… Cambodian rock….

The sounds of 1960s Phnom Penh swung into Hong Kong this week with retro rock ‘n’ rollers The Cambodian Space Project. The band put on a show to a small midweek audience in a humid room of the Fringe Club, but I was glad to be there as singer Srey Thy let loose her powerful voice, shimmied sixties style and performed graceful Khmer dance moves. She had a shy charisma, made all the more notable when bandmate Julien Poulson introduced her background as an improverished villager and survivor of abduction into the sex trade.

The band do great, soulful renditions of Khmer pop classics as well as original songs and one Western cover:

A band to watch out for!

World peace!

In a masterstroke of bizarre kitsch, this year’s Miss World pageant will be held not in New Jersey or Sun City, but in the surreal and bleak-looking city of Ordos in Inner Mongolia. In this chilling dystopia, vast and brand  housing estates spring out of the desert and gargantuan modern scultptures dot the streets – yet people are few and far between. Ordos is a “showplace” city built by government decree in one of China’s more barren districts. So far, it has failed to attract many inhabitants.

It should be an odd few weeks for the beauty queens in their bikinis and high heels, clicking along the empty boulevards or braving the stinging desert wind.  I wonder if there is much to do there, other than admire the bizarre Museum of Inner Mongolia (above) or the oddly Games-ofThronesish gargantuan horses cavorting in one empty plaza?

Chinese authorities are obviously hoping the event will help put Ordos on the map, but maybe it will work the other way. Maybe the beauty queens will be sucked into the vortex?

  

For more Inner Mongolian weirdness see here.

Seoul train

Korean pop powerhouse YG have done it again, pimping out a whole Seoul passenger train with advertising of its stars, to promote the annual New Year YG Concert. The train has become a wildly popular tourist attraction, drawing fans to take pictures on the trip from Seoul to suburban Bundang. Hopefully it will still be in operation when I get to Seoul a the tail-end of the year.

 

Eat the f*ckers!

It is famously said of the Cantonese that they will eat “anything with four legs not a chair, anything that flies and is not an aeroplane and whatever swims except a submarine”.

Guangzhou is famous as a centre for the consumption of exotic and rare animals such as pangolins, civet cats (hello SARS) and – as I saw myself – crocodiles.

But it seems that is not all. The Australian press is this week reporting that an Aussie tourist stumbled into a restaurant in Guangzhou’s Panyu district only to find a live, caged koala – and its meat on the menu. The restaurant offers “braised koala” – cue the outrage South of the equator (although koalas are not endangered). However, there is some doubt the animal in question is even genuine. The picture accompanying the claim is rather unclear with some suggesting the creature is some kind of Asian sunbear. Besides which, the dish is being offered at  what website “The Shanghaiist” describes as “the meager price of 139RMB. Surely underselling one of the bestselling trinket animals of all-time, no?”

Shenzhen: The other side

To an Australian, used to travelling vast distances to get anywhere, the idea of another city in (what is to all intents and purposes) another country, a mere subway-ride away, is mind-boggling. But that is Shenzhen. An hour, and a special “Shenzhen special area” visa away, sits Hong Kong’s misunderstood younger sibling  (or perhaps, its dark side).

It is a weird place. The city of seven million people –  per capita the wealthiest in China – has sprung up from nothing in just thirty years. Once a fishing village along the Hong Kong border, then an economic boomtown literally fenced off from the rest of China with electrified barrriers, the city now has a horizon of impressive skyscrapers and a sparkling, surprisingly extensive new subway.

You would never know this in Hong Kong though. People talk about the city dismissively (if at all) as a kind of giant factory outlet. In fact most of the time, they are talking about a giant factory outlet – “Shenzhen” to most Hong Kongers means the Luohu Commercial Centre, a five storey emporium of trinkets a bit like Bangkok’s MBK. It is filled with assorted milling hookers and spruikers, smells of stale cigarette smoke and stands just metres from the Hong Kong border.

Few visitors venture much further.

There is another Shenzhen though. In the centre of the city, wide boulevards stretch between monumental modern buildings, including a bizarre stingray-shaped city hall and the world’s biggest bookstore. Buildings are huge and new, blocks are never-ending and pedestrians are thin on the ground. It feels very much like a Communist showpiece city, coated with China’s hot, dusty haze. But further out again, the city’s character changes again. Here shady park-like avenues lead to upmarket galleries and cafes and a cluster of four little themeparks (presumably geared towards Chinese visitors. Hong Kongers who have their own Disneyland and Oceanworld. I didn’t even know Shenzhen had themeparks). There is even an Eiffel Tower and a monorail which glides (well, rattles) through the treetops above them all. Parts of this area – especially the OCT arts village – actually seem more pleasant than many parts of Hong Kong itself.

It turns out Shenzhen is full of surprises. It is a hard city to get a handle on.

Subway sign

Sign telling people to line up on the platforms.

Around the world on a (wobbly) monorail – Shenzhen themeparks

OCT Art Village

Shenzhen’s biggest surprise is its “arts village”, a popular concept in China. As in Beijing and Guangzhou, a district of all warehouses, factories and Communist-era apartment blocks has been converted into galleries, cafes and offices for design companies. And as in Guangzhou, the whole thing has been done really, really well. It is a really lovely place, with shady banyan trees, an artfully designed Starbucks, odd scultptures and big, colourful murals on patched-up apartment buildings.

The village is located in “Overseas Chinese Town”; another fixture in many Chinese cities. I have never really understood what the term means.

Taipei – the Cinderella city

Taipei is on few Westerner’s must-see lists. Overshadowed in East Asia by the allure of Tokyo and Hong Kong, it is relegated (along with Seoul) to the B-division. Yet like Seoul, it is more popular with Asian visitors and for similar reasons (proximity, food and regional cultural clout – both countries export soap operas and pop stars).

In fact like many “second cities” (Melbourne included) Taipei comes as a present surprise, made all the more potent for the lack of expectation. I was visiting the city on a school camp (the aim being to immerse the children in Mandarin). As such, I had even lower expectations – of being bussed around the city with no free time to explore. Atypically for me, I didn’t do any research – what would be the point of finding cool stuff if I would not have any opportunity to explore?

So when I arrived in the city I was truly blown away. Unexpectedly for the capital of an industrial powerhouse, Taipei is a clean, green city with fresh mountain air (it is surrounded on all sides by forested hills, visible from just about everywhere in the city). It is also vibrant though, and busy with the Chinese mania for neon and shopping. But although it is modern and dynamic –  with a skyline topped by one-time world’s tallest tower Taipei 101 – it is not sterile. Taipei still has character.

Even with the constraints of my, err, “tour”, I thoroughly enjoyed Taipei. In fact, I would recommend it to anyone – certainly over Hong Kong – as a place to live OR an interesting place to visit.

I hope I’ll be back!

Through the bus window

Taipei: New Jack City

Somewhere down the line, something interesting happened to Taiwan. It seems to have developed into the most “liberated” and progressive of Chinese societies. In the 1980s it became the first true Chinese democracy, complete with such growing pains as all-in parliamentary brawls.

Sexually, it is liberated too. I was told that one local quirk is a brand of candy stores that feature scantily clad women who sit about in their front windows, watching TV, reading or clipping their nails. Nevertheless, this display is apparently successful in attracting customers and bumping up sales.

Taiwan is also the gayest Chinese society, with talk of legalizing gay marriage (although it hasn’t happened yet) and a pride march which draws 25,000 people (dwarfing Tokyo, Seoul or Hong Kong’s efforts). Last year it was even presided over by the country’s president!

The city has numerous gay bars (which, given the nature of my trip, I didn’t get to sample  ) but I can remember in Tokyo several years a go when a visiting Taiwanese house DJ held a party in Nichome and brought a crowd of Taipei partyboys with him – it was the rowdiest party I ever went to in Tokyo, with guys ripping off their shirts and waving lighters to try and set off the club’s sprinkler system.

Perhaps related to this ‘whatever-lets-just-do-it!’ attitude, and certainly hard to imagine in more staid societies, is Taiwan’s latest specialty: animated news clips which present current affairs items in a highly informative, and amusing, fashion. I just love them:

This summary of the last Australian federal election is great:

Souvenir with a difference

How about a tattoo of your dog? Many of the establishments on Ximending’s ‘tattoo alley’ specialise in them.

Food

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Across the Chinese-speaking world (or ‘the Sinosphere’ to use the nifty new term), Taiwan is famed for its food. In a culture obsessed with eating, the island nation stands out for its culinary prowess. Visitors from China, Hong Kong and Singapore prowl the city’s famed night markets for local specialities like snake (served at snake alley, where I also saw an emu in a cage in one restaurant), oyster omlettes and oyster noodles, peanut candy, pineapple tarts, beef noodles, dried pork snacks and apparently (see the picture above) barbecued hearts.

There is also a multitude of kinds of tofu, local specialities in every village, the ubiquitous Taiwan-invented bubble tea and the famed Din Tai Fung restaurant which has since sprouted branches across Asia based on its reputation for xiao lin bao dumplings (they were pretty good).  It is clear that for Chinese tourists, Taiwan’s food is its biggest attraction.

Soup and congee (!)  in cans in a vending machine.

Chinese spectacular

Interestingly for tourists, Taipei is littered with spectacular Chinese-style monuments built on a vast modern scale. Their steeply arched rooves tower over the city as you drive along the freeway, puncturing the usual dreary urban sprawl. Brightly coloured, gargantuan in size and all contructed over the last fifty years, the buildings could easily be dismissed as Disney-esque lapses into bad taste, but somehow I didn’t find them kitsch. They were dignifed, and I thought, distinguished. Certainly Hong Kong  has nothing like them. I thought it was nice to see a worldly, modern Chinese city making such a bold statement of its identity.

Pictured above is the eye-popping 1952 Grand Hotel. The skyscraping pavilion glows at night and stands out for its blood-red walls during the day .

But the city’s biggest sightseeing drawcard is the National Palace Museum, home to the best Chinese art collection in the world, salvaged (or pillaged?) from the Forbidden City during the Civil War and spirited away to Taiwan for safe keeping ( perhaps wisely given the Cultural Revolution which was to follow). The museum is housed in a quasi-Beijing palace in one of the city’s Northern suburbs.

But the city’s showpiece is surely the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial, dedicated to the leader of the Kuonmintang, a fierce anti-communist and father of the Republic of China (aka Taiwan). The building is one of the most impressive I have seen – a quasi pyramid topped with a blue roof modelled on Beijing’s Temple of Heaven, flanked by huge, golden-roofed ‘cultural halls’.

 

Inside, a bronze statue of the General is guarded by soldiers who stand stock-still, seemingly not even blinking, for hours on end before they are relieved of their duty in a bizarre, mechanical “changing of the guards”.

It was surreal and creepy, I have never seen anything like it – the intensity in their eyes, standing still for hours on end, man become machine….

 

Into the hills

Taipei is surrounded by, I had not realised, five mountain ranges. Some of them are volcanic. Just forty minutes from the city you can be looking down over the urban centre from green forested slopes and fields, dotted with small (very Japanese-looking) villages and (again- Japanesey) hot springs. The air here is cool and fresh and the fields are full of butterflies and dragonflies darting around the warm ponds and rushing streams. It all has a very idyllic, Ghibli-esque quality to it.

We saw some interesting little temples too – each with elaborately carved raised rooves, and even more interestingly a shamanistic animist place of worship through which our guide rushed us, seeming slightly embarrassed and all together ignorant. I thought it was one of the most interesting sights of the day, carved with grotesque creatures as yet unpainted.

The animal on the left looks like the “baku” a mythical Japanese animal sometimes identified with the tapir, which is said to eat peoples’ dreams. I wonder if it is the same?

 

Taiwan blue

A popular activity (at least when you are travelling with primary-aged children) is gathering leaves from a local shrub to make a blue dye (traditional to the local Aboriginal people) and tie-dying cloth in it. The cloth is then washed and set in a local mountain stream. I can think of worse ways to spend a cool, sunny day in the mountains.

UFOs gone forever

One of Taiwan’s most intriguing attractions – to my mind – is no more. The ruined shells of a holiday village stood for four decades rotting away on a beach North of Taipei. They was built as a resort in the 1970s with holiday  homes in the distinctive shape of UFOS. However the developer went bankrupt even before the holiday village opened. The UFo shells stood as an eerie landmark for generations ( it was rumoured that twenty thousand skeletons were found during the construction – apparently completely unfounded.) But in 2009 on the orders of the Taipei city council the buildings were finally torn down. A short-sighted decision, I think. They could have been restored into something really cool – or better yet, left to picturesquely fade away.

 

Rebels of the Neon God

In the 1980s Taiwan was home to a “new wave” of film-makers like Ang Lee (who of course went on to Hollywood’s highest pinnacles), Christopher Doyle (the Australian-born cinematographer who received massive critical acclaim for his work with Wong Kar Wai, and was then a resident of Taipei) and Tsai Ming-liang who was Malaysian-born but  moved to Taiwan to make his slow, repetitive, beautiful-to-some-and-hard-to-take-for-others films like the wonderfully named “Rebels of the Neon God”.