning curve for “real” Chinese food can be steep though, so here’s a trek up the scale.

Crowd-pleasers abounded in Beijing: the justly famous Peking Duck (Xiheyaju
羲和雅居 was among the best meals of the trip) and the less famous but no less tasty zhajiangmian (炸醬麵) aka Chinese spaghetti bolognese.  Roubing (肉餅) meat pies are also widely available, although the precise origin of the meat may be a mystery at times.

Mildly more adventurous or surprising were the many Muslim eateries of Xining, serving up a constellation of noodles.  Even with basic knowledge of hanzi and Google Translate, you never quite knew what you’d get, but rarely were we disappointed.  One Chinese innovation that will take the West by storm sooner or later is the conveyor-belt hotpot: take a personal mini pot, select a broth and dipping sauces, then pick what you like from the parade going past you and pay for what you ate.  Magic!  And if you put too much chilli in your sauce, cool down with some yogurt (酸奶 suānnǎi), which is sold everywhere on the streets.  And if all else fails, head to a hotel breakfast buffet and eat an cute animal-shaped steamed bun.

At the more challenging end of the spectrum were Yunnanese cuisine, which appears to consist mostly of mushrooms and unusual veggies; the enormous gelatinous niangpi (酿皮) noodles of Qinghai served with bread-like steamed gluten dipped in chilli, the Chinese trucker favorite of “big plate chicken” (大盘鸡 dàpánjī), basically a stew of chicken, potato and lots of chilli, and the Chongqing classic xiǎomiàn (小面), the deceptively named “small noodles” that pack a big numbing-hot mala punch.

And oh, if you’re reading this and thinking “that’s nothing, once in Shenzhen I ate…”, go chew on this previous blog entry for a while.

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From Siberia to Tibet: Lhasa and Tibet

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The final long-distance train of our journey was also the nicest.  Few of China’s trains are branded, but the Tangzhu Ancient Route (唐竺古道号) from Xining to Shigatse via Lhasa had been bestowed its label only a few months before our trip and the entire train was decked out with pretty, purple-tinged Tibetesque frippery, down to the vase of plastic violet roles on our table.

We left Xining in the evening and slept through the slow climb up the plateau, crossing the 5,072m Tanggula Pass — the highest stretch of train track in the world — conveniently after breakfast.  The combo of acclimatization, a precautionary course of Diamox (acetazolamide) and the oxygen being piped into all the cabins worked a treat, and none of us felt more than the faint echo of a headache.

Arrival into Lhasa, at “only” 3,656m, was somewhat anticlimactic. The station is located on the newly built, heavily Chinese-flavored west side of Lhasa.   Our Tibet permits were scrutinized for the fourth time on this ride (rest assured, sneaking into Tibet is not a thing any more), our mandatory guide was waiting our mandatory van, and we drove through what felt very much like just another Chinese city, full of construction sites, shiny glass-fronted buildings, and the odd concrete building or bridge tarted up with some Tibetan detail, already fading and peeling off after a few years.

And then we arrived in the old city around Barkhor and stepped back in time a thousand years.   The penetrating funk of yak butter wafted around the narrow, twisty streets (we would soon come to realize that this was the smell of Tibet, in much the same way that boiled mutton is the smell of Mongolia), shops sold dried cheese, fresh yak meat and temple offerings, our hotel the House of Shambhala was decorated with near-Indian amounts of color and statuary, pilgrims prostrated themselves as they circumambulated the temple of Jokhang…   this, emphatically, was not China.

It is difficult to write about Tibet as an outsider.  For the Tibetan exiles who supply Free Tibet bumper stickers to soccer moms in Berkeley and the predominant Western view of the country, the Chinese presence is nothing short of a violent occupation intent on reducing their country into a theme park, and it’s hard to disagree with this.  But from the Chinese point of view, the army liberated Tibetans from an oppressive absolute theocracy, where a tiny elite of lamas ruled teeming masses of miserably poor serfs, and brought in modernity and economic development — and it’s hard to disagree with this either, particularly after having visited the Tibetan exile capital of Dharamsala and witnessed the lethal roads and Indian squalor of the settlement.  The excesses of the Cultural Revolution, when the Chinese government straight up razed everything that didn’t fit the program, have long since been dialed back and at a casual glance, it even looks like China is actively supporting Tibetan culture now.  Every single road and shop sign had Tibetan script above the Chinese, albeit often in an illegibly small font, and vast amounts of money have clearly been pumped into tidying up the once-decaying old city.

All that said, it was still clear that this is a land that the Chinese government keeps in an iron grip.  Security checkpoints and CCTV cameras dotted entrances not just to train stations and museums, but to Barkhor and the city itself, and it wasn’t enough to show your bags, you had to scan your ID as well.  Many guards and low-level police were Tibetan, but the heavily armed riot squads stomping around the Old City were all Han Chinese.  Lighters were banned and fire extinguishers prominently placed in any spot where a self-immolation might lead to bad publicity. The few Tibetans we had a chance to talk to spoke in stage whispers if offering politically incorrect opinions (“The Chinese are like rats!  They’re everywhere!”).  Political propaganda, a subdued presence on the streets of Beijing but more visible in Xining, was pumped to a fever pitch here, with fervent invocations of Prosperous Strength (富强 fùqiáng) and Harmony (和谐 héxié) .  Even posters of Xi Jinping, which nearly disappeared from the rest of the country during our visit, could be found in abundance.  And in the center of town, roped off in the middle of a heavily guarded square, stands the Monument to the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet, raising a permanent middle finger towards the Potala Palace opposite.  Subtle it was not, and you can only wonder if even Party apparatchiks genuinely believe this kind of thing will convince any Tibetans of the errors of the Dalai Lama’s splittist ways.

The Potala Palace is still standing though, its simultaneously graceful yet fearsome hilltop bulk dominating the city like few ancient structures still can.  In its own way, it was much like Beijing’s Forbidden City, only now with supplicants climbing up endless flights of stairs to experience the spiritual wisdom and earthly power of Tibet’s former god-kings.  Today they’re long gone and the supplicants have been replaced by tour buses of Chinese tourists, with tours of the interior limited to a choreographed controlled 60-minute dash and interior photography strictly forbidden.

The heart of Lhasa for Tibetans is the comparatively modest temple of Jokhang — although “modest” doesn’t seem quite the right word for a structure largely plated in gold — and Barkhor Street looping around it.  Serious pilgrims traverse the circuit by prostrating themselves on the ground, sliding forward, standing up, saying a prayer and repeating this over and over again.   Equally serious beggars have also realized that they can make a nice bundle of cash doing this, particularly if they force a few grubby five-year-olds into doing the same and collecting money from passers-by; probably the saddest sight on this trip.  Both are far outnumbered by Chinese tourists and the vast majority of the Barkhor’s shops now sell tourist tat and yak yogurt cakes.

On our final day we paid a visit to Sera Monastery on the outskirts of Lhasa, unremarkable except for the spectacle of monks debating in the open air with resounding claps whenever a question had been posed, and the rather more spectacular Ganden Monastery, perched atop a mountain at 4,300m, a good half a kilometer higher than Lhasa itself.  We were now up in clouds that had squatted low over Lhasa, so everything was blanketed in a chilly mist, with the ground covered in mud and occasional squalls of rain.  It’s like this in midsummer, just how cold does it get here in the winter?  Yet we were the only tourists around, and our guide explained why: “The Chinese come to Tibet for the nature.  The culture does not interest them.”

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Suddenly it clicked into place.  To Westerners, Tibet is all chanting lamas, tantric bliss and deep spiritual teachings, but to the Chinese, it’s like Alaska or Switzerland: a place of clean air, sweeping views and climactic extremes, where you can experience the power of raw nature and get away from the concrete warrens of Shanghai or Xi’an.  This explained the photoshopped blue skies of every single Chinese ad for Tibetan products and why our in-train publicity magazine was full of nothing but nature shots and extreme sports, in precisely the same way that Alaskan cruises “into authentic wilderness” relegate the native inhabitants to a optional excursion on a stopover.

And in the same way that it’s exceedingly unlikely that the United States will one day decide to hand over the keys to native Alaskans and decamp south of the 49th parallel, it’s exceedingly unlikely that the Chinese will ever decide to head to lower altitudes and leave the plateau to the Tibetans.  They now form the majority of the population in both Lhasa and Tibet as a whole, they control the levers of power, and those levers are set to “open the floodgates”.  So while you can certainly dispute who ought to control Tibet, the reality is and will be that the Chinese do, and the best the Tibetans can hope for is accommodation and respect — and even that seems like wishful thinking.

On a stodgier note, I should mention the food in Tibet, which is uniformly terrible, at least when visiting as a tourist.  Much like Mongolia, actual Tibetan cuisine is circumscribed by the extreme, vegetable-free climate, meaning that momo dumplings, yak meat (basically gamey beef) and barley are the staples, washed down with copious quantities of the justly infamous butter tea.  Mongolians drink a variant of this too, but they’re generally content to stick to milk and a pinch of salt, whereas Tibetans blend in vast amounts of yak butter — and this isn’t an inoffensive pale block from your neighborhood supermarket, but the cultured, cheesy, funky stuff sold on the streets.  The only way I found to make it palatable was to mix it into tsampa, the roasted barley flour that was once a staple of Tibetan travellers, making salty but edible porridge.

Since the average Westerner can take only so much of this, tour guides helpfully take them to a dwindling set of largely empty Westerner-friendly restaurants, serving yak-ified attempts at Western food (yak steaks with french fries, yak burgers with maraschino cherries on top) and denatured Nepalese food (bland yak curries and samosas) that persists as a sort of vestigial, withering appendix of the pre-2008 glory days when hippies could easily cross over from Kathmandu to Lhasa.  The Chinese have their own restaurants too, the tourists heading to places serving yak-ified Chinese food (hotpots, noodles, etc) and the residents inhaling chillies and breathing fire in the many Sichuanese places.

On our last day, we grabbed our packed breakfast of toast (and that’s only toast, without even jam or yak butter), zipped out of Lhasa down a motorway that punched its way through several mountain ranges, checked in at the packed Lhasa Gonggar airport (which, inevitably, is being expanded) and flew out to Hong Kong via Chongqing.

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From Siberia to Tibet: Beijing, Xi’an and Xining

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Around 10 PM at night, we trundled across the Mongolia-China border into the dusty town of Erenhot (二连 Erlian).  One of the few pleasures of international train travel is that the border crossings and their inspectors come to you, but China wasn’t having any of it: we all had to disembark with our luggage and go queue up for passport and customs.

And then we waited until 2 AM while our bogies were changed from Russian wide gauge to Chinese standard gauge.  Officially, the sparkly new International Waiting Room had all sorts of amusements including tax-free shopping, a bar and a certified 5-star bathroom; in reality, it lacked all of those as well as air-con, toilet paper and enough seats.  After various conflicting answers and general confusion, I was granted a magic plastic token that let me go outside and check out the jumbled shops and pharmacies, and most importantly, acquire some bananas and the first of many bottles of Yanjing Beer to come.

By the time we woke up next morning, the scenery had changed to rolling green hills, occasional clusters of buildings and factories, and steadily thickening haze.  Viaducts for the Zhangjiakou high-speed rail line, being built for the 2020 Winter Olympics, were often visible and made our clunky train feel rather obsolete.  After arrival at Beijing Station, which seemed to contain more people than all of Mongolia, our host whisked us away for a traditional Chinese welcoming ceremony: foreigner registration at the local Public Security Bureau (公安部 Gong’anbu) cop shop, painstakingly pecked in one finger at a time.  Now we were in China!

Beijing 北京

This was my first visit to the Chinese capital, and I wasn’t expecting much: all you ever see on TV are the inhumanly scaled plazas and buildings around Tian’anmen, designed to make citizens feel like the worthless ants they are compared to the might of emperors old and new.  The shopping district around Wangfujing, all department stores and shopping malls stuffed with name-brand shops, plus the slick modern offices and hotels around Chaoyang, including the dystopian China Central TV aka Big Pants Building (大裤衩 dà kùchǎ), could also have been straight out of Tokyo or Seoul.

But the hutongs around Shizhacai, while now tarted up for tourists and beer-brewing hipsters, remained surprisingly peaceful and lived-in, and the canals and alleyways around Qianhai Lake with weeping willows and pedal boats were green, vibrant and colorful, at least in midsummer.

The Great Wall at Mutianyu (慕田峪), about 1.5 hours north of central Beijing, was a worthwhile excursion, both surprisingly lush and surprisingly smoggy.  Those stairs were a real workout, particularly in the sticky heat of midsummer, and I was glad to take both the ski lift up and the rather ridiculous but still amusing toboggan ride down.  Pro tip: there’s a solitary little snack shop at the top, which will instantly open a frosty bottle of Yanjing for you if you so much as mention the word pijiu (beer) — and attempt to charge you 85 RMB (US$13) for it.  At the bottom of the hill, the same beer will cost you 20, and even that’s pricy by Chinese standards.

Beijing’s other mandatory attraction is the justly reknowned Forbidden City , once the home of the Emperor and now the showcase of China’s Communist mandarins.  There was a queue of several hours to see the pickled corpse of Mao, so when a torrential downpour hit we abandoned that idea and proceeded to the palaces.  The complex is enormous, and despite notional visitor limits (book your tickets online!), it was packed to the gills with local tourists, all armed with pointy umbrellas.   The Outer Court, through which you enter, consists of a series of identical-looking but empty gates and plazas, so there isn’t even much to see.  Mostly to get away from it all, we paid a little extra to visit the Treasure Gallery to the east, and this turned out to be the best move all day: the crowds were thinner and the scale was more reasonable, as this is where the Emperor and his household actually lived.

Xi’an 西安

We ended up in Xi’an through a lucky mishap: the sleeper train we wanted to take from Beijing to Xining was full, and when pondering alternatives, I realized we could take a sleeper to Xi’an, spend a day there, and take an evening bullet train to Xining.  Win!

The thing to do in Xi’an is to visit the Terracotta Warriors, which guard the tomb of Shi Huangdi, the founder of the Qin dynasty and the kind of megalomaniac who makes Mao look modest and reasonable.  In 230 BCE, he unified China for the first time, declared himself emperor, standardized all the things (writing, currency, measures, axles etc) across the vast country, burned all old books and executed those who didn’t comply fast enough, built a necropolis nearly 100 km² in size (the vast majority of which remains unexcavated) and had basically everybody who built it executed.  Unsurprisingly, it’s quite a sight, and enough Chinese agree that it’s now the country’s second-most popular attraction, second only to the Forbidden City.  Don’t expect to have too many moments of peaceful contemplation.

Much further down that list is the Great Mosque of Xi’an, buried in the mazelike depths of the Muslim Quarter (回民街 Huiminjie), and probably the least mosque-like mosque I’ve ever seen.  If somebody swapped the signs, it would substitute quite nicely for, say, a Confucian temple or the Emperor’s former summer residence: for example, the pagoda above is actually a minaret.

Visitors and locals alike do come to the Muslim Quarter in droves, but to satisfy more earthly desires for food and shopping.  Lamb kebabs (烤肉串 kaorou), Chinese hamburgers (肉夹馍 roujiamo), osmanthus cakes topped with dates (桂花糕 guihuagao), crispy meat pies (肉餅 roubing)…  both our quick visit, and this incredible blog post, only scratched the surface.

Xining 西宁

While Beijing and Xi’an are firmly on the beaten track, it’s safe to say Xining is not.  It may be the capital of Qinghai Province, but by Chinese standards its 2.3 million people barely qualify as a city, at least when compared to Xi’an’s 12m or Beijing’s 21m.  What’s more, while it’s been around for over 2,000 years and was a major staging post on the Silk Road, a massive earthquake in 1927 plus Japanese bombing in 1941 means you’d be hard put to find a historical attraction worthy of the name in the city.  The sole reason we were here was that, at an altitude of 2,600m, this gave us a chance to acclimatize a bit, and the only other city in these parts, the industrial center of Golmud, is by all accounts even more dull.

Given these low expectations, Xining was mostly a pleasant surprise, undoubtedly provincial but largely prosperous and with new infrastructure ranging from bridges and highways to trains sprouting everywhere, virtually all of it built since 2010.  Our Taiwanese cracker conglomerate hotel was golden bling to the max, the shopping malls of Xidajie (西大街) were bustling with real department stores and fake Apple Stores, Mojia St (莫家街) was wall to wall with restaurants.  Only slightly off the beaten track did you remember you weren’t in Beijing anymore, with meat hanging on open-air hooks at the street markets of Shuijing Alley (水井巷) and the green signs and ornate skullcaps of Hui Muslims dominating the local culinary scene even more thoroughly than they did in Xi’an.

Xining’s one major draw is Kumbum Monastery, or Ta’ersi Temple (塔尔寺) to the Chinese, some 40 km outside the city.   One of the largest Tibetan monasteries outside Lhasa, this was the childhood home of the Dalai Lama (you can even find a solitary photo if you look very carefully) and, while much reduced from its pre-Cultural Revolution glory, is still an active temple.  I expected to find some Tibetan pilgrims here and did, but I did not expect tour buses full of Chinese pilgrims, herded about by tour guides and stuffing notes ranging from 0.1 to 100 yuan into every nook and cranny of every statue and altar.  Clearly China’s economic boom has also brought with it a surging market for spiritual fulfillment.

Much more sedate, in fact positively comatose, was the official state-sanctioned Tibetan Culture & Medicine Museum in a faux-Tibetan concrete monolith on the northern outskirts of town.  This showcased Tibetan culture as the Chinese government would like it: colorful, safely encased in static glass displays, no actual Tibetans in sight, and with an overpriced gift shop on the way out.

In the evening, we clambered aboard train Z6811 and started our slow climb to Tibet.

Anorak bonus album: Metros in Beijing, Xi’an and Xining

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