Finally, I’ve taken the time to sit down and write out a description of my trip to China.
The trip itself was motivated by an International Astronomical Union Colloquium entitled “Sources and Scintillations.” The topic of the colloquium was related to about 2/3 of my thesis, so I thought (and fortunately my supervisor agreed) that my attendance would be good. Why in China? The Chinese have proposed a radio telescope that would be the world’s largest single antenna. (It would be similar to the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico which is 300 meters in diameter; the proposed Chinese telescope would be 500 meters in diameter.) Hosting an IAU Colloquium was seen as a way of enhancing the visibility of this project.
The trip started on April 13 from Washington’s Dulles airport. Jen’s parents were visiting us, so I was seen off by all three of them. The first leg of my trip was from Washington to Hong Kong, departing at 9:20 a.m. on April 13 and arriving on April 14 at 7:00 p.m. The flight stopped in San Francisco. While in the airport there, I had this sudden sinking feeling that I’d forgotten to pack toothpaste. (Fortunately, I did have the toothbrush, and a quick stop at one of the stores allowed me to pick up the toothpaste. 
The trip across the Pacific seemed to be far shorter than I had feared. I took along a few books, they were showing a decent movie on the plane, we were fed a couple of times, and the time passed relatively quickly. In addition, there was nobody in the seat next to me, which certainly helped.
I had an overnight stop in Hong Kong, which meant that I had to spend the better part of the day there. Hong Kong was great fun. If you remember Ted & Gerrie, their oldest son Chris (who is my age) is working in Hong Kong now. Irony of ironies, of course, he was called back to the States at the same time I was travelling in China. Nonetheless, he arranged for me to stay with a couple he knows. So, in addition to a real home rather than an hotel room, I received some excellent suggestions of places to see during a day trip through Hong Kong.
I went up the Peak, which is the large hill or small mountain on which part of the city is built. On the way up, I took the tram which starts about halfway up the Peak and runs to the top going nearly straight up. (The couple with whom I stayed lived quite near the start of the tram.) At the top of the Peak, there is a tourist trap facility, but it does have a nice lookout. It overlooks the harbor, and the day I was there the pollution was quite low so I could see a good distance. There is also a cafe inside that offers free connections to the Internet. I tried to send an email to Jen and my parents, but apparently it never arrived. I then took a delightful bus ride down a twisty-turning road into the city center. I walked along the waterfront, then up into the city. It was now Saturday, April 15, so there were all kinds of street-side vendors selling their wares. Some were selling fabrics, some chops (seals used to sign letters or mark envelopes), and lots of food, particularly seafood. Much of the seafood was quite fresh—the frogs still moving around in their cages, the fish still swimming, crayfish and shimp still moving around, though the octupi and/or squid looked dead. Hong Kong also has the world’s longest escalator. It is not continuous, so one can hop off and on and explore various places along the way. I tried to stop in a local temple, but while I found the building itself, I couldn’t figure out how to get in. Finally, I took a Star Ferry across Victoria Harbor to see the island from the mainland. (Star Ferry has been in operation for over 100 years.) I wandered around a bit and strolled through a park but was running out of time.
A street in Hong Kong.
Standing on the mainland pier looking across Victoria Harbor to the island in Hong Kong.
The couple with whom I was staying graciously offered to give me a lift back to the airport. On my way into town, I had taken the city-airport rail link. As I found out on my way back, though, the rail link goes underground or inside of the bridges. Thus, spectacular scenery and impressive architecture is entirely missed.
From Hong Kong it was on to Guang zhou (formerly known as Canton). My trip was set up this way because the Navy’s travel agent was claiming that there were no flights to the city where the conference was held and was threatening to make me take surface transportation. So I told them to get me as close as possible. What really happened was that the airlines had not yet released their schedules, once those came out I was able to get a plane flight into the conference city. Hence, I had an overnight stay in Guang zhou.
Guang zhou should have been the most uneventful stop in the entire trip. Show up in the evening, spend a night at a hotel, then continue on the next morning. Instead, I committed one of the cardinal sins of travel. While travelling what are the two things you are not, never ever ever, supposed to lose? Your tickets and passport. (Losing money or a credit card is serious, but one can still have money wired to oneself or get traveller’s cheques replaced.) While going through the Guang zhou airport (baggage claim and Customs), I managed to lose my tickets. Somehow in the process of having the baggage claim stub removed (it was attached to the ticket) and verifying that none of my electronic equipment needed to be declared, I set down my ticket and didn’t pick it up. Needless to say, that meant for a short night. I spent a couple of hours working with the hotel staff to see if the tickets could be located, calling the airline to notify it that the tickets were lost, asking the hotel staff to translate a description of my predicament into Chinese, and calling the Navy’s travel agent for instructions. I also had to go to the airport early the next morning to purchase new tickets. Fortunately, I was able to obtain new tickets, and the journey continued.
I arrived in Guiyang midday on April 16, just over three days after I departed. On the final flight I met up with a couple of other astronomers I know. After a brief rest at the hotel, we agreed that we would explore a bit around the city. The hotel itself was, by local standards, palatial; by Western standards it was comparable to a Sheraton or Hilton, quite nice. I had decided to stay there originally, but some of my travelling companions had originally requested to stay at a couple of nearby hotels. My travelling companions were surprised to learn that, in order to treat all of their international colleagues with the utmost attention, they had been upgraded to the luxury hotel by our Chinese hosts.
The hotel, the Guizhou Park Hotel, was right next to a city park. Inside the park was a temple, set on a hill, and a lake. The three of us wandered over to the park, after passing through a street-side market. Not really knowing what we were doing, we climbed the hill to find the temple on the top. Being a Sunday, it was clear that one of the popular things to do was visit this park and temple. One of the other attractions of this park are the monkeys that roam through it. We did indeed see one or two during the climb. The temple was fairly crowded. In the temple itself, people purchased incense sticks. Lighting the sticks, they would then kneel in front of a statue of Buddha and bow several times. Each time they bowed, a Buddhist monk sitting nearby would strike a bell. Afterwards, they would place the incense sticks in one of a number of large stone containers of sand where the incense would continue to burn for hours. The temple itself was fairly large, in terms of square footage, it covered an area comparable to a moderately large Christian church, though the Buddhist temple was largely open. As the breeze came through, small clouds of incense smoke would float by.
(About this time I was feeling pretty tired. After travelling for too many hours and the little sleep from the night before, I was having trouble keeping my eyes open. Fortunately, that didn’t last long, and I was able to continue exploring with the other two.)
Some of these experiences also lead me to wonder about how we treat foreign guests. Admission was required to the temple. Not knowing any better, I walked up to the window, held up three fingers, and gave the woman a 10 yuan bill. She carefully counted out the change and gave me the tickets. We later figured out that she had given two of us a discount, and I received something like 6 yuan in change. It would have been quite easy for her to keep the entire 10 yuan (or even ask for more), and we would have been none the wiser.
Going down from the temple, we wandered about the lake. One of the favorite pastimes was flying kites, which many people were doing (with varying degrees of success :). On the lake were a number of paddle boats, though tops had been put over them to make them look like cars(!). We thought that we might be able to follow the inlet or outlet of the lake back to the city, but after walking up the inlet for a fair distance, decided that it was not going in the correct direction. We finally figured out that there were only two choices: Climb the hill on which the temple sat or go through it on a little train. We decided to go through the hill.
Sunday night there was the opening reception for the conference. I can’t remember much about it, which I think means that I was so tired from the travelling and walking that I didn’t spend long there, but said hello to a bunch of people, grabbed a bite to eat, and went back to my room to sleep.
Monday opened the conference. The talks were held in an auditorium which looked quite nice (though one of my Australian colleagues who is originally from Poland remarked that it looked like a Party meeting room). We later found out that only a few months prior to the conference, the auditorium had been a storage facility and that it had been entirely redone for the conference.
Monday night was the sightseeing tour of the city. I along with a group of about 10 others skipped it. With a couple of our Chinese colleagues, we set out in search of a restaurant. On the streets, when it became clear that we were looking for a restaurant (and a group of Westerners stood out anyway), many of the maitre’d’s would come over and try to entice us into their restaurant. We finally found one that had been recommended to us. Having a Chinese astronomer along really helped! He secured a private room for us and did all of the ordering. Once the food started coming, it didn’t seem to stop. Most of it was either edible, some of it quite tasty, or one could guess just from looking at it that passing on it might be a good idea.
Having skipped the city tour, we later found out that it probably was a good thing to have skipped. The tour consisted of a stop in the Peoples’ Square and a local department store for shopping. At the Peoples’ Square, thousands of city residents had turned out for speeches by the local politicians in which the politicians expressed their support and enthusiasm for the telescope project. The department store had been kept open specifically for the conference participants. (Unfortunately, as one of the tour participants estimated, they probably did not make back their money for keeping the store open late.)
Tuesday night was a banquet offered by the province of Guizhou with the provincial governor in attendance. There were many speeches, thankfully all of them fairly short, and some interesting Chinese poetry recited. One of the conference organizers has become interested in Chinese poetry and one poet in particular. This poet often wrote about astronomical themes (the Moon or the stars), but apparently also often wrote during a state of intoxication. At the banquet, the provincial governor came to each table to offer a toast. The drink of choice was a local liquor called maotai. Aged in barrels, sometimes for decades, it apparently has only recently become available to common people. In times past it was reserved only for the kings, nobles, and other elites. Thankfully, Tuesday night was the first and last drink of maotai that I had. It went down o.k., but had a horrible aftertaste. I was sitting at a table with a few Russians, all of whom compared it most unfavorably to their national drink of vodka.
Wednesday was only a half day of work. We left midday for a trip to one of the potential sites for the Chinese telescope. Located about 130 km away from Guiyang, it took a couple of hours to get there. However, in many places, particularly close to Guiyang the roads were quite good (certainly far superior to the roads in India). On our trip we were treated like foreign dignataries. We travelled in a caravan of 8 minivan-like vehicles. We received a police escort, with two or more police cars clearing the way for us and probably an equal number bringing up the rear. Going through Guiyang (a city of 1 million or more), roads were shut down and stop lights ignored for our caravan. In the countryside, other vehicles were waved to the side of the road and roads continued to be shut down for us. As we got farther away from Guiyang, there were people lining the sides of the roads, particularly in the villages through which we passed. We were never really certain if the people were genuinely curious or had been instructed to “be curious” as the caravan passed.
Until recently (several months ago?), the site we visited had not had any road access. The province (or the county) had had a road constructed to this site. I’m sure it was done in part to help convince Chinese politicians to locate the telescope in this county, but I’d bet that the county government was aware of our conference, too. The geography of this region (and that of Puerto Rico) is known as karst. It is limestone hills with deep valleys carved by water. It makes a perfect environment for a telescope because much of the supporting structure can be the hills themselves, and the hills help shield the telescope from the (much brighter) terrestrial radio emissions. One of the reasons we could tell that the road was new was that the sides of the hills had a freshly-exposed look to them. At the telescope site we could also climb up one of the karst hills and look down into the potential site. It is an impressive sight. (I noticed that on another of the hills at this site, another crowd of people had gathered to watch us.)
Two views of a potential FAST site that we visited. This karst depression is something like 500 m in diameter, if I recall correctly. The first picture is taken from about 2/3 of the way up the side of one of the karst hills. The second picture is taken from the top of one of the karst hills. The tent is where we had lunch (and from where the first picture was taken). Note the road winding off to the left of the picture. That’s the road described in the text.
From the telescope site we then went to the Huang-guo-shu waterfall, one of the tallest in China. We visited it at the end of the dry season, so the waterflow over it wasn’t particularly voluminous. Nonetheless, it was clear that after a rain it would be a thundering falls. Also, there is a path behind the waterfall (of unknown origin, largely natural or cut out as part of a tourist attraction?). One could walk along this path and peer out from behind the waterfall.
The Huang-guo-shu Waterfall.
That night we were treated to another banquet. Again, no shortage of food, but this time instead of lots of speeches we were entertained with a festival of local dances. The region is apparently heavily populated by various minority groups, so the bulk of the dances and exhibits were from these (this?) group. During the only speech of the night, I saw one of those subtle events. The speaker and the translator were trading off during the speech. The speaker was standing a bit far from the microphone, not so far as to be unable to hear him, but clearly farther than he should have been. One of his staff ran out to re-position the microphone closer to him.
Thursday night a group of us attempted to find a local store that had been highly recommended. We didn’t. So our next stop was to try to find a vegetarian restaurant. We succeeded at this, after a nice walk through the town. Like many Indian cities, though, pollution is a problem in China. The situation in Guiyang was tolerable, though probably because it is a relatively smaller town. Still, I often wondered if all this walking through the pollution was good exercise or equivalent to smoking a pack of cigarettes.
The vegetarian restaurant was in the front of a Buddhist temple. This time we did not have a Chinese astronomer accompanying us, so we were on our own. As it became clear that we had zero command of the Chinese language, one of the diners in the restaurant came over to assist. She wanted to practice her English, and we were quite grateful for her help. We initially thought that her name was something like Aturne; after she started handing out her business card, we discovered that her name is Pengke and she is an attorney.
Friday the conference ended midday. I am fairly close to one of the other astronomers who attended the conference. (He is my age and got his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa studying under the same professor who was my undergraduate advisor.) He had never seen a monkey, so a group of us headed back to the park. This time I guided the group back over the hill from the lake, and we encountered many monkeys. It was fun to watch them scamper through the park area, have the occasional display of heirarchy appear, and in general just act like their primate cousins. In general the monkeys were quite well adapted to the humans, but were quite prepared to protect their turf. One young woman was trying to feed a monkey and got too close. The monkey jumped on her back, screaming at her. The human started screaming and running away. That was exactly what the monkey wanted, so it dropped to the ground and went back to eating. Some human also got a bit careless with a sack of fruit. One or two monkeys were able to steal the sack. This elicted much laughter from the humans, and it was fun to watch the monkeys crunch on the apples and strip the peel off an orange with their teeth.
By Saturday many of the conference attendees were leaving. My flight didn’t leave until Sunday. (Remember I had initially been threatened with having to take ground transportation from Guang zhou to Guiyang, which would have been a train ride of something like 30 hours.) My thesis advisor from Cornell and one of his thesis advisors (from San Diego) also did not have flights that left until Sunday. We spent the day walking around Guiyang. We made it to Peoples’ Square to see a statue of Chairman Mao with his hand benevolently stretched out over his subjects. Once again flying kites was a popular activity, again with varying degrees of success. We saw a quite large kite, perhaps as wide as a king-sized bed initially make it into the air, only to have it come crashing back down after it lost its lift. It survived the crash, but it did land in a small pond. One of my companions purchased kites for his grandchildren.
We also walked through a couple of more markets, one of them being a bird and flower market. Those were the primary items being sold, though any number of other items were also for sale. One gentleman tried to get us to buy what appeared to be dried hornets; in gestures, he assured us that they were as good as Viagra. It was also fascinating to look inside the stores. Stores consisted of rooms, perhaps 12–15 feet wide and maybe that deep to twice as deep. They were often on the bottom floor of a building with the owners living above them. An incredible array of objects were sold, often with no apparent rhyme or reason as to the location of the store. We came out of a quite fancy stationary store and walked past several plumbing and electrical supply stores.
About this time the INS raided the Miami relatives of Elian Gonzalez. It was interesting to watch CNN’s coverage from half a world away.
About this time I also realized that there were fewer bicycles than I had been expecting. I’ve seen pictures of Beijing where there appear to be fleets of bicycles. In contrast, there were certainly bicycles in Guiyang (and Guang zhou), but it wasn’t clear that this was the main mode of transportation.
The next day was Sunday and time to start heading home. Many of the other conference participants spent additional time in China. However, I had an observing run, at Arecibo in Puerto Rico ironically, and had to return for that. I flew to Guang zhou and spent the night there. Another two US astronomers were also flying out of Guang zhou, though on a different flight. We spent an afternoon strolling around the area near my hotel. Essentially all of the sites we tried to see were closed for one reason or another. However, just strolling along and seeing how different things are was enough of a sight in and of itself. The Pearl River flows through Guang zhou; perhaps once upon a time it was a pearl, but now it is plied by barges and doesn’t look too precious.
After an overnight stay in a hotel, Monday was my travelling day. My flight departed Guang zhou at 8:30 a.m. (Of course, that means getting to the airport at 6:30 a.m.) I arrived in Washington at 7:00 p.m., 23 hours later. It was fun to watch the Sun set over the Pacific, then rise a few hours later (all from 35,000 feet). One boring thing about the Pacific is the number of clouds. Often flying over the Atlantic, I’ve been able to see the water. I don’t recall seeing any of the Pacific’s waters (after we climbed above 10,000 feet and were above the cloud deck).
I suppose there are a dozen things that I’ve left out. Nonetheless, I hope that gives you a feeling for how the trip went.
[The following were a couple of things I left out of the original essay.
A favorite “game” of some Chinese, whenever they saw a group of Westerners walking along, was to say, “Hello.” If we responded with, “Hello,” the result was either a chorus of laughter (from schoolchildren) or shy smiles (from the adults). By no means did everybody on the street do this, but it happened maybe two or three times a day. Also, our last day in Guiyang, while in a store, we helped out the clerk who had a Professional English 300 book. (Alas, she didn’t give us a discount.
While walking with a US astronomer one night, he remarked that he had been in China in the late 1980s. At the time, people dressed in drab, quite similar clothing and there was little public display of affection. Today, even in the provincial capital of Guiyang, Westernized clothes are quite apparent and people getting dressed up to go out on dates is not uncommon.
On our 1st day here, before the water festival started we went on this like action day thing that included mountain biking, elephant ridaing and white water rafting. The mountain biking was pretty hard going with the heat and the poor quality bikes, Me and Tiley got a bit competetive as usual and tried racing for a bit, Banj had the best idea tho he got a lift in a pick up truck and met us at the end. I remembered that i don’t really like the elephant riding from the lastr time i was in Thailand, i think its pretty cruel to just make an animal ferry tourists around all day, luckily it was only for an hour tho. Our elephant did wander uo the steepest hill in the whole area, Me and Tiley were both holding on trying not to fall out at one point, i dont know how the thing managed to stay upright. Tiley got a video of it all with us both looking terrified that we’re about to fall down a big hill closely followed by the elephant. The video has since been destroyed since he foolishly took his camera out into the water festival. The best bit of the day was the white water rafting, it wasn’t as extreme as we were thinking but was still a good laugh, its the wrong time of the year im told, its a lot better in the wet season.
