The End of Work and The Beginning of Travels

Work is finished . . . at least for the next year or so. I spent my last week wrapping up loose ends: ensuring that my team members were clear about who their new managers would be, passing summaries of my learnings along to co-workers, handing off my projects, and saying my goodbyes. The whole week wrapped up with a going away party for me on Friday night which was sponsored by HighTeam and attended by my teammates and many of my good friends within the company.

The week was a bit sad as I realized in a very tangible way that my life in Beijing is coming to an end, but it was also brightened by the arrival of my parents on Sunday morning. They were scheduled to arrive at about 4:20pm Beijing time, and when I checked online their flight was arriving early. Hence, Sabine and I went to meet them, arriving at the airport around 4:30 with the expectations that they would take some time to pass through customs.

After more than an hour of waiting, Sabine and I saw my parents emerge from the baggage claim area (we were scared for a few minutes thinking that my parents would be lost in Beijing without a way to contact me. Then I realized that they had no Chinese money and couldn’t have left the airport). We were correct about the delay, but we were incorrect about the source of it; customs was not particularly slow. Instead, my parents had managed to board a flight with a passenger who was exhibiting flu-like symptoms (fever, sore throat, etc.), and of course to the Chinese authorities, this suggested the possibility of the dreaded H1N1 Swine Flu virus. Therefore while my parents were on the plane, people in full disease protection suits entered, running to the back where the person was located before deciding to let the other passengers off. Luckily, other passengers including my parents were allowed to disembark, and we gave big hugs to mom and dad when they finally came out.

Sabine, my dad and I spent the first evening walking around my neighborhood while my mom recovered from her lack of sleep on the flight. We had some great Indian food and talked about life in Beijing; it was quite relaxed, which was great because the next day was a busy day of travels.

Day two began early with a trip to Ritan park (a small park in Central Beijing). My mom wanted to see the old Chinese men who bring their birds to the park to let them sing in the mornings. We did get to see birds, though not as many as my mom expected. However, we also witnessed some morning Tai Chi which seemed to be a major social activity for China’s older population in the morning. It was an interesting experience for me as well because I had never witnessed early-morning park life before; it’s funny how you can spend 3 years in a place and still see new things.

After visiting the park, we had an American style breakfast (mom wanted pancakes), then we went to visit a couple of places in Beijing where the ancient architecture still stands before meeting my good friend Gerry for a goodbye lunch (it was his last day).
Following lunch, people were pretty exhausted. Waking up at 5:30 in the morning to see old men with birds will do that to you. Thus, we returned to my apartment to take a nap. We slept for about an hour and then went for a two hour walk through Beijing’s modern art district, which was nice, but not particularly eventful (except for when Sabine was scared by the statue of a White Whale – that was hilarious).

To finish off my parents’ first full day in China, we ate a delicious Japanese dinner complete with edame, seared Tuna, sushi rolls and other Japanese specialties before playing a Pingers vs. all game of Trivial Pursuit at my friends Kit and Fleur’s house. Sadly, the Pingers lost.

Day three was rainy but far from uneventful. We spent the morning packing up stuff for Sabine and taking care of some logistical issues for the remainder of my and my parents’ time in China. After lunch we had begun playing cards to pass the time when we were interrupted by a strange phone call.

It turns out that my parent’s brush with the Chinese medical authorities was not over. The woman on the other end of the phone line informed me that the sick patient on the flight had, in fact, been infected with the H1N1 Swine Flu virus.

Awesome.
(With every last ounce of sarcasm that you can imagine intended)

You see, after the experience with SARS, the Chinese are absolutely neurotic about the possibility of a mass viral infection in the country. I witnessed this irrational fear first-hand when my co-workers began shrieking in fear when the first case of Swine Flu was reported in Hong Kong several weeks earlier. Even worse than receiving the call and knowing the paranoia within the country, the woman on the other end of the line was explaining to me that my mother had been sitting in the seat directly in front of the infected patient’s, so she was at a high risk for infection. I figured that our trip was doomed.

Sure enough, the woman from the disease control center wanted to isolate my parents in a hotel for seven days to ensure that they did not exhibit symptoms before allowing them to continue their travels. I informed her, however, that we were scheduled for a trip to the South of China the following day, and we couldn’t change the tickets. She didn’t want to have anything to do with that argument. Hence, I took a different path. My parents had made it clear to me that the sick person was nowhere near them on the plane, and the flight attendant had confirmed during the flight that the sick patient was far in the back of the plane, beyond a divider. This argument got the woman’s attention. She said she would call me back.

Two calls later, I was informed that we would be allowed to leave Beijing on our flight the following day and that we should try to “collect all taxi receipts, stay away from crowds, and avoid public transportation when we could.” Also, if anybody in our group experienced a sore throat or fever, we should call the medical emergency number immediately. I thanked her. Disaster averted. However, I wonder if we started off a whole new string of calls to people in the back of the plane . . . that would be unfortunate for those people.

As a quick aside, we are now well beyond the seven-day quarantine period and neither my mom nor my dad has exhibited any Swine Flu symptoms. I think we’re in the clear.

The next morning began on a sad note because I had to say goodbye to Sabine since she would be leaving for France before my return to Beijing. She is heading home to gather her schooling documents so that she can apply to college for the spring semester of the 2009-2010 school year. My hopes remain high that she will be able to join me in Chicago in December or January. We’ve done six months apart before, and I’m confident that we can do it again. As it turns out, our goodbye was only a goodbye in the sense that we wouldn’t be physically close to each other for a while. We have been talking every day via phone or Skype. Thank goodness for technology!

After goodbyes and a mad dash to the airport (my parents and I almost missed our flight because of the lines at the check-in counters), three-fourths of the Pinger family was on a plane to Guilin. The first stop when we arrived was Yangshuo, but I won’t go into much detail about that portion of the journey. It is very similar to the description that I wrote in November of 2007 that can be viewed by checking this address: http://ngpinchina.blogspot.com/2007_11_01_archive.html (photos and posts included).

After Yanghshuo, I had an entirely new experience which, to this point in the journey, remains my dad’s favorite experience. We visited the Dragon’s Backbone: the terraced rice paddies in the town of Ping An.

The views in Ping An truly were striking. In-terms of man-made visual splendor, I would put it on a level similar with Machu Pichu. Words cannot do the scene justice (and pictures – which I will post later – will help, but still will not express the full beauty). The image is thousands of feet of mountainside covered by shelves of rice paddies which, when viewed from above, resemble scales on the side of a large fish, like a Carp. Another way to picture it would be to imagine a mountain built of oblong mud bricks which are rounded at the edges but flat on top, each stacked on top of one another with a bit of overhang between each successive level. Depending on one’s position relative to the sun, one either sees small shoots of rice emerging from the muddy water or the glistening reflection of light off of thousands of small, staggered pools. Reflection or not, the views are breathtaking.

The architecture was also quite amazing. Since the whole village is built on the side of a mountain, there are few flat areas on which to lay a foundation for a building. Hence, the hotels, restaurants and homes face an interconnected network of stairways, which serve as sidewalks, while the rear of the building rests on stilts that are planted in the ground varying distances beneath the floor. Thinking about both the rice terraces and the architecture, it amazes me that people took the time and effort to build a village in such a troublesome location.

These beautiful surroundings were the setting for the next two days of our journey. The day we arrived, we had to carry our luggage (luckily all packed into framed backpacks) about 600 meters from the nearest parking lot - cars cannot access the village. We had a brief lunch and then found a hotel next to the local school. We spend the afternoon avoiding the 90+ degree heat in our air-conditioned room while we recovered from our 7:30am bus trip and uphill trek. Later in the afternoon we walked to the two main lookout points on the top of the mountain on which Ping An sits. The viewpoints were particularly stunning, but essentially every view was amazing.

The following day was the highlight of the Dragon’s Backbone experience (and it also happened to be father’s day; my dad was delighted that this portion of our trip occurred on that particular day). We would hike for four hours from Ping An through a nearby mountain town called Zhong Liu and finish at a village called Da Zhai on top of a nearby mountain. After leaving the house a bit too early, we began to feel rain. Luckily, we were close enough to our hotel that we could return without getting soaked. We waited there and ate breakfast, and within the next 30 minutes, the rain had passed. Then we began our journey.

The hike was four hours of pure beauty. Mountains of rice paddies gave way to valleys of rice paddies which gave way to more mountains of rice paddies, and we walked through all of it smiling and taking pictures - actually, dad took almost all of the pictures and my mom and I had to keep waiting for him to catch up because he was always stopping. Even the immense heat and resulting sweat couldn’t bring down our spirits. After two hours of profuse sweating, our clothes are as wet as they can possibly get, and we figured that there wasn’t really anybody around to care about how much we stunk; hence, no problem!

Besides the scenery, the other interesting part of our journey was our rather colorful guide. She was a member of the Yao minority in China, which is known for their extraordinarily long hair – the longest recorded hair was nearly 2 meters (a bit over 6 feet) long. I don’t know how long hers was, but she had a triangular shaped mass of it sitting on top of her head wrapped in a bandana; I assume it was very long.

We asked her name, but she insisted that we (I?) just call her Da Jie – Big Sis. We met her within the first 30 minutes of our trek, and she insisted that she be our guide for the low sum of 50 RMB (about $7.50). We responded that we could find a guide for less money at the next town and offered her 20 RMB. She refused, but walked with us anyway. She and I spend the next 2 hours or so engaged in a conversation that jumped back and forth between discussing my life in China, her life, and the price that we would pay her for being our guide. She slowly began to drop her price, but never got anywhere near the 20 RMB that we were willing to offer. And as she began to lower her price, she tried to sell us add-ins like food, a tea tasting in her home, and bottles of water even though we had brought six total, two for each of us. Moreover, each time we stopped for a rest (many of such rest stops were suggested by her, rather than by my parents or me), she proceeded to try and sell us traditional hand-made Yao goods. What a wonderfully Chinese experience: being offered trinkets 2 miles away from the nearest town. Unfortunately for her, we denied purchasing all of the add-ins, save one bottle of water that we purchased at an inflated price from a 13 year-old girl who gave me an evil smile when I asked her why her water was so expensive. However, all of the good conversation and the long hike came to fruition for her when we decided to pay her far too much money for being our guide. The final sum: 32 RMB. We figured that was a good day’s salary when most guides earn 20-25, according to our trusty Lonely Planet guide.

After saying our goodbyes to Da Jie, we caught the bus from Da Zhai back to Ping An and returned to our hotel for showers, food, foot massages, and some much needed rest. Following all of that, we had some dinner and my dad called his dad using Skype to wish him a happy Father’s Day. Grandpa was tickled that my dad was giving him a call all the way from China. All in all, it was a great day, and apparently a great Father’s Day as well for two generations of Pinger dads.

That evening concluded our trip to the Guangxi province in China. The next day, we called a cab (which picked us up at the mountain-top parking lot just outside Ping An), and it took us to the airport for the next stop in our journey: the mountains Yunnan province.

This post has become extremely long, though, and the description of that leg of the trip will have to wait for another day!