Guangzhou - Beijing - Return

Guangzhou

My train arrived at Guangzhou at 23.00, which is not a perfect time to arrive at a totally new place without a hotel reservation. Luckily, my guide book told me that there was an Overseas Chinese hotel nearby which would accept westerners as well. Not all hotels in those days did so. I was lucky, there was a free room and after signing in, I went to bed as it was past midnight and everything was closed. Guangzhou would be my last new place to visit before I returned to Beijing. I had planned to stay in China for about three weeks (not including the trans-Siberian train trips.) Now I had been there for about two weeks so I couldn’t venture deeper into China; into places, where it wouldn’t be sure, if I’d get a train back to Beijing in time to catch my train back home.

On the train from Hangzhou I had an interesting conversation with a gentleman from Hong Kong. He was proud how modern Hong Kong was and about their most modern underground train system in the world. On the other hand he told me, that those who could, were trying to put money aside in order to move away from Hong Kong when the British handed it back to China in 1997. Little did I guess that I’d be watching the event and Governor Chris Patten’s tears in a Bangkok bar room eleven years later.

A beauty somewhere in Northern China 1986

 

So I spent almost one week in Guangzhou but it proved to be a good decision. The early April weather was nice and warm but not yet too hot and sultry which it would turn in May. I was finally able to walk around the sights wearing a t-shirt. The first day I visited Shamian Island, which was originally built for westerners, who could only do business with China from there. During the Qing dynasty it was long forbidden for the westerners to enter China, except few trading posts along the coast. The buildings of Shamian were western style and there was also a new and stylish White Swan hotel. That was a nice place to watch the boats going by on the Pearl River. When I returned to Guangzhou in August 1987 to study there, Shamian became my weekend retreat from the university. It was a place where the backpackers gathered and there were always some Chinese there eager to have an English language conversation.

While I was waiting to catch a bus back to my hotel, a young Chinese lady gathered enough courage to come to chat with me. When I told, I’d be in Guangzhou for some days, she said that she was not working at the moment and could accompany me on some days to show me around. She was what the Chinese used to call “waiting for a job” i.e. unemployed. This was fine with me as it would give me a better view to the world of Chinese, although in that way it didn’t help me much, as her English wasn’t too good but it was enough for some small talk on everyday matters. Her name was Shu Wen and on some days she took me to some parks and to restaurants where she would do the ordering. As I previously mentioned, the Chinese consider eating in Guangzhou to be one of the pleasures of life, I was happy to be introduced to that cuisine by a local person. One night we even went to see a Chinese movie in a local movie theatre.

Hop on the bus, if you can.

On the other days I went to see the local sights such as Huangpu Military Academy, where for example Mao Ze Dong and Zhou En Lai had taught, about sixty years before, the Mausoleum of Sun Yat Sen, Yuexiu Park, Yuntai Gardens and the Temple of Six Banyan Trees.

Days went past fast and soon it was time to head back to Beijing and Finland. On my last day in Guangzhou I had planned to take Shu Wen for a dinner and had bought her a necklace to thank for her guidance. However, for some reason we missed each other and as there were no mobile phones those days, there was no way to agree upon a new meeting time. Anyway, I had her address and so I mailed the necklace to her from Beijing. We also wrote some letters to each other the following winter.

The train trip from Guangzhou to Beijing took two nights and one day but it was interesting to see the view slowly change from southern Chinese sub-tropics to northern Chinese dryness. We also crossed both Yangtze and Huang He rivers so I managed to see both these rivers so famous in the history of China.

Return

I had planned to have only a couple of days in Beijing before my train via Mongolia back to Moscow and Finland would depart. However, when I went to CITS office to reconfirm my ticket, they told me that as there had been no confirmation from Moscow, I had no ticket. It was quite a shock but after considering my situation a while, I asked them when would it next be possible to get a ticket. They told me that there was a seat in the train leaving only about three or four days later than the one I had expected to be on so I immediately bought a ticket to that one. Next I rushed to the Soviet embassy to change the dates in my visa and luckily this took only one day, otherwise I would have needed to buy a new ticket again plus go through all the hassle of getting a new Soviet visa.

The days in Beijing went smoothly. The Qiao Yuan hotel was always full of fellow travelers and you could have very interesting conversations with them. There were so many places, people had visited that it really made me think, that my trip had been rather short. One of these travelers was and Australian Paul, whom I’ve since been in touch for the last 25 years. I actually returned to China together with him the following year but more about that later.

Bicycling was the way to go those days

What a nice way to travel, never mind the wind and rain.

You can't escape the crowds

The return trip via Siberia was similar to the first one except that now everyone on the train was full of stories of China and other places. We knew what to expect from the Russian restaurant car and were well stocked for evening parties in the train. My last worry was my ticket from Moscow to Helsinki and I had booked it for a date when I was supposed to arrive, not for my actual arrival date. I went to the hard currency bar in Moscow, where I had spent part of the day on my way to China and met the same Finns there. They were eager to hear about my trip to China and one of them who could speak Russian said, he’d go with me to the station and talk me into the train. This he did and was really able to do as he had promised. So a compatriot is a compatriot no matter in which part of the world you are. I hadn’t been speaking any Finnish since I left Moscow, except for one occasion in Peking Hotel, in Beijing, where I had bumped into someone I knew, a lady who worked as a nurse in our university in Finland. The world is small.

On the same night when my train was going between Moscow and Helsinki, the nuclear reactor of Tshernobyl exploded. The other travelers in the same train had been crossing into Poland that same night. Paul told me later that he had gone to a hospital if there was any radiation on him but lucky enough, there wasn’t.

P.S. Unfortunately this story is based on very vague memories of things that happened a quarter of a century ago. I do have a diary about the trip but it’s still on its own trip somewhere in Bangkok.