The Great Wall, from East to West

Two main items remained on our itinerary for China: the Great Wall, and the far North West, the other side of the Gobi Desert. We had been away for approaching 17 months, and without doubt both of us had started to dream of the comforts of home ever more frequently. But we were determined to round off our time in China by seeing its most famous sight, and reaching its most remote corner.

Most people who go to China visit the Great Wall, and most see it in one of two or three places reachable as a day-trip from Beijing. As we had more time, and were not immensely keen on the sort of packaged mass tourism that afflicts lots of China's most popular sights, we decided to skip those parts and instead try to see both extremities of the Wall - the far eastern end, where it meets the Yellow Sea at Shanhaiguan, and the far western end, stuck in the middle of the desert some 5000km distant.

Shanhaiguan was to be quite a shock. We'd picked out a hostel right in the centre of the walled old town; arriving at night, a taxi drove us through an endless building site, and eventually reached the hostel. It was almost the only building left standing in a sea of dust and scaffolding. The next morning it was confirmed - virtually the entire old town had been razed to the ground, and work had started on building a brand new 'old' town. We'd seen evidence of this attitude to historical towns before in Lijiang in the southwest - but had arrived some time after the total reconstruction had been completed, to find a pretty but rather Disneyland-esque, plasticky 'ancient town'. It was interesting, though hardly ideal as a visitor, to see the process at a much earlier stage. Obviously I can't really say what the original old town of Shanhaiguan looked like, as it was lying in rubble at our feet, but I imagine it would have been scruffier, dirtier, more dilapidated - and a thousand times more interesting than whatever shiny new town is put up in its place. I hope China doesn't start ripping down all its old towns in this way, because the country will just feel like a giant theme park if it does. The problem, I think, is the huge increase in internal tourism - Chinese tourists just seem to love shininess and souvenir stalls, and apparently aren't put off by inauthenticity.

However, both the restored sections and the crumbling remains of the original Great Wall at Shanhaiguan were compensation enough for the discomfort of the town itself. My first glimpse of the wall snaking up a hillside, such a familiar, iconic image, gave me a thrill similar to when I first saw the Parthenon looming above Athens, or the Eiffel Tower from afar in Paris.

This is it, as far east as the Great Wall gets.


The Yellow Sea, from the fort on the Great Wall


Looking west, atop an unrestored section of the wall


And back east towards Shanhaiguan and the sea.




After Shanhaiguan we finally made it to Beijing, after almost four months in China. Many of the people we spoke to and overheard in our hostel were starting their trip here, and many more had been on a whistlestop tour of the most famous places in eastern China. Once more we felt vindicated in our decision to concentrate on the lesser known places in China's West, and above all to take our time over it. China is simply not a place to rush around, especially if you're organising the trip yourself; several people were leaving China having had their trip spoilt by the obtuse, unreliable transport system. For example (I may have mentioned this previously, so excuse me) if you are in place A, there is almost no way at all of booking any transport other than a flight from place B to place C. You can only buy a bus or train ticket from B to C if you are in B. This makes trying to get from say Shanghai to Xi'an to Beijing in two weeks, with a couple of sightseeing stops along the way, and considering the numbers who use China's public transport, practically mission impossible. Far better to halve the number of places on your itinerary and actually make the most of those.

By and large we were disappointed with Beijing. To be fair, the immediate area around our hostel was great - it was one of the city's diminishing number of hutong (back alley) districts, and felt more like Southeast Asia with its sweaty open-air restaurants and food stalls and ramshackle, low-rise buildings. We didn't actually see much else of the city, mostly because we were both struck down with chesty coughs and streaming noses, a result, we're pretty sure, of the horrifically polluted, smoggy summer air that hung so low over the city. Tiananmen Square, though absolutely huge, was ugly without being oppressive or moody as I'd hoped.

However, leaving Beijing to head westwards was to prove much more difficult than we'd imagined. Chinese universities had just finished for the summer, and millions of students were on the move. Although we'd had months of building up the patience and doggedness required to travel on public transport in China, we were not ready for the hours of futile queuing, garbled and contradictory instructions and wasted phone calls that we endured trying to get on an overnight train to Ürümqi in the far northwest. Feeling that we were trapped there obviously did nothing to improve our feelings about the city, so the relief was immense when Faye finally got us a compromise, a pair of tickets to the halfway town of Lanzhou (which we'd passed through before, after leaving the Tibetan region for the last time - remember?). We'd just have to see how far we could get from there.

As it turned out, not much further. Another overnight train took us into northwestern China proper, into the desert, to the fortified outpost town of Jiayuguan and the dusty western extreme of the Great Wall. From there, after a few days loitering in the shade and eating water melons and cold noodles, we made one aborted attempt to get further west. With unreserved tickets in hand, we boarded the overnight train to Ürümqi, hoping to find a couple of seats to squeeze onto. In fact there was barely any room to stand in the aisle, so full of sprawled passengers and coffin-like bags was the train. The prospect of straddling bags for 13 hours overnight, with our Beijing colds still in fine form, was just too horrible to consider. Within 24 hours, we were back in our hub city of Lanzhou for a third time, for our last night in China - in a posh suite at an airport hotel. The next morning we had onward flights to Hong Kong and then, yes, the United Kingdom. It was time to come home. We'd failed in our bid to reach China's far northwest, but the horse was dead, and any further flogging might have soured our overall wonderful impressions of China.

It was appropriate enough that we signed off from China with some majestic views of its most remarkable human achievement. It's incredible to think that this wall in the desert is connected (in some places barely, these days) to that part we saw many weeks and thousands of kilometres earlier. Even more amazing is that while we covered the distance in around 3 days on relatively straight train lines on mostly flat terrain, the wall snakes along mountain ridges almost all the way. And no one's going to suggest that this was all built in the Seventies...

Proper communists

After Japan we returned to the northeastern Chinese port of Qingdao, famous for its beer and beaches, which will next year host the Olympic sailing competitions. We'd spent a few days here before getting the ferry to Japan, but the fog (or sea fret as Faye insists) never lifted enough for us to judge its seaside beauty. Fortunately the second time around we had some sun, but the sea looked a bit too murky to try a swim. It's a strange place - about 100 years ago it was run by the Germans, who left very incongruous European mansions, churches, and most importantly, a very tasty local brew. On every street there are several hole-in-the-wall bars with kegs of Tsingtao beer stacked up on the pavement, which they serve in the old-fashioned pint jugs with handles. Delicious, chilled (I don't know how it was cold in the summer, but it was) draught beer, for 14p a pint. Aahh...

The pier and beach number 6


You're never more than five yards from a food vendor in China



Realising how close we were to one of the most inaccessible, secretive countries in the world, we then decided to get a train up to Dandong, a small town just across the river from North Korea. Unlike its neighbour, China has pretty much given up on the economic side of communism at least, and typically there were several local entrepreneurs ready to take tourists in boats across to within a sandwich's throw of the North Korean town of Sinuiji. (As a westerner it's almost impossible to get any closer, although Chinese tourists are usually permitted into the country.) I was fascinated by the thought of even a glimpse of what I imagine to be a country stuck in the 1950s at best, so I got out the telephoto lens and across we went. We did manage to see some life, and without meaning to be cruel, there was a part of me that was disappointed to see that it all looked reasonably prosperous and actually quite similar to China. There were even a few modern-looking cars (although I did wonder if they belonged to Chinese tourists). I suppose it's possible that the authorities ensure that the one part of their country easily visible from the outside shows it in a good light. Having said that, at night it was interesting to stand by the river and compare the bright lights and neon of Dandong with the darkness punctuated by the occasional flicker over in the North Korean town.

There is a functioning bridge between the two countries, built recently to replace the one you can just see in the foreground, which was destroyed by the Americans during the Korean War.


The large group may be Chinese tourists, it's hard to say. I'd love to know what the poster says - anyone know?

Across the Yellow Sea to another world

In Britain, I think most kids think of China and Japan as being pretty similar. Everyone knows the rhyme with facial mimes about the Chinese and the Japanese, even though probably only Prince Phillip would now perform it in public. The people of both countries look the same to us, they are all martial arts killing machines, they all eat with wooden sticks, their languages look unreadable and feature an abundance of the word "haaaai-YA".

Obviously as adults our perceptions are a little less simplistic - we know that while Japan is one of the richest and most advanced countries in the world, China still has a communist dictatorship and hundreds of millions of peasants living lives little changed in centuries. But I think we still consider the Chinese and Japanese to be similarly far removed from us in the west, almost unknowably different from us.

So when Japan made us nostalgic for home, it came as quite a surprise. Speeding along the main island of Honshu in the bullet trains, the towns we passed reminded me more of Germany than anywhere else - neat rows of well-built, clean-looking houses with dark tiled roofs, all very prosperous and ordered after the dirty mayhem of Chinese cities. (I suppose Germany and Japan have had similar histories of huge growth and rebuilding since defeat in the war.) The Japanese are very image-conscious, just like us; Chinese men in particular seem unfamiliar with concepts such as the comb. And anywhere decent-sized in China (thus essentially anywhere in China) is fun to wander around in the evening on any day of the week, because of the amount of street life going on at high volume all around you; strolling around smaller towns in Japan at dinnertime was like being at large in, say, Tunbridge Wells on a Tuesday night - a bit lonely.

The people are very different too, although to my untrained eye they look alike. Courtesy, etiquette and politeness are hugely important in Japanese society - when you go into a restaurant, for example, each waiter greets you with a volley of platitudes, something about being humbly grateful for your wondrous custom, so we were told. When the woman pushing the snack trolley through the train enters and leaves each carriage, she turns to the passengers and bows. They make the English look blunt and direct. The Chinese, on the other hand, just don't have room for politeness - there are too many people jammed in, it would take too much time to say excuse me to everyone, so they seem to accept that jostling and a lack of personal space are the natural way of things. In fact this attitude can be quite liberating - just push and shove with the best of them and you'll get on just fine, with no risk of upsetting anyone. In Japan there are a thousand ways you can offend someone, for example by resting your chopsticks in the wrong way.

Of course Japan still has elements of the oriental and the exotic. Often the Germanic-looking homes were fronted by paddy fields, which I don't remember seeing much of in Dortmund. And the fashion and celebrity that Japanese youth is so obsessed with is mostly, to put it bluntly, weird. Kyoto in particular is stuffed full of pointy-roofed temples. I think if we'd come to Japan from Europe, the many differences between the two cultures would have stood out more. But coming from China, which really is a different world, Japan seemed unexpectedly familiar.

As is now tradition, seven days after leaving Chinese territory I got food poisoning. In Laos this was lamentable but not exactly unusual; in Japan it was quite an achievement. Every westerner I spoke to congratulated me on having got diarrhoea in such a clean and hygienic country. Fortunately (hm) I didn't have it as bad as in Laos, but still it spoilt our plans to go out drinking at the weekend in Tokyo's Shinjuku district, famous for bars, neon lights, 'massage' parlours, the inspiration for Blade Runner and the setting for much of Lost In Translation. As in Laos, I'm sure I would have liked the country much more had I not spent a fair proportion of my two weeks there on the toilet.

I did enjoy Japan though, and I'd certainly go again if it wasn't for the expense of the place, which I must mention. On the second night, we decided that trying to keep to a strict budget would just spoil most of the fun, and would mean spending say 700 pounds each in two weeks rather than a round thousand. Since we may never come this way again, we came to the sensible conclusion that for the sake of a couple of hundred quid we might as well have a good time rather than eating noodle soup every night. Our hotel room in Shinjuku cost each night what we'd been paying for almost two weeks' accommodation in south west China, but it wouldn't have felt like we'd experienced Tokyo if we'd stayed in our first hostel, which was a long train ride from any of the action.

The 36-hour ferry journey from Qingdao in China to Shimonoseki on the south western corner of Honshu was far more smooth and comfortable than reluctant sailor Faye had dared to hope. Our cabin was roomy and luxurious (we even had baths!) and the food, our first taste of genuine Japanese cuisine as opposed to wagamama, was good and not even that expensive.
A just-woken Faye spots land on the second morning - it's Japan!


Within an hour of arriving we were on a bullet train. Now I'm no trainspotter but these things are beautiful. Watching the countryside fly by outside the window was not dissimilar to looking out of a Chinese train - but on fast forward.


East meets West - modern houses and paddy fields


Within two hours we were a third of the way along the main island. As you'll know we're not ones to cram loads of sights into our travelling, but this castle at Himeji features in You Only Live Twice and The Last Samurai, so it seemed worth the detour en route to Kyoto.


The most striking thing about these samurai uniforms (apart from the moustaches) was the size of them. Tom Cruise was well cast in the film.


Geisha girls putting on a show at Kyoto station


Two more geishas in Gion, Kyoto's traditional entertainment district


Ramen noodles


The Inari shrine in Kyoto. There are hundreds of these torii gates leading through a forest and up a hill, and they appear in the film Memoirs of a Geisha.




A brief and quite lucky glimpse of Mount Fuji from the train


Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo, the best place in the world for fresh sushi


Tuna heads


Jugs of Asahi in the Asahi brewery, Tokyo


Bill and Scarlett at the Park Hyatt




Piss Alley, Shinjuku, Tokyo


I was particularly amused by the cool young lads in the big cities, who looked like a middle-aged Hollywood director's idea of a rock star - huge hairsprayed bouffant coiffures, goth jewellery, skin-tight clothing. This lad is relatively uncool compared to some of the dudes I didn't manage to photograph


There's a major teen subculture of fancy dress - robots, teddy bears, Little Bo Peep, all with a gothic twist. Strange


A waiter attacks at Ninja restaurant


Torii gate on Miyajima island, near Hiroshima. This is one of Japan's top three sights, according to accepted wisdom. We didn't manage to see it at sunset unfortunately, when I think it would be stunning.


On Miyajima we had one night in a ryokan, a traditional Japanese-style hotel. One night only, at those prices, but it did feel very Japanese and had to be done once.


Dinner was an adventure, sometimes delicious, often puzzling. We ate most of it, but raw squid was a bridge too far.


This watch stopped when 'Little Boy' exploded over Hiroshima on August 6, 1945


Our last night in Japan, back in the port of Shimonoseki, and a drunken Japanese girl invited us back to her flat to enjoy her collection of 80s classics. An appropriately odd but amusing end to our time in Japan.