26 February 2018
Guiyang pork and paper
24 February 2018
Leiyang to Guiyang by bus
The bus too is fully booked, but we get two seats in the back.
Three men board and take seats without tickets, when collector asks for tickets they say they could not buy them because they were sold out. They argue, they want to go home. Then three more passengers with tickets board but can't find any seats because they've been taken by the three men. A long argument ensues then finally the three men leave.
Very noisy trip, people suck their drinks loudly, a car-sick girl vomits no one cleans up.
Meanwhile, it's been raining all day long.
We pass through some old villages. Old houses with pagoda roofs quite charming though need restoration.
New housing on the other hand mostly has with flat roof, just boxes of brick and mortar, no character but popular because can dry fruit on top . good for farmers who move to town but still grow crops in village plots.
Once at the Guiyang coach station we find a Didi (Chinese Uber) taxi driver who is rude and unhelpful. He does not move from his seat and keeps smoking while we load and unload heavy suitcases. But anyway we are home!
It is 4pm or so by the time we get to the apartment, and it is very cold. Hunan houses don't have a central heating system but many (including ours) have electric systems but people don't turn them on. In the evening it's 11 degrees inside, essentially the same temperature as outside.
23 February 2018
Wedding in Leiyang
They tell us how the husband went to the house of bride to take her with him and left a chicken as a symbolic form of gratitude to her family for having brought her up!
On a simple wooden table in the middle of the main room of the paternal house, we are offered tea, peanuts and cigarettes.
All around are many old houses with clay tiles, wooden beams and wood floors.Some are being demolished for new ones with flat roofing and cement bricks. More functional if less charming.
Back in town we see a rather large Christian church next to a Buddhist temple. We get our shoes cleaned by a happy lady (one of many) who is working on the sidewalk with a little stool, a chair for her clients, brushes and polish. She is happy, smiling and works fast and very well!
At the reception, people come and give envelopes at a table by the entrance where each envelope is opened and the money counted, then most of them just eat and go away, unabashedly taking leftovers with them! The meal is scrumptious as expected, local cuisine, moderately spicy. The bride and groom spend some time at the different tables, and at the end they come to ours. They are exhausted, but finally can relax a bit and eat their lunch!
We later take a walk around the Western Lake park with a large pond and bridges by the western lake middle road. Lots of children running around, many elderly men play card and mahjong. One lady is screaming obsessively at her son for who knows what reason, then starts to hit him. Lifang tries to calm her down but she tells her to mind her own business!
There is a beggar with broken feet, he says to my wife he was a construction worker but fell from the 3rd floor of a building and broke both his feet. He says he gets 200 rmb a month from government, just enough to pay rent for a room. Then has to beg for a living, moves around on a small sled with 4 little wheels and pushes himself forward with two broken metal pipes.
My impression is that it is not easy to be a beggar in China, it is not a compassionate culture if you can generalize about 1.5bn people. His pot is almost empty. I am thinking of London where beggars get much better treatment from passersby but a better comparison is India where (again difficult to generalize) people give more easily in the streets. Quite often I've seen people who look poor give to those who are poorer. In China apparently a lot of beggars are fake, they pretend to be sick or handicapped.
In the end we manage to buy tickets at coach station to go to Guiyang tomorrow, no chance for train, but better than walking!
22 February 2018
Changsha to Leiyang
Some of the highlights: I was first attracted by the local cold noodles, roughly grated with a special tool from a big boulder of dough. You then add spices and bits and pieces of veggies and meats. Also interesting the hot soup with veggies, pork, mushrooms, taylor-made for each of us by a dedicated chef.
After breakfast the real challenge of the day awaits us: find tickets to Leiyang for the wedding ceremony of Carrie, one of our best Chinese friends, but no seats were available to purchase online as usual. It is still the Chinese new year rush, with over half a billion people moving around the country to spend the holidays at home. We went to the station and tried our luck at the ticket office, but no way.
We were then approached by some scalpers who wanted 300 Rmb, not for tickets but as a fee to smuggle us on a train then we could then, supposedly, buy standing tickets. However I have never seen anyone standing on the fast train we need, and the slow train would take way too long, maybe up to 4 hours as opposed to 1. The whole thing is fishy, we give up.
We're stuck! My wife then remembers that there is an alternative: get bus tickets instead. We manage to catch the last bus to Chenzhou at 5:30pm, but must pay for the whole ride to Chenzhou even if we plan to get off at Leiyang. Actually at a highway station which is the stopover for Leiyang-bound passengers. But that's the way it is and we're lucky to be able to get (close) to our destination! Carrie's husband and his brother (who owns a car) will come and pick us up. Very kind for someone who's getting married tomorrow!
Meanwhile great buffet (40 Rmb pp) with unlimited food and beer at a restaurant by the gas station. Tons of meat (great), fish (so so) and veggies (again great). Beer is a local brand, kind of light, but tasty. No fresh fruit however. I loved the chicken paws and the pork belly. Also black fungus with quail eggs was juicy and inviting.
Gas station buffet, Hunan |
20 February 2018
Macau
Huge crowds are channeled in one direction only through narrow cobbled streets, after all this façada is still one of the main attractions of Macau.
Other than gambling, Macau is well known for the manufacturing of matches and fireworks.
In the afternoon we visited a "Venetian" complex, complete with canals and gondolas, several of which are driven by Italian (I know they are, I talked to a couple of them) gondolieri one is a woman.
16 February 2018
Chinese New Year parade in Hong Kong
15 February 2018
Alaskan crab in Hong Kong
Easy day of relaxing at the W hotel pool overlooking the city and some walking around.
Dinner at the Star Seafood restaurant on busy Nathan Road, there are only locals, obviously not yet discovered by the big guidebook publishers. I was here a few years ago by myself and tried to order their signature Alaskan crab, but they refused to serve me because it was too big!
We can not choose our own crab from large tanks which are prominently located at the ground level by the sidewalk. Each crab has a price tag attached to one of its claws.
A waiter grabs one for us and takes it to the table where he holds it up high for our final approval before dispatching it to the kitchen.It comes back a while later on a large serving dish, piping hot and with all the shell and claws cracked open for us to enjoy the delicate meat inside.
It is a noisy restaurant, not really ideal for a romantic dinner with my wife but the crab is amazing and the price does not break the bank.
The head waiter advises us not to order anything else as this large animal (well over 1kg with the shell ) will be more than enough to sate our appetite. he was right.
When we ask for the bill he points out to my wife that it's CNY and so he expects a red packet from us, ie a significant tip!
14 February 2018
Hong Kong New Year preparations and flower market on Valentine's Day
Visit a new year market with lots of flowers, food and a couple of musical shows. Huge crowds! The flow of the masses of people is channeled so that everyone is going in a one-way direction around the portion of Victoria's Garden at Causeway bay which is dedicated to the fair. It would be impossible to have everyone move at random, freely, there are just too many of us. Those in the middle of the human river can't even see stands on either side!
Very dense crowd!
25 December 2017
My book on the Maldives is available in English! "Journeys through the Maldives" by Marco Carnovale
Typical Maldivan boat |
But the islands are facing rapid changes and serious problems, and they are not always the paradise they seem. The Maldives are at a turning point, with political, economic and environmental changes that pose difficult challenges to the government and to the nation.
The book is completed by an analytical index, a chronology of the Maldivian history, a bibliography and some black and white photographs.
Available on all Amazon websites.
In the UK buy it here
In Italy buy it here
In France, Belgium and Switzerland buy it here
In the US buy it here
In Canada buy it here
18 December 2017
Book review: The Maldives: Islamic Republic, Tropical Autocracy (2015) by J. J. Robinson, ****
Islamic Center in Malé |
The Maldives is a small and beautiful archipelago south of India, more renowned for luxury resorts than experiments in democracy. It is a country of contradictions, where tourists sip cocktails on the beach while on nearby islands local women are flogged for extramarital sex and blackmarket vodka costs $140 a bottle. Until 2008 the Maldives also hosted Asia's longest-serving dictator, Maumoon Abdul Gayoom. A former political prisoner, Mohamed Nasheed, an environmental activist, journalist, and politician, brought Gayoom's thirty-year autocracy to a sudden end, in the Maldives' first democratic elections.
Young, progressive and charismatic, President Nasheed thrust the Maldives into the spotlight as a symbol of the fight against climate change and the struggle for democracy and human rights in one of the world's strictest Islamic societies. But dictatorships are hard to defeat, enduring in a country's institutions and the minds of people conditioned to autocracy over three decades. Democracy brought turmoil, protests, violence and intense political polarisation.The ousted dictatorship overthrew Nasheed's government in February 2012, supported by Islamic radicals and mutinying security forces. Amid Byzantine intrigue, the fight for democracy was just beginning. (Amazon)
Review
It is unusual for a book entirely dedicated to the Maldives to come out, and here it is from an English journalist who lived and worked there for four years. The book is a compendium of his time there. It touches upon many aspects of Maldivian life, with special attention to the political dimension. Loads of facts and footnotes but also some opinions and evaluations. The book is written loosely in chronological manner, and it ends with the author's departure in 2013.
The general approach is typically English, ie detached. John J gets to know a lot about the Maldives but one does not get the impression he ever fell in love with the country, or was emotionally involved with it at all. But that is not a criticism, in fact perhaps it is a good thing in a journalist!
What the book lacks is a more critical organization of the issues, but perhaps as a journalistic chronicle it was never intended to delve in political analysis. Still, you will find more raw material for political analysis her than in any other book I know of that has been written on this country in the last decades.
I recommend reading this book to understand more about a country known mostly for its resorts.