Shanghai's Pudong airport: fast trains and fake taxis!

Travelling to and from unfamiliar international airports can be challenging, in terms of comfort, timetabling, and the sheer intellectual effort involved. Shanghai's Pudong airport (pictured below) makes it a bit easier than most, I thought.

It's about 50km, and you can take a taxi, or get straight onto the Metro system. Or, to save a bit of time and also experience another transport mode altogether, you can do most of it on the Maglev train. Magnetic levitation,that is.

It does its 30km trip in a mere 7 minutes, but it manages to do most of it at 300 kph. It was comfortable, and not very full.

So the best deal seemed to be a Maglev/taxi combination journey. This is how I got back to the airport at the end of my visit, and the cost was about $10 for each of the two legs.

It was a different story a few days earlier, when I arrived in Shanghai. The maglev bit went fine, but then I spoilt it all by falling for the fake taxi trick! On my way to the taxi rank at the maglev terminal, I was intercepted by a keen taxi driver, who ushered me over to his nearby, wrongly parked vehicle. Nothing unusual here. Taxi drivers around the world try to subvert their systems to avoid the queue. I checked with him about whether his meter was working and that we'd go by it, and he assured me it was. Sure enough, the meter ticked over slowly, with a series of small numbers gradually increasing. I was expecting them to be totalled at the end of our ride, and it was going to add up to the $10 or so I'd been led to expect.

But no, when he pressed his totaliser button, up popped from nowhere the figure 390 (which translates roughly to $78!) We argued for a minute or two. I suggested we drive into the hotel's driveway properly so I could check with the people there. He refused. He'd gone deliberately past the hotel turn, and we were stuck in the middle of the busy road. I initially refused to pay and sat there. But he had the upper hand. He had my suitcase in the boot, and had made no attempt to open the boot. If I got out of the taxi, he'd have taken off with my luggage. So I cut my losses, agreed through gritted teeth to pay his ransom, and made him open the boot and get out of the car before I got out. Not a good start to my Shanghai experience.

Lonely Planet, I noticed, had a little piece about this scam. They say 'Most taxi drivers in Shanghai are honest, though make sure they use the meter; avoid monstrous overcharging by using the regular taxi rank...'  I should have paid more attention!

Shanghai shopping palaces

Yes, they do a good line in shopping centres.

The Bund

The Bund, Shanghai's historic waterfront area, is about the only bit of Shanghai that hasn't changed much in the last 100 years. Here it is now, and a hundred years ago, when it was the centrepiece of the International Settlement area.








It gets very crowded most evenings, mostly with locals and domestic tourists taking in the view of the Pudong skyscrapers opposite.

And here's the Peace Hotel. This was the tallest building in the city when I visited in 1985. I spent several hours in the cafe here on that visit, killing time, having failed to negotiate accommodation there or in any of the hotels that might take foreigners. China travel was like that then. Hotels generally had dormitories and rooms. If you said you wanted a dormitory, they'd say they only had rooms. If you said room, they only had dormitories. In Shanghai they had neither, but would happily keep you waiting there all day while they thought about it.

Buying train tickets was a bit like that too. You'd spend hours queuing, with the required details all written down in Chinese characters. When you got to the front of the queue, they wouldn't even be bothered looking. They'd just point you to the next queue. Where you'd waste another hour before being sent back to the first. This could go on for days.

So the Peace Hotel conjures up mixed memories for me. On that fateful day I chose to escape from Shanghai in the late afternoon, by leaping aboard a Suzhou-bound train, ticketless of  course. A nice man, a teacher, I recall, smoothed things over with the ticket inspector, and Suzhou, I found, was a much quieter place, with hotels that let you in and stay there even.

Shanghai History Museum

Shanghai's History Museum is interestingly located in the basement of the 'Space Module' TV tower. Visiting it is a great way to get a feel for the place as it was a century and more ago.

There's a courtroom scene, for example, where the 'mixed court' (British/Chinese) system was being practised.

There are opium dens, of course. And brothels.











And Europeans enjoying a rather fine lifestyle.

The Bund, looking much as it does today, except there are no skyscrapers behind it.

Yuyuan selfies

Shanghai's Yuyuan Garden is a classic Chinese garden, created in the 16th century by a Ming Dynasty bureaucrat.

It's a nice place. Doubtlessly best enjoyed in quiet contemplation, as it would have been at the time. Unfortunately there isn't much quiet contemplation to be had in Chinese Gardens these days. They're always crowded.



It's hard to get pictures that aren't full of people. Usually they're taking photos too, often of themselves! Eventually I gave up trying to get any people-free shots. I started concentrating on the people, and their selfies!

And the world's biggest metro system too!

And here it is. Shanghai's Metro has 14 lines, and the total length is 588km. There are 364 stations, and its ridership is over 3 billion per year.

As ever, it depends on exactly how you measure these things. Shanghai's got the longest system. Beijing has a slightly higher ridership, and New York has more stations.










Anyway I was impressed. It was very easy to navigate, excellent value, fast, clean, reliable. I used it a lot.




 

(Thanks to Wikipedia once more. Here's more on metro systems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metro_systems )

Shanghai's French Concession

Shanghai was of course run for a while by foreigners, and the British, Americans, and French had their 'concessions', to operate from. The French Concession - not known officially by that name any more - is still the part of Shanghai that is, in the words of Lonely Planet, 'the epicentre of food, fashion and fun'. The streets have an elegant, relaxing feel to them too.









I liked the name of this place. She had nobody to chat with at the time though.

There's a region within the concession, called Tianzifang, a 'hip quadrant of lane housing overflowing with shops and cafes' which is 'one of the latest retail and entertainment hot spots'. (Lonely Planet again)








It's extremely well patronised (ie crowded), but there's lots to see. All kinds of things to buy, and eat.














And drink.






And it's easy to get disoriented and lost. (In my case, without even indulging in the drink.) But there are handy maps to help you get oriented and found again.

View from a bottle opener

The Shanghai World Financial Centre, aka the Bottle Opener, is the world's fourth tallest building, at 492m. I knew it had an observation deck, so off I went to enjoy the view.

At the time I wasn't actually sure which of Shanghai's top three was in fact the SWFC, and thought it was probably the tallest - the wobbly looking screwdriver/egg whisk one. But no, everyone seemed to be heading for the bottle opener one.


It turns out the Screwdriver  is in fact the world's second tallest building, at 632m (after Dubai's Burj Khalifa, 828m). It's properly called the Shanghai Tower, and isn't fully operational yet. I'm not sure if there's going to be an observation deck, but I wouldn't be surprised.

Anyway, I got to go up to the current world's highest observation deck, which is in the world's fourth tallest building (because the Burj's one is only half way up it).

In fact the Bottle Opener has three separate observation decks. The lowest one, at 423m, hardly seemed worth the bother, but I did the other two (439m & 474m), which are directly below and above the open hole. There are glass ceilings and floors and things!















The views are stunning indeed.

Call that a skyscraper - THESE are skyscrapers!

When I last visited Shanghai, the land across the Huangpu River was flat swamp. That was 30 years ago.

Look at it now!

I was keen to check out this amazing megalopolis again, and it didn't disappoint. Shanghai is somewhere right up there in the 'World's biggest city' stakes. It depends on how you measure it, of course, but it's usually in the top two or three, and its population is roughly that of the whole of Australia. If you went for 'World's visually most stunning central business district', it would possibly get the very top spot.

It's got the current world's second and fourth tallest skyscrapers, and gee, what a colourful, constantly changing Disneyland light show they present every night!

If you go up one of the skyscrapers, there are hundreds of other skyscrapers in every direction, pretty well as far as you can see.








You also look down on walls of pint sized, common or garden skyscrapers like these.



The funny looking multi coloured TV tower (The Space Module) is closer than some of the others, so it looks bigger than it is. I took a special interest in the group of three here: the Shanghai World Financial Centre (The Bottle Opener), the Jin Mao Tower (The Eggbeater, or The Syringe), and the Shanghai Tower (The Screwdriver, or The Egg Whisk).

Ashfield sights (and Shanghai nights)

I lived in Ashfield for a couple of years when I first arrived in Sydney in 1998. It was well on the way to being one of Sydney's premier Chinatowns then, and I liked it a lot.

I headed back the other day to check the place over and see what's changed lately, and as the Sydney Morning Herald reported recently, it's gone further down that road, and especially down the road of a Shanghai food and culture Chinatown. There seemed to be lots of 'Shanghai', 'New Shanghai', 'Shanghai Night', and 'New Shanghai Night' restaurants, and I suspect they're all excellent. See http://www.smh.com.au/national/business-booms-as-old-ashfield-becomes-new-shanghai-20110617-1g7vg.html

There's also a monument to Mei Quong Tart, the 'Ashfield Mandarin' of more than a century ago, and there's a Chinese temple there too.

I checked out the Ashfield Mall shopping centre too, and was pleased to see it's looking up again, with a smartly renovated food court, and a new Aldi supermarket to complement the Coles and Woolworths ones there.
The new civic centre looks OK too. It's funny, but I remember going to a big rowdy mass meeting once, presented by Ashfield Council, where they told us that private developers had promised to provide us with a renovated shopping centre and council chambers, but the only way we could have them was if we agreed to let the developers build 30 storey tower blocks on top of it all. Well, guess what? No sign of any tower blocks. The Council must have called their bluff after all.

One thing hasn't changed though. There are still a lot of big, noisy airliners passing overhead on their way up after take off from Sydney Airport. The last few before the 11pm curfew tended to be the fully fuelled, heavily loaded ones heading for distant Asian destinations. They probably still are.