I want to break free

After five weeks of home leave in France, I have managed to fly back to China. I had chosen Shanghai as my port of entry because the municipality had until very recently the friendliest quarantine rules for newcomers into China: 14 days of strict quarantine with medical observation in a hotel room followed by 7 days of self monitoring and free to roam within Shanghai.

I have just completed my 14 days of quarantine. The hotel dedicated to the quarantine of diplomats in Shanghai has the advantage of its majestic views overlooking the Huangpu river. I was not fortunate to get a CBD Pudong view, but the northern side view was still interesting with cargo ships cruising by and the regular crossing of ferry boats. The lounging armchair in the bedroom was particularly welcome to sit by the window and enjoy the view.

My daily meals were delivered to my bedoom door three times a day. The fare was of good quality, varied and nutritious with lots of vegetable dishes. It was all Chinese food, including breakfast with its steamed buns and salted vegetables. I did not get as large a variety of steamed buns in the morning as during my previous quarantine in Tianjin, so the morning breakfast was the least interesting meal of the day. However, I was treated to a custom-addressed gift basket from the municipal foreign affairs office containing fresh fruit, chocolate and biscuits. It was a welcome addition to the ordinary quarantine fare.

My quarantine coincided with the lunar new year festival this year. When I asked whether we would get some sort of culinary treat for the new year, I was told that it was likely though I should not be expecting anything extraordinary. On new year's eve, I got an extra box of Chinese dumplings for lunch and for dinner. Dumplings are a traditional family meal for Chinese new year symbolising all the good wishes you pack into them with the mince. I was thrilled to get another extra box on the 1st-day-of-the-year lunch and on the 2nd-day-of-the-year lunch containing balls of glutinous rice filled with sweet sesame paste. Glutinous treats are another staple dish for the lunar new year because their gooiness is a symbol of all the good wishes sticking to you for a long time.

Despite the culinary extravaganza and the stunning room view, I must admit the 14 days stuck inside my bedroom did become a bit boring. There is a limit to listening to music, reading e-books and surfing the Internet. I did do some physical and vocal exercises every evening, but these are no substitute for a jog out in the park or the community of choral practice. Working days were easier to pass as I could telework with my colleagues sending me tasks to do remotely. This time, I was undergoing quarantine with six other colleagues from the French embassy. We had created an online chat group to share impressions, news and jokes. It made this quarantine a bit easier than last time when I was really alone.

The bad news came in early during the quarantine: because of the Omicron covid variant taking over the rest of the world, and in the run-up to the Beijing Olympic games, Shanghai municipality had decided to reinforce the health safety conditions of its quarantine to avoid covid cases appearing. The first 14 days of quarantine with medical observation are now followed by 7 more days of quarantine with self observation. I have changed hotel last evening. The hotel room is smaller; the view from the window on a carpark with palm trees bundled up for the winter is underwhelming; I am served my food three times daily at my bedroom door; I will still undergo two PCR tests this week. The only difference with my first 14 days of quarantine is that I now take my own temperature and report it to the hotel management twice a day.

I made the most of the long evenings alone to send out emails with my new year greetings. It is still time to wish all my readers a roaring lunar year of the tiger.

My wishes are in the bubbles: Break free of outdated ways of thinking; Safety; Tranquility; Friendship; Powerful; Delicious food; Music.

I want to break free

Queen, The works, EMI

Comic strip: Hergé, Titin Cigars of pharaoh, Casterman

The autumn leaves

It had stayed relatively warm and summery in Beijing until only this week. To get some fresh air and some sense of autumn, I had two solutions: go up in latitude or go up in altitude.

I did both!

First in mid-September, I went with my friend Josh to Jilin in the Northeast of China, just by the North Korean border. I climbed up Changbaishan again. However, we were puzzled by the impossibility to walk up the volcano. A bus took us along with other visitors into the national park, up the mountain and dropped us 500m below the crater. We only had 1 500 steps up a concrete staircase to walk before reaching the top. In this northern province, the leaves on the trees were bearing beautiful autumnal colours.

 

And again last week, I travelled with my colleague Julien (with whom I had visited Xinjiang and Qinghai this Summer) high up above 4 000m on the Tibetan plateau in Sichuan province to the Yading valley national park. Just like in the national parks of Jilin and Xinjiang, we were bused along with other tourists from the main entrance at the bottom of the valley up to the main visitor centre inside the park. From there, we shunned the crowded minibuses that ferried visitors into the upper part of the valley and found a pathway where we were allowed to walk through the autumnal landscape unhindered by the crowds. 

In both Jilin and Sichuan, I ate very tasty fresh wild mushrooms at nearly every meal: stir-fried with other vegetables and meat, stewed in a pot with country chicken, boiled in a hot pot to give a strong umami flavour to the broth. In Jilin, I saw many locals picking mushrooms from the forests we visited, filling up several bags with them at each picking session. Collecting and eating wild mushroom are indeed an essential part of autumn for me having passed many autumn holidays in my parents' forest country house in Southwest France.

Autumn leaves
Jazz Music Korea

Not a cloud in the sky, got the sun in my eyes

After ten days spent travelling around Xinjiang, my colleagues Julien, Fred and I boarded a day train for an eight hours' journey to the northern part of the Tibetan plateau in Qinghai. We started from the inner depression city of Turpan at sea level, passed through vast expanses of desert, steppes, croplands, grasslands and mountains to alight 2 500 m higher in the altitude city of Xining. 

The feature that struck me most on the Tibetan plateau was the intense blue colour of the sky. There was no dust or smog to dim its hue. The sun shone particularly strong, burning our eyes and skin.

On our last day, we trekked between 3 500 and 4 000 m elevation. I got the confirmation that I am prone to altitude sickness above 3 200 m : although the hike up was not particularly steep, I was panting throughout the way up, lungs and hamstrings in pain for lack of oxygen, aching back of head and neck. Despite the beautiful landscape, the hike was not pleasant for me in these high-altitude conditions. Meanwhile, my two travel companions were still prancing up the mountain, unaffected by the lack of oxygen.

 

The grasslands were filled with cattle, sheep, yak and horses. Surprisingly for such large areas of land, there were many fences criss-crossing the plateau to limit the herds of each livestock owner to their individual plots. Although our guide told us some shared and communal grazing did exist, these were always organised on private plots.

We kept eating lots of mutton-based dishes. Vegetables were even scarcer in the Tibetan diet than in the Uyghur fare. We discovered the very filling barley-and-yak butter-flatbread tsampa.

I mentioned the Qinghai skies were blue. But when clouds did form over the mountains and were swept by altitude winds across the skies, they formed incredibly distinct masses of suspended cotton floss.

Top of the world
The carpenters, A song for you, A&M records

(Without rush) and the pace back East

I have been on a fascinating 10-day holiday trip with two colleagues around the western province of Xinjiang. We flew to the western-most commercial airport of Kashgar and from there hopped around from site to site by car, train and airplane, slowly making our way back towards the Northeast. We have seen amazing landscapes, mesmerizing historical and cultural sites, rode a camel and ate lots of mutton. However, the part of the trip I want to highlight is the music we encountered on most of our stops.

It looks like music has been a vibrant form of expression for a very long time in this region at the centre of Asia, a real crucible of cultures and religions. Already in the 3rd century AD, the buddhist frescoes of the Kizil grottoes depicted heavenly angels and local dignitaries playing all sorts of instruments to accompany the Buddha's ascension to nirvana.

Whether we were in Tajik, Kazak or Mongolian regions, there was music playing in the shops along the streets or from the tea rooms and bars. All markets had at least one shop selling instruments. Local tunes were often transformed by a beat box into a modern pulsing house number; we heard the local language being adapted to rap-style rythms.

In one of the ancient tea houses of Kashgar, a group of what looked like just friends of the tea house owner took their instruments out of their cases and gave the tourists and usual patrons an impromptu concert of traditional music.

In the 10th century Bezeklik grottoes, frescoes once again showed more musicians playing all sorts of instruments at the head of the reclining Buddha. Outside the grottoes, an old man kept the tradition going and invited one of us to improvise some music with him.

Is it not fascinating to witness the importance of music recorded in this region throughout the ages?

Go West
Pet shop boys, Discography: the complete singles collection, Parlophone

Photo of Julien with Tajik drummer: Frédéric Bessat

It's just another brick in the wall

Chinese tourists generally tend to congregate in photogenic places to take pictures of themselves, which they then post on their online social networks. 

Most Chinese tourists therefore try to cram as many photogenic spots into their travel plan in order to assemble as many tiles as possible to construct their online photo wall.

 

 The Great Wall of China undoubtedly has many photogenic spots along its 5000 km. It also flanks or bears many challenging trekking trails for hikers based in Beijing. 

 In line with the Chinese practice of picture tourism, here are three individual bricks I gathered from the the Great Wall:

1. The Western-most beacon tower overlooking a large ravine in Gansu province.
2. An unrepaired Ming dynasty section of the wall North of Beijing perched on top of a mountain ridge.
3. The Eastern-most beacon tower plunging into the sea in Hebei province.

And there are many more more-or-less photogenic Great Wall sites for me to explore all around Northern China. 

Another brick in the wall
Pink Floyd, The wall, Capitol.

Untitled musings on spring travels

After three months spent within the boundaries of Beijing municipality from mid-January to mid-March because of travel restrictions between provinces to avoid any risk of covid-19 spreading within China, I was very happy to see all sanitary restrictions on internal travel lifted. This meant I could once again start travelling to keep discovering this very large country.

In the past three weeks, I have found my way into three completely different ecosystems. All had fascinating landscapes and food.

Mid-April, I went for a few days of holiday in Changbaishan, Jilin province in the far Northeast of China along the border with North Korea. The weather was still chilly and the vegetation was only just coming out of its winter stage. Flowers were very scarce, most of the trees had not sprouted their new leaves yet. I ascended the sacred mountain of the Korean people where fresh snowfall the previous day had blanketed every thing under a thick layer of snow. So I ascended the mountain in a 4x4 vehicle and none of the walking paths were open to visitors. I will have to go back at a better time of the year to trek up the "Ever-white mountain". I particularly appreciated the hearty and simple northeastern food: meat-and-potato stews, saurkraut and kimchi, wild plants and mushroom harvested from the birchtree forest and tundra, maize-based bread and noodles, the best roundgrain rice of the country. 

 

The following week, I flew South to Fujian province where I visited the tea gardens of Anxi Tieguanyin tea. The hot tropical climate had generated lush green vegetation covering all the mountains and hills. The tea bushes were neatly trimmed in lines along the higher slopes of the mountains because their ideal growing altitude was between 800 and 1200 m high. The food was extremely varied; some of the dishes were spiced up with infused or deep fried tea leaves. As we were presented with the local tea to taste wherever we went, I tasted a wide variety of different Tieguanyin teas over the three days of my stay there, and came back home with several boxes of Anxi Tieguanyin tea.

 

 

Last week, I flew off to the border between Ningxia and Inner Mongolia for three days of trekking in the Tengger desert of Inner Mongolia organised by Beijing Hikers. The landscape was unlimited sand desert dunes. Our group sailed through the sand dunes in 4x4 vehicles driven by expert local drivers. We trekked through the dunes on the soft sand and ate a lot of sand and dust with a strong wind blowing for a full 24 hours. It was no use trying to swipe the sand out of our tents, it came back in immediately. The best surprise from this desert trek was the food truck and local chef that followed our group to cook delicious fresh local dishes for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The desert grass we would trample along our trek actually had culinary value with a slight chive taste when boiled and served seasoned as a cold apetiser dish. We ate all the parts of a lamb in every possible form: roasted, boiled, stir-fried, oven-dried... After three exhilirating days of trekking and camping in the middle of the desert without running water, the first shower in the hotel room back in Yinchuan town was a real godsend. 

 

 

So much variety within one very large intriguing and diverse country. Meanwhile, a pandemic rages and kills outside...

 

Pastoral symphony, Ralph Vaughan Williams

Adrian Boult and London symphony orchestra, Emi classics

 

The winter is driven away and spring is returning anew

 

I have survived my first winter in Beijing. It has been quite a shock for me to move from the relatively mild winters of Southwest France to the harsh and freezing winters of Beijing's continental climate. 

Riding to work on a bicycle by -18°C and winds blowing straight out of the steppes of Mongolia was particularly unpleasant. Luckily, the ride only lasts 15 minutes so it is still bearable with the right amount of clothing. 

 

On the other hand, I joined a trek on the Great Wall in mid February under strong winds blowing at -10°C. I think that has been the most demanding trek I have ever done up to now because of the freezing wind. Stopping and taking out gloves to relace my hiking boots for just 2 minutes meant 30 minutes trying to get my body and fingers warm again.

The one real advantage of the Mongolian winter wind blowing over Beijing is its pushing air pollution away. It is thanks to the wind that the city can enjoy wonderful blue skies and clear sunlight. 

 

 

Having had to stay indoors for four consecutive days of air pollution and depressing smog over the Chinese new year holiday, I think I now prefer cold temperatures and harsh winds to humidity and smog.

Waltz of my heart

Ivor Novello, James Shearman, from the original motion picture soundtrack of Gosford Park, Decca