Our very own Floriade festival

We headed down to Canberra the other day to re-acquaint ourselves with the charms of the national capital.


It's Floriade time, Canberra's big spring flower festival, and all the oldies and school holiday family vacationers are into the Floriade pilgrimage.


We'd planned to see what it was all about, but in the end, decided to prioritise some of the other places we'd had in mind. We only had two half days to explore the city, so Floriade would have to wait another year.


But what's this? A great little display of tulips in Moss Vale in the Central Highlands. Surely this will do us instead!

More Barangaroo - the Wynyard Walk

Ever eager to bring you the latest on what's new in Sydney, your fearless reporter despatched himself this morning down to Wynyard station. Then on through the new pedestrian tunnel to Barangaroo - the 'Wynyard Walk'.

I was slightly underwhelmed at first, because it seemed so short. But they've achieved some sort of wormhole space-warp or something, because you emerge seconds later at a spot it used to take ages to get to. And the squiggly lines and curvy path are quite attractive.

Meanwhile, Barangaroo's three main buildings all seem to be pretty much finished. No  sign of anything happening yet re any hotel cum casino cum 'punctuation mark'. Maybe that's good news.

Now is the time for all good people to come to the aid of the .......... enlarged Gardens of Stone National Park

The Gardens of Stone National Park has been a bushwalking playground of mine for a few years now. It's about two hours north west of Sydney, and it's packed with unique features and wilderness values galore. It's worth World Heritage status, without a doubt.

Except that much of the relevant, precious, area is not actually protected. Not a part of the National Park. And it's mostly because of mining - coal mining in fact.

The dirty, dying, coal mining industry still goes on around here. There are longwall mine shafts under much of the area, and subsidence, pollution, and unexpected swamp drainage is going on largely unchecked.








So it's good to see there's a well organised campaign on to extend the Gardens of Stone National Park. Here's a link to the Colong Foundation's campaign: https://www.colongwilderness.org.au/campaigns/the-gardens-of-stone/about-gardens-of-stone

 The other day I attended a photographic exhibition organised as part of the campaign. I'm sure they won't mind me directing you to the photo gallery: https://www.colongwilderness.org.au/gardens-stone-focus-photographic-competition-gallery

I put in a bid to buy one of the fine pictures in their silent auction. I haven't heard back yet from them, but fingers crossed.

It reminds me a bit of Tasmania 35 years ago, when the Franklin-Lower Gordon Wild Rivers campaign was underway. Fabulous photography played a huge role, as the Australian public was educated about the unique beauty of an area which was about to be dammed and flooded by an uncaring and out-of-control government bureaucracy, for no known public benefit. That one had a happy ending. Lets hope history repeats itself here.

Suzhou scenes

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.