WhereDaily's Open Salon Blog

Heaven and Halong Bay

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 19:04:35 -0400

A cruise through the karsts of Halong Bay near Haiphong Harbor in Vietnam is an eerie one indeed. Strange rock formations crop up through the fog and haze, ghosts really, of some dismal times recalling French Navy boats that patrolled the waters in the earlier parts of the last century looking for subversives and smugglers among the fishing junks. And then later, of U.S. Navy vessels trawling the deserted coves in search of guerrilla activity and or just a reason to be there.

But these calm waters have always been a place of ghosts – mostly of the ancestors of farming village residents in these parts who have lived here for hundreds of years.

A cruise on the Emeraude from Halong City on an overnight venture through the mystical outcroppings easily puts the visitor back a century. Time melts on this carefully reconstructed 1910 paddle steamer, and then stops altogether. The ship silently slips around a forest of limestone islands and rock formations – there are more than 1000 of them in this sleepy bay in northern Vietnam – as mesmerizing in their spectral presence as they are historic.

As a passenger, the lazy overnight journey requires a cocktail on the top deck lounge before reading on a chaise, perhaps The Lover by Marguerite Duras, and whiling the afternoon away in dreams.

But the boat is not without its bustle of activities. A tender takes brings passengers who want to go ashore to Sung Sot Caves (Cave of Surprises) on an out island by a small village. There are options for kayaking and swimming near Hang Trong. Vietnamese cuisine demonstrations reveal the secrets of really good pho and a night at the movies watching Indochine under the stars upon the Emeraude sun deck simply sizzles. The trip ends the next morning with early t’ai chi and tea before a packed buffet.

Pampering has a place here, too, and for a fraction of what it costs elsewhere. The recent onboard opening of the Hanoi-based Santal Spa adds another layer of relaxation to the dazzling views with massages, facials and body scrubs. Santal is best known for its signature massage: the “four hand” treatment performed by two therapists using a blend of Shiatsu, Thai, Swedish, Balinese and Hawaiian Lomi-Lomi techniques. Other available treatments include traditional Vietnamese massage, warm stone treatments, reflexology and foot massages as well as body wraps and scrubs and a range of facials, all using quality cosmetics from France and Germany. An hour-long Swedish massage here might cost $30, rather than up to $200 paid on luxury cruise ships.

The ship’s 39 air-conditioned cabins come in deluxe and superior classes (including three suites) and keep the style of simpler times with wooden floors, modest wood and rattan furnishings and a small bathroom and shower. Buffet meals offer an array of Vietnamese and Continental dishes, along with fresh caught seafood, to suit the preferences of the 74 passengers it can carry.

Rates for the two-day, one night cruise experience run $308-$557 for one and $350 to $624 for two. Transfers from Hanoi hotels (Halong Bay is about three hours by car from the city) run $45 pp for a shared van or $125 for up to two people in a private car ($135 for 3-5 persons). www.emeraude-cruises.com.

Beating a Path to Shanghai for Expo 2010

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 01:04:52 -0400

from www.wheredaily.com

It’s barely a week to the opening of Expo 2010 in Shanghai and the city is holding its breath. While this global tradition that dates back to 1851 and put the Eiffel Tower in Paris promises to be the biggest World Expo to date in size and scope, it will also attract some of the biggest crowds ever – some 70 million are expected to attend. Most of those visitors will hail from China herself, whose masses are fast becoming the world’s largest market for potential outbound tourism.

Already the city is abuzz with cranes and welders working last minute corners to open the Expo by May and turn the city into the golden door its officials want it to be. Even the famous Peace Hotel on the Bund, the original 19^th century Sassoon building closed for two years or more for renovations, hopes to open its Art Deco portals by the time the Expo shoots off the first round of fireworks. The grand widening of the Bund’s corniche along the Huangpu is now finished and a glistening success, filled with Chinese visitors taking photographs with the Jetson-like AT&T Tower in the background across the river. A brand new subway line, number 13, is in place to ferry passengers speedily through town and arrive at the Expo site in just minutes.

This year’s festivities run May through October, have more than 200 countries participating, spread out along two square miles on both sides of the Huangpu, feature 24 acres of shopping and dining, run more than 100 performances daily on stages throughout the complex and cost more than $45 billion to build.

Grand enough, the pavilions promise to bring on the sound bites. Japan is featuring robotic violinists. America is running a “4D” movie about dreaming and change in the blighted city. France is floating its pavilion on water while Switzerland has a lush roof garden traversed by highflying gondolas. Saudi Arabia has spent the most to bring over a “halfmoon ship,” a hanging boat shaped like a celestial cresscent with imported date palms planted on the top deck as a sort of hanging garden of Babylon. Bedouin tents flap amid the date palm trees welcoming visitors with tea and incense and famous traditions of Bedouin hospitality.

China, of course, has the biggest pavilion of them all. It’s a traditional red tower nearly 200 feet tall built in a bracket design called Dougong widely used during the Spring and Autumn Period (770 BC-467 BC). China, too, features a movie – an eight-minute 360-degrees in all directions film about the history of development in China from rural to urban.

The theme for this year’s Expo is Better City, Better Life and the focus is on the new urban vision: sustainability, community, the uplifting of the human condition. Some 270 countries, corporations, agencies, NGOs and industries are coming together throughout the 184 days to share ideas and showcase ingenuity.

Lines are long so visitors who have easy access to Shanghai are advised to leave the lumbering China pavilion for another time. As the Expo site deconstructs according to regulations at the end of the Expo, the China pavilion stays on indefinitely.

Tickets range from $22 to $29 for single day tickets and $58 and $131 for three- and seven-day admissions. Buy them at Expo offices and travel agents around Shanghai or from travel agencies in the US, such as Danville, CA-based Peregrine Travel (925-984-4984; www.worldexpochina.net), which is an official purveyor of tickets for the Expo.

For more information contact the Chinese National Tourism Office (www.CNTO.org); Shanghai Tourism (www.meet-in-shanghai.net); and Shanghai Expo 2010 (http://en.expo2010.cn).

Road to Old Nanjing

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 18:04:49 -0400

from WhereDaily.com

The rural/industrial countryside flies by at 125 km an hour on this fast train from Nanjing to Shanghai. The trip should take just over two hours – a good buy for $20 these days. The cars are clean, the seats even have international computer outlets. It’s a bullet into the 21^st century that is about to get even faster when the new China Railway High-Speed (CRH) train opens in July, doubling the speed– and the price, while cutting travel time between these two hubs to 45 minutes.

But Old Nanking (the English pronunciation before the standardization of Mandarin) is not too far away at any time whether in the preserved landscape of the city or the hearts and minds of its people.

Today, two-thirds of the 35 kilometer, 14-century wall around the city (built entirely of perfect-or-die bricks mortared with a mixture of lime and sticky rice that adheres to this day) is intact or rebuilt and inside it is brilliant city of “hutong” style neighborhoods, bridges over canals and a lively bazaar selling carvings of rare woods and stone to silk purses to batteries. Of course you can always buy a watch or trendy Fendi. Just look for the man in a business suit with a bound catalogue in hand and a story about how he just came from an import show in Shanghai with a stash of goods to sell hidden in some off location.

Most of the time the streets here and the lively promenades are bulging with Chinese tourists vying for the perfect photo opp on the bridge by the illuminated dragon wall.

In fact, if you don’t like crowds, forget Nanjing (or any other tourist spot in China for that matter). This was China’s capital before Peking and the residence of Sun Yat Sen, considered the great liberator and father of modern China. His tomb presides here in the peaceful foothills of the purple mountains about 20 minutes outside the city. But it takes 392 steps to reach his marble resting place -- one step for every 1,000 Chinese souls alive in 1926.

But Nanjing’s complicated past just gets more complicated as the moments tick by. As the city was the seat of power from the turn of the 20^th century until 1949 it was also the scene of war and massacre, surrender and forgiveness

A “must” for a trip to China, if not just Nanjing, is a pilgrimage to the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Museum. This expansive and artful undertaking ranks among the world’s finest interpreters of history, right up there with the Holocaust museums in Berlin and Washington DC.

The museum is crowded with school children and throngs of Chinese nationals who come from far villages and cities to remember what is commonly referred to as the “White Terror”: 13 months of slaughter between December 1937 and January 1938 that wiped out 300,000 people in Nanjing: one person every 12 seconds.

It is not on every tourist’s itinerary. In fact, few non-Chinese will be seen among the throngs on any given day. The museum offers in a variety of documentaries, photos, artifacts and stunning dioramas, a living history of Nanjing’s darkest time – told through the voices of those who remember (there are some 400 survivors now) as well as diaries of witnesses, Japanese soldiers and officers. The English footnotes come surprisingly well written and clear (making the hiring of the incomprehensible English-speaking guide for 200 yuan, or $30, unnecessary). The story takes in the beginning of Japanese imperial activities dating from 1870 to provide the full context of this history and ends with Japanese surrender at the Treaty of Nanjing. In between, the rape. Afterwards, the museum winds through a sad courtyard of pebbles and rocks representing the bones of the dead. It leads to a pit of real bones and skulls in the earth laying just where they fell for the museum is on the haunted site a village outside the city center where the peasants and farmers were butchered and left to rot.

The museum ends in a meditation chamber, completely black except for a field of flickering lights in random spots, ghosts in the night and not forgotten. Admission to the museum is free.

An easy overnight segue from Shanghai, historically riveting and stunningly quaint in its own way, Nanjing is what you do with any extra time in Shanghai. If you can ignore the Disney elements of the Old City, you can find the true mind of China here.

Information:

www.nju.gov.cn/english/

www.cnto.org

Recommended Accommodations:

Mandarin Garden Hotel, Old City

Starting Rate: $69

Thailand's Peaceful "Red"volution

Tue, 6 Apr 2010 17:04:24 -0400

From www.wheredaily.com

It looks like something right out of 1960s America – only with color, one color that is. Red.

Bangkok is awash in red shirts, red banners, red flags, even red plastic clapping hands and no one is really sure why, except the ones dowsed in color. If this is a revolution, even the police don’t care.

The “Red Shirt” revolution is giving peace-loving Thais another flower to wear. So far, the throngs of demonstrating revolutionaries have succeeded in taking over key streets in the city and turning traffic into more than the morass it usually is. But it has not done much else.

At issue is a call for a changing of the guard – with the old guard. The former prime minister wants his job back and is waging a well-funded grassroots movement to make it happen. The current regime under Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva came to power in quiet coup in 2006 as then Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, a billionaire former telecoms tycoon and former police colonel, was under scrutiny for corruption charges. But Thaksin was not your run-of-the-mill dirty politician. He was a run-of-the-mill dirty politician with a heart. He came to power in 2001 in a landslide victory powered by Thailand’s disenfranchised and marginalized masses and was ejected from power in the country’s 18^th coup in some 70 years.

He brought with him reforms that raised living standards in the country and generally elevated Thailand’s position as a world player in politics and economics. And his people want him back. Or at least that is what it seems.

Blocks of encampments line the dusty streets of Bangkok, mostly populated with protesters from Chiang Mai and points north in Bangkok from where Thaksin hails. They are well fed by organized kitchen tents, and manage sanitation through an army of well-placed bathroom trucks. They have their own policing units and traffic managers, sound stages and broadcasting facilities. No one knows quite where all the money for this comes from but easy speculations are made.

Bangkok’s police forces run a light guard around the protest site perimeters, occasionally lining up in a token show of force before retreating for relaxing chats and cigarette breaks.

Meanwhile, the “Yellow Shirts” are nowhere to be seen. Those are the supporters of the current regime who boldly took over Bangkok’s airports for a week in 2008 in a show of unity for the current prime minister. Throughout the politicking, Abhisit is nowhere to be seen. He rarely shows at public or ceremonial events as scheduled and maintains a stance of quiet disinterest, assuming the movement will wear down in time and everyone will go home.

So far, all remains peaceful in Bangkok despite weekend marches through financial districts, mall closures, heated rallies, strange symbolic charades and warring headlines between the two leaders. Tourism continues and visitors remain safe and comfortable far from any inconvenience outside certain traffic snarls and random mall closures, although the government mentions losses of at least 10 percent of the destination’s usual tourism numbers so far.

Violence is not expected, but patience is not projected. As for a divided population? Yawn. Somehow, those Che Guevara T-shirts and scary red bandanas for sale along the red shirt side walks like so many hot dogs in Central Park are not drumming up the fervor when it comes to reinstating one of the richest men in Asia.

For everyone but banner waving protesters and the skittish prime minister, all is peaceful and copasetic in the Thai capital. Shoppers may have to switch malls but Thailand is very much open for business.

Tale of the Thai White Temple

Fri, 2 Apr 2010 19:04:25 -0400

From WhereDaily.com

It could be a set out of What Dreams May Come, as Robin Williams wanders the sewers of Hell. Or it could be a bullet on a page of Ten Temples You Should See Before You Die. This apparition rises from the fruit fields on the road to Chiang Rai in northern Thailand almost like a crystal cathedral off the San Diego Freeway. The only thing it lacks is an angry preacher.

Wat Rong Khun, or White Temple, is a spectacle in the middle of nowhere. Perhaps it is the very definition of the nirvana it is trying to capture – a blinding enlightenment coming from the patience, perseverance, and vision of one man: artist Chalermchai Kositpipat. Thirteen years in the making so far, the temple is part of a sprawling, six-acre complex of white paint and mirrored glass with a bridge that passes over a sculpted river of grotesque figures of sin and suffering to get to the ubosot, or assembly hall -- one of the three main structures in this creation to date. Day or night Wat Rong Khun is a splendid display of imagination that plays upon the sunlight and moonlight with sparkling reflections, enhanced by a menagerie of creatures amid calm ponds.

Kositpipat, a devout Buddhist of 55 who sold paintings for 20 years to launch the project, got to work on the Wat with a small army of disciples 1998. And he is taking until eternity – or 2070, he projects – to get the job done. Completion calls for nine equally painstakingly ornate white buildings, including a crematorium, each with a grand lesson in morality to teach.

Most Buddhist temples pay homage to the life of Buddha in colorful images of lotus blooms and monsters that depict the faces, lessons and ascent of the master of enlightenment. The murals in this ubosot read like a painted alleyway in Hollywood. Red skull traffic cones line the road like so many Halloween candles. And once past the river of writhing hands and body parts the temple walls depict images of whores, alcohol, cigarettes and all manor of vice, plus New York cityscapes, weapons, spaceships, even Superman and Neo from Matrix – basically whatever seemed to come into Kositpipat’s brain from the headlines of the day. A sign posted boldly on the gift shop wall reads, “Wat Rong Khun is a Buddhist place of worship and unfortunately, due to many incidents of inappropriate behavior, our foreign visitors will not be permitted to enter the temple without your guide.” But a bored guard at the door to the hall hardly pays attention to the sad sign.

Entry is free and a gift shop sells artful T-shirts and the artist’s prints. Or there are the bottles of Mao berry juice, honey and fresh fried worms to be purchased next door.