Iceland 2015

Being an account of my most excellent Icelandic adventure, 2015

Tom Browne, 12 July 2015

Start of the adventure

The whole thing started in late 2014 while planning for my 60^th birthday. I was inspired by my friend Lorraine’s 60^th North of 60° escapade, while wanting to stay on solid ground and avoid polar bears. At that point, the furthest north I had been was on my way to Piteå, in a taxi at an interchange on the E4 near the airport at Luleå, which Google places at 65° 35’ 13” N. I decided to look for supported treks in Norway, perhaps including Nordkapp  at 71° 10’ 21” N. (The northernmost point in Europe is actually Knivskjellodden, 1500 m further north at 71° 11’ 8” N and accessible via a relatively modest hike from the Nordkapp parking lot). Why supported? This would force me to interact with people over a multi-day period, and save me having to find my way alone over unfamiliar terrain with a full pack.

Somehow I couldn’t find supported hikes in Norway, but came across an interesting one in Iceland. So I took the plunge and booked a week-long hike through deserted inlets to the home of the queen of the faeries, here, managed by Fjallabak, here, leaving Reykjavík June 21.

Adult supervision

Lorraine, my long-time cycling buddy, decided to join me in order to keep me out of trouble and provide adult supervision, a useful contribution given the 4 other hikers signed up at that point were Swiss ladies, and given the lack of any interest from any of my other so-called buddies.
So by early June I had made a last few purchases and loaded up the day pack with a reasonable assortment of contents, to see what it felt like. According to the bathroom scale, the pack weighed 16 pounds with the camera. Add 5 pounds for 2 litres of water and snacks. It might be possible to reduce the weight in good weather, but on June 1 on the east coast of Iceland, there was light snow in the morning changing to sleet by noon, then drizzle in the afternoon, high of +6°C. So best to be equipped. At least I wouldn’t be suffering through the horrible +35°C humidex that Central Canada dishes out in the summer.

Departure

Beginning with a drink in the lounge, I arrive in Reykjavík via Halifax on Friday at 05:30 local, 01:30 EST; I get to the hotel by about 07:30 via the comfortable but slow Flybus service. The hotel has a room available so I shower before heading out to meet Lorraine who has come via Toronto, landing Thursday evening and who thus has a few hours in a real bed under her belt – Saga class on IcelandAir does not include lie-flat beds as in Air Canada business class.  

Reykvavík, Part 1

Lorraine and I play tourist for a day and a half, explore some odd neighbourhoods, take pictures of interesting signs in front of restaurants, tour the Harpa concert gallery, visit an outdoor museum with a number of old homes that have been moved to this one location, tour a decommissioned Coast Guard ship (the Ođinn, a veteran of the Cod Wars with Britain), get a picture of the statue of Leifr Eiricsson in front of Hallgrímskirkja, and watch a moderately funny comedy show on How to Be an Icelander. Lesson 1: how to pronounce Eyafjallajökull. It’s easy: Eya is the location, fjalla (pronounced fatla) is mountain, and jökull (pronounced yokel) is glacier.

Interestingly, the suffix ‘-vík’ means bay; it also designates a location where one leaves or arrives, especially by water: a transit point or terminus. Such a person, who leaves or arrives via a vík, is properly a víking (with the first ‘i’ as in ‘vixen’, not ‘eye’), or traveller. So Reykjavík is Smoky Bay. Another example: Skaftafellsjökull. Skafta is the town and fell is waterfall; so this is the jökull feeding the waterfall above Skafta. Continuing on this theme, flót is a river (resembles flood), höfn is a harbour (resembles haven or havn: lufthavn, a harbour for airplanes), etc. Pretty simple once you get a feel for where the word breaks are. 

The hikers
Our guide, Estrid, picks us up and takes us to Reykjavík Municipal airport where we meet the other hikers before flying to Egilsstáðir on the east coast. We are a varied bunch:

·       Lorraine and I, the Canadians;

·       Three Swiss ladies, Marie-Claude, Elisabeth and Karen (a fourth dropped out at the last minute);

·       Ned, the Lutheran pastor, who has hiked with Fjallabak before; his daughter Grace; and Ned’s buddy Bryan the orthopedic surgeon, all from Wisconsin.

The Hike…

Gobsmacked. It’s really the only word for it. The scenery is completely gobsmacking. Each day involves climbing from sea level over a col to the next fjord, possibly with added cols on the way. Typical total daily elevation gains are 400 to 800 m; distances are 14 to 20 km. Mostly we stay in mountain huts, with a large kitchen and dining area on the ground floor and dormitory-style accommodations upstairs. And while we are slightly south of the Arctic Circle, which means the sun technically sets for 45 minutes or so, it never really gets dark at the end of June. I can't imagine December ...

After the flight to Egilsstáðir and an hour’s drive north, the driver drops us off and disappears over a hill with our luggage … we are on our own. To the left is a river, Selfljót, meandering northwards across a broad alluvial plain of black volcanic dust (Héraðssandur); to the right a 415 m ridge which we will climb. On the way up there will be fog and occasional snow fields, but nothing difficult. At the peak, the map provides a GPS waypoint of 65° 35’ 25” N which beats my previous record by 12” of latitude, or 371 metres. Statistically, let’s call it a draw. At Njarðvík we encounter Icelandic ponies in a corral. We are driven to Bakkagerði, a small fishing town at the head of Bogarfjörður eystri, where we will stay two nights in a dorm-style building with common dining and kitchen area.

 

Day 2 is a loop to Brúnavík and back, with two cols to cross, each about 350 m each. On the way we pass a puffin colony which sadly is in decline, as are most such colonies across Scandinavia, due to warming seawater and the resulting decline in their principal food source. Brúnavík, or Brown Bay, was a small farmstead abandoned in 1944; we will encounter many such abandoned communities. We also visit Álfaborg, a small hill on the outskirts of town which is known as the city or palace (borg) of the elves (álf), and home of the elf-queen Borghildur. No elves are in evidence but the area is certainly enchanted.

Day 3 is where the real fun begins. An overland hike to Breiðavík (White Bay) takes us through some spectacular scenery. I only wish I had a wide angle lens on the camera as selecting which mountain peak to use as backdrop is impossible. The wind is strong and Ned and Bryan manage to get a kite aloft. More fog and snowfields are encountered and Estrid’s GPS comes in handy; the trail markers are little sticks that get lost in the snow and fog. (Unlike Canada, there are no handy trees here that you could nail a fluorescent orange trail marker to.) I would not want to be up here alone unless I had much better maps and orienteering skills, and even then some of the snowfields lead through fog to precipitous drops, so local know-how remains critical. The weather in Breiðavík is gorgeous and I walk to the seashore, dodging calling cards left by the sheep who seem to run loose across the entire country.

 

The mountain huts built by the government are palatial, especially if there are only 9 people in space designed for 20; later in the season these could be crowded. Being first over the col means dealing with snow and fog, but also having the huts to ourselves. The Swiss ladies are indefatigable, helping Estrid make dinner with the contents of the boxes delivered by Skuli, our laconic local driver who somehow manages to get his Nissan 4WD (with enormous high-flotation tires, a full set of three locked differentials and a monster granny gear) across some other col with all our supplies and gear. I compensate for my inability to follow cooking instructions by leading the dishwashing brigade.

Day 4 takes us over another col to Húsavík (House Bay). Snow melt combined with very fine volcanic ash leads to a swampy mix that does not drain; I have never before encountered such steep swamps. I always thought swamps were flat, but apparently not so. Step in the wrong spot and it will suck you in to your boot tops.

For part of the day we climb up a steep 4WD track that had been recently plowed – apparently the snow is lingering later than usual this year. Approaching the last col, we see Skuli climbing through the plowed snowfields below us. He’s got the Nissan in a very low gear and is proceeding at somewhat less than a walking pace. Standing by the road, I witness a master class in getting a truck full of gear and food up a steep slope in deep, wet snow, as each wheel in turn tries to slip and is immediately curbed by the relevant differential; careful adjustment of tire pressures and keeping the engine just above idle without digging in do the trick. He eventually gets through the snow fields and passes us on his way to the col.

 

The last homestead in Húsavík was abandoned relatively late, in 1974. The hut is a good 50 m vertical or more above sea level, and the beach is at least a 6 km round-trip; no one takes the trip to the seashore as it has been a long day with more snow and fog in the high col, highlighted by stunning glacial lakes.

Heading up from Húsavík to the first col on Day 5, we are accompanied by André (spelling unsure) and his very well behaved dog. André is the warden for the hut for the week; this is a purely voluntary position and there is a waiting list – Estrid will finally get her chance in 2016.

The descent into Loðmundarfjörður is completely gobsmacking. The hut is bigger than the previous ones, and there is an old chapel with a list of pastors going back to the 16^th century posted inside. Ned uses the opportunity to recite John I: In the beginning was the Word. Estrid, Grace, Ned and Bryan strip to their undies and dip into a pool below a waterfall coming off the glaciers at 4°C; Grace and Ned run in, then right back out, but Estrid shows her Nordic style by splashing about for about 30 seconds accompanied by Bryan who apparently does this for fun while hunting in Wisconsin in the winter.

Our last hike on Day 6 takes us over another col into the town of Seyðisfjörður, where the ferry from Denmark and the Færoe Islands docks once a week. On the way down from the col, in a steep mucky part, I put my left foot on a rock that seems well supported, but which isn’t; I sink into it up to my boot top, topple forward down a steep slope and wind up on my back, head facing down the mountain, in more muck. As I topple, my right knee finds the only sharp bit in the muck, namely a newish piece of volcanic rock that has not yet been smoothed by glaciers. There is a gash, but fortunately it is only skin deep, no muck got in the cut as the pant leg didn’t tear, nothing is broken, and bleeding is quickly stopped.

Back at sea level we are picked up and stop in town for some sightseeing. I am cold and the wind has an edge to it, so I sit in the bus and chat with the driver. He’s worked on fishing trawlers and has dropped catches at processing plants in Harbour Grace and Saint Anthony’s; he once spent a month in Halifax while the refrigeration plant on the ship was repaired. He is planning a fly-fishing trip to Greenland. Fascinating what you can learn from locals. Then it is off to the airport for the flight back to Reykjavík … it’s over L. 

The Westman Islands (spellings vary)

The morning after returning to Reykjavik, Lorraine and I are on a flight to Heimaey, the largest and only inhabited island of the Westman Island chain, or Vestmannæyjar. First impressions after about 10 hours on Heimaey:

• If Iceland is an outpost on the fringes of Europe, Heimaey is an outpost on the fringes of Iceland.
• Hilariously, Iceland is called the ‘mainland’ here. This sort of makes my point, doesn’t it?
• Surtsey, which emerged from the ocean by volcanic action in 1963, is an outpost on the fringes of Heimaey. You can’t get there from anywhere, and not only because it is not allowed.
• In Heimaey they are proud of the fact that they have the highest average wind speeds in Europe? The World? All I know is that it blows like the dickens here.
• In 1973, a 2 kilometer-long crack opened up in the earth’s crust right across the east side of town, pouring out about a million tonnes of flaming lava over a 6-month period. It buried one third of the town, incinerated another third, and increased the land area of the island by a significant amount. It also covered the rest of the town in a foot or more of ash and cinder.
• There was enough geothermal heat from the 6-month eruption to heat most homes on the island for 8 years … they are now on bunker fuel.
• The lava almost choked off the harbor, but instead added a layer of protection … when I was down there that first afternoon, I had trouble standing up in the face of the gale entering the harbour channel, so I am having trouble imagining what it was like before.
• They got lucky: the night of the eruption, the fishing fleet was in port because of Force 12 winds which promptly died down, allowing the fleet to evacuate the entire population to ‘the mainland’.
• The breakwater protecting the port keeps getting washed away by the prevailing easterly storms.
• Being a volcanic island, there is no ground water, nor any wells. Fresh water is piped in via an undersea pipe from ‘the mainland’.
• All the houses have corrugated roofs held down with lots of #12 panhead screws with big flat washers under them.
• There’s no litter because if you drop something, it’s gone.
• There are whitecaps in the inner harbour.
• They have 3 or 4 calm days per year.
• In the early 1600’s, a bunch of Algerian pirates came here and kidnapped a bunch of Westman Islanders and took them to Algiers to sell as slaves.

In spite of all this, something like 4000 people live here, including a lot of families with kids. Granted there are no more Algerian pirates but it is hard to imagine why anyone would settle on a barren windswept island with no fresh water and a dodgy port. So why would anyone settle here? Answer: Fish, and the best port on the South Coast in spite of the wind. And boy is the food good which I am assuming puts it one up on the Falklands.

Reykjavík, Part 3

Back on the ‘mainland’, where the wind is not so bad, Lorraine and I tour an archeological dig in downtown Reykjavík that proves there was human settlement there well before the eruption of 871 which covered the whole country in a thin layer of unique ash, and which thus serves as a useful marker. There is no way of determining how much earlier than 871.

Then we took a tour bus to Þingvellir (Þ is the Icelandic letter ‘thorn’, as in Þór, the god known to others as Thor) which is where the Allþing, the first parliament, was held starting in 930. No, that's not a typo; they have had a parliament, continuously, for almost 1100 years. The location is spectacular, in a rift valley formed by the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates drifting apart by some large number of centimeters per year. Over 1000 years the drift is possibly as much as 1000 meters, and the landscape has shifted, but the Law Rock, where Njál would have argued his cases, remains. In 1000 these would have been substantially closer together and the valley floor at a higher level.

 

Vík and the South Coast

After a very nice dinner with Lorraine, I head off alone the next morning to Vík. Among my objectives is to find Bergþórshvoll, the farm named after Njál’s wife Bergþór, where Njál and his family were killed in the conclusion of a multi-generational inter-family feud documented in Njál's Saga. (Spoiler alert: everyone dies). Fortunately Icelanders seem to have calmed down since then, the broadswords and halberds are all safely locked up in museums, and they are all now all driving tour buses and providing wry commentary on Icelandic customs and foibles for wealthy tourists.

Vík is on the south coast in the shadow of Eyafjallajökull and its bigger, nastier partner, Katla. Fog and drizzle greet me, but this is the first poor weather so far, so I can’t complain. We had been told by a Reykjavík tour bus driver that in case of an eruption of Eyafjallajökull, or especially of Katla, one should look to the church in Vík for salvation. On arrival I locate the church high up on a ridge, well protected from lava flows or sudden glacial melts, so it appears the advice is more than merely spiritual.

 

Later that day, I locate Bergþór and her husband Njál, on, or perhaps more properly under, a grassy knoll overlooking the otherwise flat southern plains near the ferry landing from Heimaey at Landeyjarhöfn. I am not sure what lies under the knoll (ruins of a burnt homestead perhaps) but there is a B&B next door for the real keeners, and some really friendly lambs who tried to follow me back to my car. Immediately to the east is a small stream, issued from the volcanic mountains to the north. There are also a number of Icelandic horses, brought from Norway by the original Víkings and related to the ponies ridden by Mongols under Genghis Khan as they made their way across the Central Asian steppes to the eastern edges of Europe. No doubt the Víkings came across these in Ukraine or Moscow.

The next morning I hike up Skaftafellsheiði, the mountain next to Skaftafellsjökull. It’s a 17 km loop, 700 meter vertical gain, promising views over Skaftafellsjökull. This is a tongue off Vatnajoküll, the towering slab of ice visible from the highway that is Europe’s largest glacier. Vatnajoküll is also at the heart of Europe’s largest national park, Vatnajökulsþjóðgarður. (I had to get that one in somewhere). I start off in good weather with lovely views, and with the cloud cover seeming to hold above the 700 m level.

 

At about the 2½ hour mark, well into the 6 hour hike, a symptom of the old OCD rears its ugly head: I am suddenly struck by the worry that I had forgotten to turn off the headlights in the rental car. I figure that turning around would mean a) that the battery would probably still be OK after 5 hours, and b) that I would miss the views of the glacier on the descent. The alternative was to press on, with the possibility that the battery might be pretty poor after 6 hours, especially given the way modern cars are built to minimise weight – I can just hear the battery designer being told “why design a battery so some stupid tourist can leave the lights on for 6 hours? Make it 4 hours and shave 30% off the weight”. So I press on.

Towards the top there are a dozen small snow fields to cross, then the descent begins alongside a cliff side overlooking the glacier. There are plenty of opportunities for vertigo here, especially once the fog starts to drift in and the trail, on jagged rocks with a sheer drop to the left, is not obvious. After a while some drizzle starts up, the footing gets even worse and the visibility drops further. Thinking fast, I put on my Gore-Tex jacket, in a shade of Marine Rescue Orange carefully selected to assist Icelandic search and rescue teams. Unfortunately, the fog never really lifts so there are no decent pics of the glacier.

Oh, and the headlights? They were off. Clearly a lack of adult supervision …

I spend the next day exploring the coast and the huge fields of lava, rock and black sand that extend for over 200 km east of Vík. In one location it takes me 45 minutes to walk to the Atlantic over the sand blown out by Katla at some point in the past – the shoreline is now a couple of kilometres further out than it was, a bay has been filled up, and a promontory is now a lump of rock inland. The scale of it is all pretty mind boggling.  The only wildlife posing a problem is a big seabird that dives straight at me repeatedly until I change my tack on the return from the beach. No screeching, just heading straight at me, and I instinctively duck when he didn’t pull up.

The next day I drive to the glacial lake Jökusárlón, about 2 hours from Vík, but the parking lot is full so I head back, driving up little dead ends looking for historical or geological markers, and taking short hikes up promising trails. I discover where Ingólfur Arnarson is said to have come ashore in 874, and where he buried his stepbrother Hjörleifur Hróðmarsson after his murder by his Irish slaves. Said slaves escaped to the Westman Islands only to be tracked down by Ingólfur and made to pay, in typical Icelandic fashion, for their heinous behaviour.

A sign at the foot of the hill below Hjörleifur’s grave reads: 

which my Little Book of Runes translates as Baiarstatur, a word not recognised by Google. (Note the font I downloaded uses alternate versions for ‘a’ and ‘s’). Playing around with this, I can honestly say that

In contrast to the mountains, there is smooth black volcanic sand, lumpy lava looking like big piles of buffalo dung, sharp pointy stuff sticking up at weird angles, the whole bit, all of it covering large numbers of square kilometres. In one spot the local road runs atop the lava field; it is a 20 meter drop down to the farmlands. The south coast is subject to regular glacial floods, eruption or no eruption; all the bridges have been redesigned to direct flood water over the road (which is easier to replace) rather than under the bridge (which can wash the bridge away – in 2011 it took 2 weeks to build a temporary bridge). Cutting the main road involves cutting the country in two; with Katla 40 years overdue for a blast, this is a potential problem.

I am reminded of Middle Earth, and Mordor … forbidding cliffs with bizarre cave structures overlooking bubbling lava pits (now cooled since we are passed the Age of Middle Earth), black ash everywhere … Did Tolkien visit?

Home
I stop in at Víking World near Keflavík where they keep the Islendingur, the replica Víking ship that was sailed to L’Anse au Meadows in 2000 to commemorate 1000 years of Víking presence in North America. It is unfortunate that the only way to get here is by car; I am sure many people miss it.

Settlements near Reykjavík clearly date back well before 874, possibly to the middle of the 8^th century. It continues to amaze me that they made it across the North Atlantic (and back!) in flat-bottomed boats with a square sail and a simple rudder. The usual problems around longitude arise as well; if you know the date, and can measure the height of the sun above the horizon at noon, then you know latitude, but you don’t know longitude until you have a reliable clock set to a fixed time (Greenwich, for example) and thus know how many hours off you are. It was well into the Renaissance before anyone managed this; I think Simon Winchester wrote a book on the topic. Anyway having visited L’Anse au Meadows and the ship museum in Oslo, I suspect I am now an expert.

Back in Halifax, it is night for the first time in 16 days.

So what's the link with the bio-economy, you ask? Well, I toured a geothermal plant, which consisted basically of a steam turbine. Most of the country is on geothermal power, and a lot of it is on geothermal heat as well. I am guessing their greenhouse gas emissions come mainly from sheep.

 

  

China Diary (2011)

Looking back, I see the last two posts haven't exactly been cheerful or uplifting. I apologise for this; 2014 was most definitely not a good year for me.

So back to happier times: I have had occasional requests for the link to the following extensive post, written as I toured China in 2011, and originally posted on Dropbox. It was an incredible trip and I would strongly urge all of you to add China to your bucket list.

For the literary types, scroll to the bottom for a description of my visit to the childhood home of J.G. Ballard. The text, overall, has seen minor edits to bring it up to date but is otherwise identical to the original text posted in 2011.

China Diary

Being a summary of my excellent Chinese adventure, June 19 to July 9, 2011

Draft complete July 9, 2011; revisions to the section on JG Ballard, 26 August, 2011

Overview
Having been invited to present a keynote speech at a conference in Xi’an, I ask my colleague Zhirun, who has offered to show me around China, and who is also on the conference organising committee, to help with the planning. He and his family accompany Mary and I for the first two weeks of a three week trip.

Departure
Toronto to Beijing is a polar flight. We fly north over Northern Quebec and Baffin Island, then between the Pole and the northern tips of Greenland and Norway, then along the Siberian coast north of Murmansk. We make landfall somewhere in Siberia, and cross Lake Baikal and the Mongolian steppes before following in Genghis Khan’s steps and approaching Beijing from the north. We arrive at 14:30 local time, 02:30 in Montreal, after 13 hours in flight. Due to the polar route and the proximity to the summer solstice, the entire flight is spent in sunlight.

Beijing
Arrival in Asia is properly chaotic, and we have to push through a huge crowd milling around just outside security. The baggage cart serves as a suitable battering ram to clear the way. As a clear indication that I travel too much, I recognize Yonghao Ni, a former McGill classmate and now a professor at UNB, in the crowd; he has been here for a few days and is waiting for his wife who is on the same flight from Toronto. At customs we used our first words of Mandarin, xie xie(pronounced somewhere between ‘she she’ and ‘chin chin’), meaning ‘thank you’.

On Tuesday morning Zhirun and I visit Beijing Forestry University where we make a presentation about FPInnovations and our R&D programs. The university buildings are decrepit relics of the 1960’s, and the quality of the lab equipment is far below that of the poorest Canadian universities. Budgetary constraints mean the lights are off in the bare, echoing hallways, giving it a gloomy, Stalinist feel. We are not impressed.

In the afternoon we are joined by Mary, Zhirun’s family (his wife Lizhen, 13 year-old Kevin and 8-year old Eric) and a BFU student delegated to ensure we have a Good Time and don’t get lost or robbed. We tour the Summer Palace which includes a lake and a number of pavilions. It’s pretty but not a must-see. I buy a genuine Red Army cap (or so the street vendor assures me) for 30 RMB; I pass on the genuine Mao watch as it is a knock off – I am pretty sure Mao’s watch would not have been quartz-powered.

On Wednesday the student from BFU has arranged a small minivan to take the six of us, the driver and himself to the Great Wall at Badaling. The climb is steep and full of people; my vertigo and the decent weather mean I take the steep path down with Zhirun while the others take the cable car which is likely to give me the willies. The day is hazy, hot and muggy with humidity, dust and smog, and the views are therefore less than spectacular, but nonetheless it is breathtaking. Ultimately the Wall was an exercise in futility as Ghengis Khan and his Mongol hordes didn’t like mountainous routes with narrow passes in any case; he cleverly stuck to flat land more suitable for cavalry and went around the central mountain range, and would have done so anyway, wall or no wall. At the exit there are sad-looking bears in pens which you can feed for 3 RMB (about $0.50), a thoroughly depressing sight. We finish the day in a restaurant where too much food is ordered; we send the grateful student home with a doggie bag.

 

Tianjin
On Thursday Zhirun and I take the high speed train to Tianjin, one of China’s 4 largest cities (Beijing, Shanghai and Chongqing are the others), to visit Tianjin University of Science and Technology and the Nine Dragons Paper Company site there. We plan to return the same evening. This trip is where the true contrasts between the new and old Chinas become evident to me.

First is the transportation. It takes an hour to do the 10 km from the hotel to Beijing South train station, dealing with chaotic early morning traffic. You can’t rent a car in China without a residency permit, which is a good thing as the traffic is a complete madhouse with its own set of complex rules (Rule #1: vigorously and melodiously manipulate the audible warning device, aka horn, at any provocation). The taxi costs about 60 RMB (under $10). From the train station we take the high speed train which hits 330 km/h and covers the 200+ km to Tang Gu (an eastern suburb of Tianjin) in 45 minutes, at a cost of 70 RMB per person. Then it’s back into a taxi for another 45 minute, 10 km ride to the university where we do our dog and pony show again. TUST is newer and better equipped than BFU, having been uprooted from downtown Tianjin and transplanted bodily to this suburban oasis a few years ago. Students ask questions in decent English, wanting to know about employment opportunities in Canada and my views on the future of the pulp and paper industry in China. I am getting good at this Expert thing and they are all suitably impressed.

After lunch in the cafeteria, a driver collects us for the 45 minute drive to the Nine Dragons Paper Company outside Tianjin. We follow a coastal road north. The road is a flat, dead straight 10-lane boulevard, obviously brand new, and utterly deserted. The driver, an employee of the paper mill, is driving the vice mill manager’s new Honda Accord and is soon doing 150 km/h. The surrounding landscape consists of: dirt. Nothing but dirt, and lots of it. In some places the dirt is flat; elsewhere it is arranged in long ridges or furrows; still other places have geometric patterns carved into it. The smog is still quite heavy and we can only see a few kilometres in any direction, where we can occasionally glimpse a solitary excavator slowly rearranging the dirt. It is clear that this entire stretch has been recently cleared for new industrial development, with the road infrastructure going in before industry can build. Google Maps still shows this area (if I have the right spot) as a large series of small fields and narrow tracks, with occasional little farm compounds; the grid of 10 lane boulevards is too new to show up in the photos.

Every few kilometres there is an intersection with an identical boulevard. Road blocks prevent our driver barrelling through these at 150 km/h, and also permit bored police officers to get a good view of the vehicle license plates and occupants. It becomes clear that we might not be able to visit here on our own.

Apart from the heavy police presence, there are occasional labourers. We came across a team of 5 or 6, quietly creating a brick sidewalk. Looking forward and back, there is nothing but empty road as far as the eye can see; the emptiness makes the idea of completing another 100 meters of brick sidewalk seem utterly futile. Later we pass a team of 10 tending the flowers and shrubs in the median strip, and finally a pair of ladies sweeping the gutters with long witch’s brooms in a futile attempt to keep the dirt where it belongs, i.e. off the road. None of these work crews are accompanied by a vehicle of any kind, so they are obviously at the mercy of shift foremen. (The two fellows selling melons were obviously independent entrepreneurs as they both had tricycles).

After 20 minutes of this, a block of apartment towers under construction emerges from the smog. Completely isolated from any other building, this site consists of 8 or 10 rows of buildings, each row consisting of 8 or 10 apartment blocks, for a total of about 80 towers. None are complete; all are at least 20, if not 30 stories. (Exact details were hard to gather at 150 km/h). Assuming 80 towers of 25 floors, with 20 apartments per floor and two people on average per apartment (an average between bachelors and the standard Chinese 3-person family), this works out to housing for 80,000 people. Presumably there will soon be industrial employment near by. We will come across many similar blocks of housing, each suitable for tens of thousands of residents, either complete or in construction, in all of our travels.

Beyond the new tower blocks, we start to see industrial plants: a huge petrochemical plant of some kind, then the Nine Dragons paper mill. We are greeted by the vice general manager, a classmate of the professor at TUST who arranged the visit. Both offices and paper mills are spotless; staff are apparently hired to permanently mop the offices and sweep the streets to keep the dirt at bay. The mill employs 2000, and most, including the vice mill manager, live in company housing onsite. The mill operates 4 state-of-the-art paper machines to make 1.6 million tonnes per year of recycled cardboard, using old papers and cardboard imported from North America as well as that collected locally. This is a staggering amount (total Canadian cardboard production is probably about 1.6 MT) but it is apparently not enough to meet demand: the building for a fifth machine is almost complete, the foundations for a sixth are being poured, and there is a field with room for machines number 7 through 10. Once complete, total production from the site will then be 4 MT/y. This is, however, just a portion of the Nine Dragons output; they operate about 32 other machines in other locations across China and can’t keep up with demand for cardboard, both for shipping goods to North America and for internal use.

The vice-general manager drives us around the mill in his new Honda. After a tour of two of the machines (which are temporarily idled because there is a problem with the onsite coal-fired power generating station), we approach the gate to leave. The guard, in crisp military-style uniform and cap despite the heat and humidity, recognises the car and snaps to attention, saluting us as he opens the gate. The manager recognises his efforts with an idle wave, lifting two fingers off the steering wheel.

We take a different route back to Tianjin, avoiding the coastal route. The driver can’t do 150 km/h anymore due to lumbering, belching communist-era lorries hogging the left lanes at 45 km/h, and tricycles full of building materials in the right lanes. This leads to a lot of lane changing and dodging traffic; it is a miracle no one is killed. The city core is choked due to traffic and the fact that the entire city is one big construction site, and the last 10 km to the train station takes another 45 minutes. The return train hits 330 km/h again, getting us to Beijing in 30 minutes.

In Beijing there is a torrential downpour, and there are no taxis to be had. We walk the 40 minutes from the nearest subway station to our hotel in steady rain, after buying umbrellas from an enterprising fellow at the subway exit who had a duffle bag full and was selling them for 15 RMB. He knew he was sitting on a gold mine; our offer of two for 20 RMB was dismissed. Just another reminder of the contrasts in this city of 30 million people.

Beijing, part 2
On Friday another BFU student takes us to the Forbidden City. Unlike the hordes of tourists, who enter by the south gate facing Tiananmen Square, we enter through the north gate directly into the Emperor’s gardens and residences. This is a stunning area of small pavilions and sculpture, masked by cypress trees which reveal new delights at every turn of the path. The layout is geometrical but with deliberate small areas of more organic layouts. The pavilions have evocative but almost comical names, bordering on parody – you couldn’t make some of these names up with a straight face: the Hall of Supreme Harmony, the Hall of Mental Cultivation, the Pavilion to Usher in Light, the Hill of Accumulated Elegance, the Hall of Literary Elegance, and my personal favourite, the Hall of Central Extremities. As you leave the Emperor’s quarters, you move through increasingly large squares where a progressively larger number of outsiders, of progressively lower rank, would have been permitted to visit, until you leave by the main south gate onto Tiananmen Square. The last gate but one was originally called the Gate for Worshipping Heaven when it was built under the Ming Dynasty, but was renamed the Gate of Imperial Supremacy, presumably following some internal debate on the topic; with the matter settled it was renamed the Gate of Supreme Harmony.

After a visit to the silk and pearl emporium, which is worth a separate report and where we profitably use our second Chinese word, tai qui le, meaning ‘too expensive’, we have what is said to be the best Beijing duck available anywhere. Indeed it is delicious, and once again the lucky student goes home with a doggie bag.

On Saturday morning we move to the Fragrant Hill Empark Hotel, a resort in the shadow of the mountains surrounding Beijing to the west. The Wall is visible above the hotel on the ridgeline. Saturday is devoted to a meeting of the Eminent Refiner and Groundwood Scientists (ERGS), a private club accessible only by invitation. I attend at the invitation of Zhirun, who passes his initiation rite and becomes a full member at the official dinner. (I am invited to attend the meeting, and to share in the costs, but not to become a member, as I am not really a scientist anymore).The main purpose of the club appears to be eating and drinking in exotic locales, although some interesting technical papers are given. The winner of the award for Best Paper will get his name engraved on the base of the ERGS Elephant (don’t ask), which is in my keeping as Program Manager, Mechanical Pulping.

On Sunday we head to the airport for a 90 minute flight to Xi’an, the ancient Chinese capital and location of the main event, the International Mechanical Pulping Conference.

Playing tourist in Xi’an
Xi’an is the ancient Chinese capital, and portions of it survived the turmoil associated with numerous changes of dynasty relatively intact. We are driven to the Xi’an City Wall, a 600-year old pile of dirt with bricks on top. It is intact and you can rent bicycles to ride the full loop along the broad brick-paved top. Mary and I wind up with a battered tandem with dodgy brakes.

We are told that the 14 km-long wall encloses a total of two million inhabitants, with another 6 million living outside. Given the surface area of 12 km², this is a staggering 167,000 people per square kilometre, mostly in low-rise buildings. Later in the week, in torrid but dry weather, we visit the Xi’an International Horticultural Exposition on the outskirts of the city. Everywhere there are blocks of apartment towers under construction; we pass a small traditional walled village which is being demolished to make room for another such development. On Thursday we move to the Tang Paradise, a spectacular hotel built in the Tang Dynasty style with pavilions set in public formal gardens and pools. It looks like it is 1000 years old, but, according to Google Maps, was just a field full of dirt a couple of years ago, and it is surrounded by apartment towers under construction. On the way we pass what looks like a Western-style townhouse development: with only a few families per hectare, this must be for very wealthy people indeed.

July 1 is the 90^th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist party, and the television stations are full of speeches by President Hu Jintao and pageants featuring cute Chinese girls singing patriotic songs in military uniforms with short (but not indecently short) skirts, backed by masses of dancers in traditional costume. One show features dancers in front of a huge video screen showing modernization: highways with flowing traffic (a lie, as the traffic is usually gridlocked), scientists in labs with test tubes (a moderate lie if some of the pulp and paper labs we saw were any guide), modern cityscapes, etc. Clearly the government is selling the idea that modernisation will bring better lives for all, if not for the peasants doing the grunt work, then for their children.

After another university tour, we visit the Terra Cotta Warrior site. It is spectacular. The most amazing fact is that, in a country which carefully records everything and has done so through something like 26 consecutive dynasties, there was no historical record of this tomb; farmers drilling a well stumbled across the site in 1974. Equally impressive was a Han Dynasty mausoleum, about 2000 years old, also featuring huge numbers of clay figurines of animals and people, with the largest about 3 feet tall. The figures were made with clay bodies (anatomically correct, I might add), with real clothes and wooden arms that rotted away, leaving only the armless clay figures behind. This tour ended in a restaurant specialising in dumplings.

And throughout it all, the most memorable part of the visit to Xi’an has to be the enormous number of apartment buildings under construction. From the top of the pagoda in the Tang Paradise public park, I count 20 construction cranes before giving up. The country is modernising at a massive rate, using all the money earned by selling stuff to Walmart. And what looks old is frequently deceiving, as shown by the Tang Dynasty theme park encompassing our hotel. It’s not quite Disney World, but it’s close; Tang World, anyone?

Night train to Suzhou
In a scene of utter chaos, surrounded by thousands of people with bags and boxes held together with twine and duct tape, we make our way across the central square in front of Xi’an’s old train station. Propelled by an energetic porter on a tricycle, Zhirun, his eldest son and our luggage disappear into the crowd and there is a brief panic until I manage to get my cell phone to negotiate China’s digital network and contact Zhirun through his Chinese cell phone. With some collaboration from authorities, we get our large amounts of luggage on the train and secreted among the bunks of the sleeper car. The sleeper car is made up of little rooms with four bunks each; we share our berth with a young girl who goes right to sleep, and a young mother with her two-year old son.

Fortunately the kid is well behaved and sleeps through the night. The ride is bumpy and the partition with the next berth rattles; neither of us gets much sleep. However the opportunity to see some countryside before dozing off (we leave at 5:00 pm) makes it worthwhile. Abandoned villages full of windowless two story brick buildings, all huddled inside a wall, are numerous, and are being slowly disassembled (not bulldozed) and replaced by tower blocks. We pass at least two coal-fired generating stations under expansion before dark, one so close we can almost touch the new cooling tower. High speed rail lines are being built everywhere we look, using a bridge type of architecture consisting of standardised pre-stressed concrete beams sitting on piers rather than more traditional railway building methods; we pass a plant churning out these beams in vast numbers and loading them onto rail flatbeds. One advantage of the bridge method is that it can leap over obstacles (such as the aforementioned abandoned villages) with little or no demolition – this can be done later; also wildlife is unlikely to wander out onto the tracks, and there are no level crossings to convert to underpasses. (You can’t have a level crossing with a train bearing down at 330 km/h). The night train, while not high-speed, is relatively quick and makes few stops but is pretty uncomfortable; if you choose to travel this way in China, remember to bring your own toilet paper and some sleeping pills.

Suzhou
We arrive in Suzhou, totally exhausted, at 7:00 a.m. on Monday morning. Given our past experiences with taxis, Zhirun has arranged a minivan and driver to take us to the hotel. At a cost of 200 RMB, this is about $32 and well worth it as we would have needed two taxis at 50 RMB each, assuming we could find some willing to take us and our voluminous luggage. Fortunately the hotel, part of an American chain with a large replica of the Statue of Liberty in the lobby, has rooms available this early and we can shower, shave and change before visiting the paper mill at Changshu. Unlike Xi’an, which is hot and dry, Suzhou is hot and humid, and my shirt is quickly soaked after a short walk around the park to the west of the hotel. To the east, there are six construction sites within the same number of city blocks, each with a new tower going up; we can see at least 13 cranes without really trying.

The mill at Changshu, an hour north by car, is interesting because it is owned and operated by the Finnish paper making giant UPM-Kymmene, and because it is a customer of several of our Canadian pulp mills. The product is largely photocopy paper, with some lightly coated magazine grades thrown in, made on two big, fast modern paper machines. It’s not as big as the Nine Dragons mill in Tianjin, but it is probably as profitable, and like Nine Dragons, it has lots of room for new paper machines should the demand arise. Also like Nine Dragons, most of the 850 employees live onsite, with their families, in company housing.

The mill visit over, we are now officially on vacation, and Zhirun treats us to typical Suzhou dishes for dinner. Suzhou is Zhirun’s home town and he is glad to be able to show it off to us. The cuisine here tends towards sweeter sauces than the fiery concoctions in western Xi’an; seafood is more prevalent too, given the short distance to Shanghai and the sea, and the octopus is delicious.

Suzhou, at least the section we are staying in, is clean and modern, with lots of new construction. I walk to the waterfront along a lake, and notice a school, shops and other services aimed at the residents of the new high-rises. The streets are broad and straight. Later we visit the market in the old part of town where the streets are narrow and crooked, and prices are even lower than the silk and pearl emporium in Beijing (perhaps due to the fact we are the only westerners in sight). Then we tour a Buddhist monastery which also serves vegetarian meals. The monastery doesn’t look like much from outside, but includes a cool, dark wooden hall with 500 gilt Buddhas, all slightly larger than life size, and all with different clothes, poses and expressions, in cases made of gorgeous dark wood and glass. No photos are allowed, and even if they were, it would be somewhat crass in such a beautiful spot. Outside there is a garden whose purpose is releasing live things; the pools are full of turtles, frogs and fish, and there are two white doves that allow me to approach to within a few feet. This quick glimpse of the old Asia makes me want to return and explore more thoroughly. That afternoon, we visit Zhirun’s brother, who is a senior executive with a silk manufacturing company; Mary runs amok in the warehouse. We are invited to dinner with Zhirun’s brother, sister and elderly parents and are treated like royalty. His 91-year old father was raised by missionaries in Shanghai in the ‘20s and ‘30s, and still knows enough English to welcome us to China. Overall we would not have seen anywhere near as much of China without Zhirun and Lizhen’s help, and without the translation services provided by Kevin (their eldest son).

Shanghai

On Wednesday morning we bid farewell to Zhirun and his family, and set off alone (in another car provided by the agency) to hot and humid Shanghai, about 90 minutes away.

At first glance, Shanghai is very different from Beijing. Partly it is more Western; the main shopping streets near our hotel (on the edge of the French Concession) feature expensive New York, London or Paris brands; there are Westerners on the street who look like they live here (as opposed to tourists with cameras); it doesn’t have the broad, straight boulevards of Beijing but narrower tree-lined streets that follow gently curving paths. At least one of these streets reminded both Mary and I of some Parisian neighbourhoods. (The plaque proclaiming ‘Place de Tong Ren’ as part of the 280^ième Arrondissement strengthens the impression). But Shanghai is also more Asian, with more of the old alleyways still surviving. We also notice beggars and street people for the first time, perhaps an indication of our limited experience in other cities, but perhaps also an indicator of a greater disparity between rich and poor here. Certainly the city around our downtown hotel is a startling mix of new shopping streets and narrow little Asian laneways, many consisting of 3-story brick buildings.

In one such laneway, we visit one of Mao’s residences when he was preparing the revolution in the 1920’s. The purpose of the museum, which is free, is to encourage the study of Marxism-Leninism, Maoism and the theories of Deng Xiaoping in order to promote the development of a healthy economy. I’m paraphrasing a bit but it was all heavy on the propaganda and sounded a lot like a bad Cold War movie about the Yellow Peril full of people calling each other Comrade. A room is devoted to Mao’s son, Mao Anyong, who was killed in action during the War Against US Imperialism in Korea (or words to that effect). The exhibit includes soil from the location of his death and other mementos. The Lonely Planet guide says this museum is for people with real nostalgia for the Great Helmsman and the Cultural Revolution, and they are probably right. Dinner that night is in a Balinese restaurant where we have a wonderful meal for about 400 RMB (not cheap for China, at just under $65); only the wine is priced at Western levels, with a California Chardonnay costing 300 RMB.

On Thursday we visit the Old Town and stray into very narrow alleys with live chickens and ducks, some very bizarre smells, narrow little stalls with families living above, and plenty of poverty. The electrical wiring hanging overhead illustrates ingenuity if not respect for building codes. In places we feel like intruders even if no one is staring; I don’t take out the camera. Along the way, we pass what the Lonely Planet map says is another such neighbourhood, but there is a wall around it and it has been reduced to rubble to make way for a new tower development of some sort. We also visit a shopping area designed to look like an old Chinese town but obviously quite a bit newer than the real thing. Nonetheless the silk goods in the phony, new ‘old town’ are quite a bit cheaper than those in the markets on the edge of the real Old Town, I assume due to the fact that the Lonely Planet guide recommends these edgier, more ‘authentic’ markets which are therefore full of gullible foreigners getting fleeced by shop owners unwilling to haggle if they think they’ve hooked a live one.

Finally we visit a Buddhist temple with an astonishing jade Budddha. (It also has the requisite assortment of gilt Buddhas). Ordinary people are burning wads of incense and phony paper money, and kneeling in front of various Buddhas, so the religion is very much alive. A guide appears out of nowhere and shows us around, skilfully navigating us to the air-conditioned boutique near the exit, a welcome occasion as it is sweltering. They may be monks, but that doesn’t mean they can’t also be businessmen.

We take a quick trip to the Bund where the offices of the British merchant bankers and opium dealers of the 1920’s face the futuristic towers of Pudong across the Huangpo River. We don’t make it to the Shanghai World Finance Centre, the third highest building in the world at almost half a kilometre. It’s impressive, even if it does look a bit like a giant beer bottle opener.

 

As in Beijing, the Shanghai subway system is a joy, with a one-day tourist pass costing 18 RMB (about $2.75). Automated ticket dispensers provide instructions in English, stations are clean, the cars are (perhaps overly) air conditioned, automated systems inside the car announce the next station with both visual and verbal messages in Mandarin and English, and it all works much better than trying to get somewhere by taxi through the gridlocked streets. The fact the entire system is less than 10 years old is simply staggering; the investment must have been many tens of billions of $US, financed mainly by Americans shopping at Walmart, and I am guessing that revenue from ticket sales comes nowhere near covering operating costs.

Searching for J.G. Ballard

My regular readers (if any) may know of my fondness for the writer J.G. Ballard. Ballard was born in Shanghai in 1930, of wealthy British parents. His father ran a cotton mill for a large British textile company, and the family lived on what was then the outskirts of Shanghai in a large British-style home just to the west of what is today the French Concession. They had as many as ten Chinese servants, including a chauffeur who would drive them into town in the family Buick. In 1937, the Japanese took Shanghai, and while the Chinese population suffered immeasurably as a result, the Japanese left the large expat community alone and allowed them to continue with their business. (Up until 1937, the city had little in the way of immigration controls, and there were large communities of White Russians, Eastern European Jews and others fleeing troubles at home, as well as a large French, British, American and German population of businessmen and their families).

Following the attack on Pearl Harbour, the Japanese decided the expats represented a potential threat, and over the next two years had them rounded up and interned in civilian camps. The camp where the Ballard family was imprisoned with other British expats was probably typical: there was usually a reasonable amount of food, and the bored guards usually limited their activities to an occasional roll call. Of course there were periods of insufficient food and random acts of violence (usually directed at Chinese civilians); life must have seemed suddenly precarious for the formerly well-to-do, and it got more so as the war progressed and the Japanese began suffering military losses. Although he remembers the war years fondly in his memoirs, this must have been a significant shock for the 11 year-old Ballard, and I can’t help thinking it shaped his later fiction. In 1945, the Americans liberated the camp; Ballard moved to England with his mother and younger sister in 1946, his father staying on to run the cotton mill until shortly after the communist takeover in 1949. If anything, Britain after the war was an even bigger shock for the now 16 year-old Ballard.

With the aid of a web site set up by Ballard enthusiasts, and using Google Maps and the GPS on my smart phone, I set out early one morning from the Shanghai Hilton, where, coincidentally, Ballard stayed during his only return trip in 1991. My objective was to locate the Ballard residence. The walk through the French Concession reveals plenty of 1920’s vintage stately homes, some well preserved, others looking ratty and subdivided into apartments. The front door of the Ballard home, at 31 Amherst Avenue, is now at the end of a laneway leading south from what is now Xinhua Road, just west of Pan Yu Road (or Fan Yu Road as the Lonely Planet guide has it, incorrectly). The former back gate on Columbia Avenue is now the front entrance at 508 Pan Yu Road, and the building houses some form of club or restaurant. There have been renovations but a number of the external features remain as described by Ballard and, later, by his fans on their website.

From there I take the subway south and west to find the location of Lunghua airfield, where the Americans dropped food and supplies from airplanes for the camp residents in 1945. The pagoda at the north end of the field, where the Japanese had mounted anti-aircraft guns, was moved a number of years ago. Today the runway serves as a parking lot for city buses, and the area near where the terminal used to be, which still shows a couple of old airplanes when viewed using Google Maps, is a construction site. The planes are gone but the site, large portions of which are complete and operational today, is meant to be a vocational college for aircraft maintenance trades. The artist’s rendition on the barricades shows several airplanes in the original location just off Fenggu Road, so perhaps they will be returned or replaced. I don’t have time to look for the Lunghua internment camp, which apparently is now a girl’s high school; during Ballard’s return in 1991, he was able to visit the very cell which his family occupied, and which was then a storeroom.

Most of Ballard’s novels and stories explore, in one way or another, the sometimes bizarre behaviour of ordinary people suddenly thrust into inexplicable situations not entirely of their own making. It may have been The Times Literary Supplement that coined the word ‘Ballardian’ to describe a particular form of dystopia built around this theme. Ballard’s first published novel, The Drowned World, appeared in 1963, and I stumbled across it as a teenager while roaming the aisles of Bonder’s Bookstore on rue Bernard in Outremont. In 1972 he published Crash, a disturbing novel exploring the potential relationship between car accidents and sex; it was 1996 before this was eventually made into an equally disturbing film by David Cronenberg, not to be confused with the 2004 film of the same name directed by Paul Haggis. The basic premise may sound bizarre, but in 1970 he set up an art installation in a disused London warehouse involving three wrecked cars, one of them a large Pontiac. This being London in the Swinging ‘60s, he easily convinced a young lady of his acquaintance to serve cocktails and interview guests at the vernissage while entirely in the nude, until she found out that the show involved wrecked cars, at which point she insisted on wearing her bikini bottom. Ballard says he never saw a crowd get so drunk so quickly at an art exhibit, and people were soon vandalising the wrecked cars; in the midst of the general mayhem the young lady in the bikini bottom later claimed to have had to fend off a rape attempt in the back seat of the Pontiac. As Ballard commented in an interview many years later, an interesting social dynamic was on display, and this convinced him to press ahead with the novel.

In 1982 he published Empire of the Sun, a semi-autobiographical novel about a boy named Jim who grows up in war-time Shanghai. It outsold all his other novels put together; after Spielberg made it into a popular film, his back catalogue was revived, and many unsuspecting readers must have been surprised at the radically different content of some of his other titles. His best novel, in my opinion, is Cocaine Nights (circa 2000), which explores the notion that a low level of background danger or violence is a necessary precondition for the development of culturally vibrant societies. In the absence of any personal risk of any kind, we will all turn into couch potatoes, sprawled in front of the TV; throw in some random robberies, vandalism, sexual assaults and drugs, and you’ll get retired orthodontists and their wives from Shepperton (the London suburb where Ballard lived most of his life) suddenly starting up amateur Gilbert and Sullivan troupes, participating in debates at local council meetings and maybe even engaging, with the accountant and his wife next door, in the production of somewhat kinky home movies. It’s written as a murder mystery: Agatha Christie meets a 21^st century version of Alfred Hitchcock. And his writing, especially in the later years, is very good.

J.G. Ballard died of cancer in 2009, at the age of 79.

Home

Given the large number of suitcases we have accumulated in three weeks, we decide not to struggle through the public transit system in order to take the magnetic levitation train to the airport at Pudong.

 

The maglev train, the only one of its kind in the world, hits over 450 km/h and as a result takes only 8 minutes to get from downtown to the airport. It is on my bucket list, but it will have to be another time. Instead we take a taxi. The driver only feels like he is driving 450 km/h – actually he tops out at 145 km/h, and the ride takes 45 minutes at mid-day on a Saturday. At 200 RMB it is probably more expensive than the maglev, too. The view from the business lounge at the airport is of container ships heading towards the East China Sea, a fitting end to our trip.

Three weeks is a long time, but China is huge – there are urban areas with almost as many people as all of Canada – so I’m sure I’ve only scratched the surface. Nonetheless, the primary message I’ve taken away is the break-neck pace of change. Young Chinese, both boys and girls, blow-dry their hair, like nice shoes and are expecting a better life than their peasant forefathers who wore flip flops while toiling in the fields or factories. There should be no problems as long as the Party continues meeting these expectations.