19 April 2024

China And Japan

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Other Asia Reviews

Far East in a flash

Can you really try to make any sense of China and Japan in just two weeks? Laurie Margolis made a valiant effort.

1 The neon of Hong Kong 2 Kyoto Temple of Japan 3 Guilin Sunset, China

SO, I ASKED A COLLEAGUE who’d spent a year in Hong Kong, “I want two days in China, no more. Where do you recommend?”

She replied, without hesitation: “Guilin.” I’d never heard of Guilin (pronounced Gway-Lin). “Why there?”

“It is,” she said, “the China you’ve seen on a thousand restaurant walls - China as you think it should look. River gorges, pointy mountains, rice paddies, the lot.”

I tried the same on a friend who knows Japan. His answer? Kyoto.

At least I’d heard of Kyoto, but why there? Again: instant, concentrated Japan.

Why, you might ask, go to these fascinating countries for such short periods? You cant “do” China in a couple of days.

Of course you can’t. These are huge, complex countries, each of which would take months to see properly. But we had a fortnight and wondered if we could realistically sample each, choosing destinations that would be easy but worthwhile.

What we did can easily be replicated by anyone wanting to get the feel of China and Japan. The key is to find a local base from which to organise self-contained tours. That base is Hong Kong, which must have a fair shout at being the most dynamic, exciting city in the world

Overwhelming, yet familiar

Hong Kong is overwhelming but also familiar. There are double-decker buses, Marks & Spencer, proper post boxes, and streets called Edinburgh Place and Gloucester Road. There are also six million Chinese making the former colony, now a special Administrative Region of China, whirr like a dynamo.

Hong Kong is dazzling but easy to get to grips with. The heart is Hong Kong Island - in London terms the City, Mayfair and Knightsbridge, but with a Harbour in front and a mountain, The Peak, behind.

Across the water, criss-crossed by cheap, frequent ferries, is Kowloon, more workaday like Oxford Street. All the big hotel chains are there, though they are expensive. In fact, if there is one disappointment about Hong Kong, it is that neither hotels and restaurants, nor even the goodies in the electronics shops are particularly cheap.

Getting around is easy. There is a brilliant underground system, the MTR, which is clean, safe, air-conditioned and punctual. Buses and trams go everywhere. The world’s longest escalator wafts you past people’s windows to the hillier districts.

Best of all are the inter-island ferries which putter around the stunning harbour to the outlying islands. Most journeys end at pretty, bustly, very Chinese destinations such as Lantau Island. Coming back from there to the centre is like sailing from a seaside village to Canary Wharf in half an hour.

The two day package to Guilin in China saw us on a short flight into an old style communist airport. Rain poured through the roof; the escalator stopped suddenly, causing a human pile-up.

Our driver took us into a city which was a total surprise: brightly lit, full of bars, restaurants and shops, clean streets, pretty parks - and bicycles, of course, but many private cars too. I expected North Korea; what I got was an apparently thriving city in a country which remains repressive politically but which is grabbing capitalism with one billion pairs of hands.

The highlight at Guilin is a five-hour cruise down the Li River, all my friends promised. The mountains are jagged; the rice paddies brilliant green; the peasants wear conical hats and wash their clothes in the river; water buffalo splash in the shallows. It’s every China you’ve ever seen in a children’s picture book.

We visited a kind of theme park devoted to ethnic minorities, which was better than it sounds. We went to the reed flute caves, an incredible underground world of stalagmites and stalactites, only discovered in the Fifties. We ate well, with charming waitresses keen to practise their English.

China was strange enough. But Japan was quite weird...

This may sound pathetic but, by and large, the Japanese don’t speak English; not a word. It isn’t like being in mainland Europe, where you can make yourself understood. This approaches total non-communication and is quite bewildering.

Kyoto was four hours flight from Hong Kong, then an hour on the gleaming Kansai Airport express. You get on after crews have zoomed around eliminating what traces of dirt may have accumulated since the last scrub. Japan is clean!

A mixture of bath and cambridge

Kyoto is like a mixture of Bath and Cambridge. It has a quarter of all Japan’s historic buildings. There are Shinto and Buddhist temples everywhere, apparently old, though often reconstructions because the wooden originals kept burning down. Kyoto is Japan’s seventh city, about the size of Sheffield. The level of retail activity is amazing, with at least four gleaming department stores, stocked with every label.

With no historical reference points, the many shrines and palaces tend to merge into one, though one Buddhist temple, the Sanjusangendo, was unforgettable, stuffed with a thousand life-sized gilded statues of warriors, every one different, in a giant wooden gallery.

The fascination of Japan is in the small things: sweet shops crammed with mysterious candies; dark, forbidding restaurants full of besuited businessmen, their womenfolk in livelier places nearby; even the department store sign to an “Escarator”!

So did our Chinese and Japanese appetisers work? Undoubtedly. We got a real feel of both countries. And Hong Kong, which felt like home as we moved back and forth, is simply wonderful.

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