London Taxi in Amoy
After visiting Gulang Yu on Saturday we left on Sunday morning to
travel further inland towards the company factory that is in Fujian
Province (there are others elsewhere in this vast country). Our taxi,
unlike the normal ones both in Xiamen and Shanghai which are very worn
out VW Jettas, was a brand new London taxi. I’ve seen a couple in
Shanghai, but it was quite a surprise to find one turning up at our
hotel in Amoy. I think they are now being made in China, but I may be
wrong. We were heading to the next city in land up the Jiulong River to
Zhangzhou a small city of about 4
Seafront cranes on Xiamen
Gantry of the Xiamen Shipbuilding Industry company Ltd
million people, about the size of Birmingham. As we headed off the
island across one of the five bridges that join the island to the
mainland, we could see evidence of huge shipping activity, judging by
the cranes on the seafront and shipbuilding – the gantry in the right
hand picture says it’s the Xiamen Shipbuilding Industry Co. Ltd. Along
our route there much evidence of housing construction going on, with
many cranes on the top of many tower blocks:
Cement works
Cement works sub-station
And Richard, who years and years ago used to work in production in a
Blue Circle cement works in Jordan on the top of the Ma’an Plateau,
says that this was a cement works. It would certainly need a massive
power supply and it had a large electricity sub-station to prove it.
Whilst there was evidence of endless vertical housing going up all over
the place we did see one or two traditional structures:
Old Brick Works
In the same area as the cement works we could see the remains of what
had been a thriving brick industry, but all of the places were very
dilapidated, as China has moved on from bricks to concrete. It’s just
such a pity that what they are building in most places (and this is true
even in some parts of Shanghai, which in general has some excellent,
though dense, housing ) are vertical rabbit warrens with no redeeming
features. When we arrived at Zhangzhou this was the sight that greeted
us:
Modern Housing Zhangzhou
Oh Dear Housing
row upon row of the same high rise blocks packed in densely one
behind the other and we had a view of exactly the same design of tower
blocks from our 5* hotel room (for the equivalent of £45 per night) in
the same town, just a different street. We felt depressed. Wouldn’t
you feel depressed? Perhaps it is much better housing than they had
before; but I worry for their souls. Our hotel lobby however was in the
grand communist style with a vast atrium and a huge rectangular
chandelier the size of a tennis court. The occupancy was low. Hubris
lurked around every corner. Although it was lunchtime, as soon as we
arrived we booked another taxi to take us straight on to see some of the
local traditional housing here in Fujian Province, known as Tulou.
After we had had a quick wash and brush up we joined our unusually
careful and female
Siesta Time
Church in Zhangzhou
taxi driver whom the hotel had arranged to take us. We passed a man
having a siesta on his tricycle – as I think I’ve said before the
Chinese seem to be able to sleep anywhere and we were surprised to see a
tall Church. I wasn’t sure whether the church was the whole building
when we saw it from the taxi, but looking at the photo now, I think it
is just a church put on top of a tower block. I had been lulled into a
false sense of security however about our taxi driver. I had got the
feeling that our afternoon was going to be calmer than is normal inside a
taxi in China – more English in style – but how wrong I was. We soon
lost the careful driver, replaced by I think her husband, who was on the
more aggressive end of the Chinese taxi driver spectrum. After a few
miles of his driving Richard and I decided that we were somewhere in a
cross between Italy south of Naples and Jordan. In the former,
undertaking is de riguer, hands on the steering wheel are an optional
extra and driving 6 inches from the car in front is the norm. In Jordan
it is OK to overtake on a blind summit, on a blind corner, fill a road
so there is nowhere for the oncoming traffic to go….. but since then I
have realised that we should
Traffic jam
have put another country into the mix, India. As in India three or
four people to a moped with toddlers squeezed in-between the adults is
the norm and that was certainly happening here and we were practically
shaving their legs as we drove past. The worst I think I saw was three
adults on a scooter and a baby, under one years of age, lying flat
across one the adults’ laps as we whooshed past. Several times I
couldn’t look. Many times my foot braked to no avail. And a lot of air
whistled through my teeth. And then we reached a traffic jam.
Richard and our taxi
The view from the traffic jam
Our driver managed to sit for about 2 minutes in the queue before
getting out to see what was going on. We got out too to relieve the
tension and have a look at the view. He was back shortly and turned the
taxi round and went back into the tunnel, all the while shouting into
his mobile phone and seeming not to care about the oncoming traffic. At
the other end of the tunnel he shouted back into his phone again and
back round we went and back into the tunnel. Back at the end of the
queue where Richard is standing in the photograph our driver turned left
and we went straight down a farm track – down the hill in the picture
on the right. Don’t be fooled by the picture of the concrete – that
didn’t last. It was like driving down one of the vertical tracks on the
Malvern Hills. I thought we were going to get stuck as we were only in a
two-wheel drive car, but we didn’t. I thought that we were going to
ground the car as we reached the bottom road, but we didn’t (well not
much) and off we set through the hamlet on the lower road at high speed.
We could then see what was causing the delay – a landslip further
down the road and a digger at the top of it lobbing boulders down the
slope onto the road where we should have been.
Hamlet on the lower road
Digger lobbing rocks down onto the road
Vosges-like mountains
Once we had got out of the Jiulong River valley which is being
heavily built-up we drove through miles of banana groves and then as the
road started to climb the houses and the countryside reminded us of the
Vosges in France. We went up and up through winding valleys and
reached several orchards of trees that smelt fantastic, with a smell
that was redolent of soap. I have been trying to work out ever since
what type of tree they were. Richard thinks that they were citrus trees
but I think they could have been
Citrus? or
Osmanthus?
Tea Garden
osmanthus. There were no obvious flowers on the trees for blossom to
have been responsible for the smell, but it was extraordinary. The
smell appeared to come from the leaves and or the bark. Do let me know
if you know what they are. And further up above these trees, on still
steeper hillsides were tea gardens, planted in terraces and in thin
strips to allow the bushes to be picked from either side. We finally
reached the TianLuoKeng Tulou of which more in my next post. On the way
back to our hotel in Zhangzhou all was repeated in reverse except we
didn’t acquire the man’s wife for the final leg and other cars on the
farm track detour got stuck as others were coming down towards us.
Richard had got out to see if he could help and then the taxi driver
got himself around a stuck car and raced all the way to the top, leaving
Richard to climb all the way to the top in the heat. Richard felt that
he was ready for a beer after that. Our driver thought it was all very
funny.
Postscript
I noticed when we were going around the Tulou that he prayed at one
of the buddhist shrines there. So I understood. It didn’t matter how
he drove because he was going to be reincarnated no matter how he died,
just as, according to Richard, the cement lorry drivers and the petrol
tanker drivers coming down off the plateau Tafilah/Ma’an Plateau down to
Aqaba on the King’s Highway in Jordan believe that if they die it is
just Allah’s Will.
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