We're deep into planning a July trip to Szechuan and Xinjiang provinces in China and then a quick spin through Kyrgyzstan & Kazakhstan. The full range of luxury hotels on offer today in Chengdu and Urumqi contrasts utterly with our first China visit almost fifteen years ago.
I went back to find a little taste of how China, mid-nineties, felt to a first timer. Here's an excerpt from our wide-eyed first trip to Guilin:
Kiosk keepers huddled under strings of bare bulbs. An old pagoda perched high up on the hill across the river. Fruit and vegetable vendors and a magazine stand stood open at nine o’clock at night. Around a bend in the road, storefronts set sample dishes on the sidewalk, just out of the rain.
A wet old man beckoned me in. We didn't speak a word in common except “OK” and “bye bye.” I drank a couple of big tall green bottles of beer I couldn't read and I bought a bottle of something he thought I should buy. And there was some clear toast he kept pouring. Mostly we sat in his store and stared into the fog.
A boy who'd studied English for three years came in. Then his brother came in, and the thing they could do best in English was urge us to come back tomorrow.
*****
One side of Guilin was shiny, the other just rubble. Five years before, Guilin tore down the buildings on the whole west side of Zhongshan Road and rebuilt them all. Now they were doing the same thing on the east side.
A bed careened by, balanced on a bicycle. Pointy-nosed little three-wheeled machines sputtered along, almost but not quite trucks. Water buffalo halted traffic and chewed the roadside, right in town. Guilin, somehow, was dusty even in the rain.