May 12 - 19, 2002: We arrive in Hong Kong, slipping into the spacious and shining new airport. We breeze through the customs line, which features an abundance of clerks using actual computers, and our luggage comes out quickly. We board a shuttle bus directly to the hotel, where the porter sweeps our bags away as we check in. We are back in the first world and loving it. Even better, our friend Brad Williamson has come from Seattle to join us for a week, arriving in Hong Kong a few hours after us. Heather has hit the sack by the time he shows up; he and I have a sleepy beer then retire.

In the morning it is gray and drizzling. Heather and I reacquaint ourselves with modern comforts by spearheading a trip to Starbucks. We sit there, nursing a latte amongst an English-speaking crowd and watching the rain. “For this I left Seattle?” Brad asks. We assure him that it is only to ease his transition. The previous week Heather and I had read a story about the restaurant with the perfect dumplings: each is supposed to have exactly 19 folds. We track it down. The dumplings are as promised, uniform and delicious. And they don’t serve them anywhere near the Seattle Starbucks.

 I had last been to Hong Kong a few months before the handover, and I see no substantial difference. There is a protest exhibit near the Star Ferry, featuring the PRC's (People’s Republic of China) repression of Tiananmen Square or the Falun Gong, or perhaps both, but it seems almost perfunctory. Unsure of what to do on a rainy Sunday night in Hong Kong, we ask the concierge for some suggestions. She thinks for a minute with furrowed brows. “Hmmm, how about dinner and a movie?” For this Brad left Seattle? We succumb anyway: Spider-man and some Peking Duck, which, though good, is nothing like my mother used to make.

The next day it is cloudy, but with no rain, so we take the tram up to Victoria’s peak and embark on a short 3km hike. The views are outstanding; the Hong Kong skyline and harbor truly one of the great sights of the modern world. We bustle back to the hotel, check out and manage to stuff ourselves with Indian food before heading to the airport. Brad gets us into the Red Carpet Club, and mixes us margaritas while we wait for our flight to mainland China. We are met at the airport in Guilin by our guide, named Wei. Heather is the first to grasp the comic possibilities, immediately exclaiming “Really? No Wei!” We head to the hotel where Wei manages us through a laborious check-in process, partly complicated by reservations that puts Brad and I in a single room with a king-size bed, while Heather has her own room with twin beds. This sorted out and the purity of our honeymoon restored, we go to dinner.

Upon our request, Wei takes us to a local restaurant. The main floor has huge family-style tables; we ask for something smaller and are escorted upstairs where we are given our own room. After much persuasion, Wei is convinced to join us. His story comes out slowly, but it is fascinating. He is in his mid Forties; at 11, as part of the Cultural Revolution, he was sent to work on a rural farm, where he, by his own admission, learned nothing for eight years. Returning to Guilin at age 19, not sure what he should do, his father, a communist party official, thought that Guilin would become a tourist center and suggested that Wei should study English. He picked up most of it from the Voice of America, and has been a tour guide for about seven years. He talks about the lost time of the Cultural Revolution quickly, not wishing to dwell on it, but it is clear that is was an uncomfortable and wasted eight years; at the time almost half his life.

After dinner Wei leaves us and we head for a quick drink. Guilin is not what we expected: it is a bit like a Chinese Orlando: modern, with a riverbank center lit by neon palm trees and bright lights and the high-rises of a modern city. It is very clean, and there are tourists – about 90 percent domestic Chinese – everywhere, in the small boutiques and cafes. We toast each other, Brad’s wife Debbie and young daughter in Seattle. After a few drinks we move on to toast the recession that has given us ample time to travel and the MBA degrees that enabled us to so intelligently choose companies that were disasters. Perhaps the gods disapprove: we are caught in a torrential downpour on our way back to the hotel.

Tourists don’t come to Guilin for the town, they come for the scenery, and the next morning we head outside town to a dock, where we catch a boat down the Li River to Yangshou. It is still raining lightly, but the scenery is remarkable: thin limestone peaks rise above the river, enshrouded in mist. It’s a pleasant trip. Yangshou is also unexpected, bigger than we had thought and more geared to tourists but still charming, with a “Western Street” lined with small bamboo-roofed cafes. We check into the hotel, which has pictures of Nixon, Clinton and First Bush all staring at the same scenery.

Traveling with Brad rocks. He and my mother (who was born in China) planned this trip together from the States, and for the entire time Brad acts as our own private Federal Reserve bank, monitoring the monetary supply and ensuring currency hedges; bartender, keeping the beers coming and patiently listening to the stories we have by now told each other a thousand time; and general enthusiast when we get slightly travel-weary. He also tips with a munificence rarely seen outside the winner’s table in Vegas. Sometimes this has funny consequences. We go to get a massage, and are lined up on three tables in a single room. Brad tips in advance (after all, what’s the point of tipping well if you can’t enjoy the results). His masseuse, a young woman who looks about 12, responds with doubled energy and vigor. In a flashback to our Thai massages, he is soon grunting in agony. The masseuse seems to take this as confirmation that her skills are appreciated, and doubles her efforts. Brad moans in pain. Afterwards she grins a broad smile. “Me number 11” she says, “You come back.”

The following day it is overcast, but without rain. We rent bicycles, which are decent, but too short. Towering over them, we head off, briefly on the main road but soon on a side road and then dirt. The scenery is spectacular – the same limestone hills, tall and thin, like slender fingers rising from the earth. Also rice paddies, and the tiered irrigated patches leading like giant, wet steps down the hills. It is soon very rural: the occasional house or small village; a bridge reaching across the river; a series of small mausoleums built into the countryside. It becomes gradually more hilly, and the road is rougher. Small pieces start to fall off the bicycles: a fender, one reflector, then another. We pick them up and push on. We do about 20 miles, and exhausted, pull into a village – one of the bigger ones – for lunch. The village seems to serve mainly as a bus depot for surrounding homes within a day’s walk. We find a woman who has a big pot of noodles – no one in the town speaks a word of English – and manage to convey that we would like some lunch. There is one dish: noodles, with some sauce, local basil, peanuts and some pork. In our hunger we eat ravenously. For the three of us the bill comes to fifty cents. I insist emphatically that lunch is on me. I give the woman $1.50. “That’s very Brad of you” Heather says.

We push on, rejuvenated. The houses here are still built out of brick, with tile roofs, and they merge into the hills. At one point we approach a school atop a hill. By the time we reach it a horde of children line the road; a handful are brave enough to approach us when we stop. One even gamely shakes my hand, but regards my attempt at a high-five with suspicion. We see a lot of kids on the ride, almost all of them call out to us: “hel-low, hel-low.” Under Brad’s direction we answer them back: “nei-how, nei-how.” It’s a funny scene, each of us hurling an accented greeting in the other’s language. We end the day – about 35 miles – exhausted, and grab a beer. Dinner is also good, and we find a place with amazing apple crumble, quite a change from lunch.

We return to Guilin by car the next day, stopping at an exceptional cave, which is unfortunately mobbed. We are caught briefly between a Chinese tour group with megaphone and a German tour group with megaphone, before managing to get a little space from the crowds. The cave is full of stunning stalagmites and stalactites, many with impressive folky names: the Mosquito Net and Bed, the Sleeping Dragon, the Big Mirror. I point one out to our guide that looks to me like Fat Tourist Drinking a Beer. He confesses that none of the formations had names until 1974, just before Nixon visited, when they thought up the names to make it more interesting.

 For dinner that night we go to a local restaurant. We are met eagerly: three servers surround our table, with just enough English to be dangerous. When we try to talk about the menu they jump in with suggestions whenever they understand a word. “How do you guys feel about some chicken?” Brad says, and at the word “chicken” there if a flurry of activity, with chicken dishes suggested, described, praised – all with a minimum of comprehension but an abundance of enthusiasm. When we mention “duck” they are ready to have us go in the back and pick out the lucky guy who looks the most appealing. After a few minutes of getting nowhere, we revert to top secret code: “Okay, so no qwack-qwack, let’s have one cluck-cluck dish and maybe an oinker” Brad says. We figure out what we want, deciding to spare the duck. It’s pretty good, and the servers fill our beer glasses every time we take even the smallest sip.

We tour Guilin for a drink later and find it teeming with domestic tourists. This is the new Chinese middle-class, traveling outside their interior cities and towns for pleasure for the first time, spending some of their new wealth. They stare at us in amazement, much more than anyone we have come across who lives in Guilin or Yangshou. We head into a bar only to find four people, one of them earnestly singing karaoke. “You know I’ve never actually seen a full karaoke bar” Brad notes. Come to think of it, neither have we.

The next morning we do local tourist sites, which are fun in a clean, touristy sort of way. However we make the mistake of going to the zoo, which is pretty dismal -- when most of the county has low living standards the animals don’t do much better. The worst of it is a magnificent tiger, totally drugged and sat on by two men who motion for us to come in and have our picture taken. We try to express our disapproval of the situation. They don’t understand, instead offering to wake him up for us. He is really a beautiful creature and it is depressing. A delight is our conversations with our guide, Wei. He is an interested and diligent student of English. At one point he sees a scale, and asks for the word in English. We tell him, and he asks about the meaning of “Scales of Justice.” This turns into a mini-forum on American jurisprudence.

Later in the day we go to an internet café. Wei does not have an email address, so we sign him up, and show him how to get English-language news. On the New York Times site (which we access without any trouble) we find an article about corruption in China and Russia, and another article about the Chinese mobile phone company. I am amazed, as we help him try to decipher the articles, at the complex and poor writing. Perhaps it is just the NY Times, but every statement is qualified and hedged, adding a murky layer of complexity. There are no simple declarative statements in the news. We head to the airport, say our goodbyes to Wei, and finally board a delayed plane to Shenzhen.

Shenzhen is amazing less for what it is than what it was. A sleepy village town with perhaps a few thousand residents until 1980 when it was named a Special Economic Zone and afforded economic freedoms, twenty-two years later it is a concentrated concrete and steel metropolis with a population of 4-6 million; the equivalent of a Dallas or Boston rising from nothing in a single generation. It gives you a sense of the enormous latent power of China if it can ever get its 1.3 billion people pulling in the same direction.

We head out to dinner quickly. A friend has suggested a restaurant, and warning that they will not speak any English, he has emailed some courses to order, which Heather has diligently copied. We take a taxi there, sit down and hand the waiter our list of dishes. Much confusion follows. He tries to speak to us in mandarin – we gaze back in bewilderment. He summons other waiters who hold a brief conference. Much gesticulating. Finally they find another customer who speaks a little English. He comes over, listens for a while, asks a question or two and then turns to us: “You are trying to order the street address of the restaurant” he says. Astonishment and laughter. Now, far out of our depth, we manage to order. It is late in the evening and they are out of several dishes. We end up with a very strange meal, some of it delicious, some as perplexing as our struggle to order. We leave a tip and head out for a taxi. The waiter soon ruses after us, tip money in hand, sure that we have forgotten it on the table. We manage to convey that it is for him. He looks very confused. It seems a fitting end and we speed off.

We look around a bit the next morning, and are offered a variety of bootleg DVDs and copies of Windows XP, but there is not much of interest. It is just a big commercial city. It is only about 35 kilometers to Hong Kong, and we guess the train will take about 45 minutes. We take the hotel shuttle to the internal PRC border between Shenzhen and Hong Kong. Once there, the Hong Kong residents are shuffled off in an orderly fashion, while the rest of us form a mob. The Chinese seems to view lines as a rare opportunity to distinguish themselves from the sheer mass of humanity, expertly cutting through any brief establishment of order in their determination to get to the front. Heather, Brad and I, with our bags, form a human blockade and inch forward toward the Visa booths while holding off intruders. We wind our way past one check point, then another, and finally catch the train. It is almost three hours until we are back at our hotel. We opt for a nice dinner of Asian fusion cuisine, with a round of martinis to start. In the morning we hustle to the airport, see Brad off on his flight to Seattle and depart for Paris.

on to paris...