Visiting Cindy in Mainland China
June/July 1987
In many ways the most fascinating foreign trip I have ever taken was in June/July
of 1987 when I joined a six week tour of Mainland China with a nice, intelligent,
experienced leader, Fred Drake through the University of Massachusetts. This
was one of the few US tours that went to Chengdu where my old Chinese friend
Cindy was living with her family.
I first had to fly from Chicago east to New York City to meet with the other members of the tour. Our main long flight was in a huge 747 jet from New York to Tokyo, Japan. The route took us all the way across the US, Canada, up over Alaska (where we could see Mt. McKinley),
then down over the Pacific Ocean to Tokyo. They played two full length movies during that flight. Our final flight was from Tokyo to Hong Kong, China. Hong Kong was a fascinating mixture of western economics and technology with eastern culture. Many of the scaffoldings for men remodeling old or building new buildings were made of bamboo, instead of steel. We got a chance to visit many shops, do a lot of window shopping, and to ride on the Hong Kong subway.
Bamboo scaffolding in Hong Kong
We took the Star Ferry across the harbor, and then we took the train to Guangzhou (Canton). At most of the railway crossings, there were ever so many more Chinese people on bikes than trucks waiting to cross.
In Guangzhou there were ever so many housing buildings ten to fifteen floors high with a small balcony for each unit. We visited the National Peasant Movement Institute, and then the Mausoleum of the Seventy Two Martyrs.
The mausoleum has a statue of a lady wearing a crown and holding up a torch,
(very similar to our Statue of Liberty), on top of a pyramid of seventy two
blocks, each having the name of a martyr carved in it. We also saw the Temple
of the Six Banyon Trees, the Beacon Tower Mosque, and a food market containing
live eels as well as fish and fruit. By the side of the road we saw men on siesta
who were totally asleep.
We took a Chinese airline CAAC to fly to Guilin. There we first saw waterfalls, pagodas, and a cave. However, the main attraction was a river cruise among the spectacular steep hills, some partially hidden in fog.
Beautiful steep hills in Guilin on river cruise — some shrouded in fog
The cruise ended in Yangshuo where we saw many Chinese on bikes and some Buddhist carvings in a cave.