The Virtual Reinhard
Created | Updated Apr 7, 2005
A Letter from Shanghai: Part One
'Taxi? Meter taxi? Let me take your bag...'
Running the gauntlet of freelance taxi drivers emerging from ever so dodgy cars outside Pudong Airport, we fought our way through to the official taxi rank, presided over by a smartly uniformed man with an anti-SARS facemask and a clipboard. He was able to translate our hotel address for the first driver in the queue of identical VW Santanas, and we climbed aboard.
The driver, sitting in his perspex protective bubble, crunched into gear and launched into the video game that is Shanghai traffic. Cars and buses swerved in and out, punctuated by sudden pedestrians, bicycles, rickshaws, and randomly strewn warning signs. We had no idea where we were going or what to expect, so we simply sat and watched the world race by until we emerged from the city and crossed the Huangpu River into the business district. There, on the waterfront overlooking the Bund, looking like it had just landed from space, was the Oriental Riverside Hotel.
We'd had a long flight that morning, so Bronwyn had a rest while I wandered out for a stroll along the river. I certainly wasn't going to get too lonely, because every couple of hundred yards I'd be stopped by Chinese tourists, apparently visiting the big city from the country, who liked nothing better than to take photographs of their wives and girlfriends with the strange ponytailed giant who had appeared in their midst. Indeed, westerners were extremely scarce on this side of town, so it was even more surprising that I suddenly happened on a Bavarian bar by the waterside, serving pretzels, bauernfrühstuck, and locally brewed Paulaner beer, including my favourite Dunklerweiß.
It was an excellent opportunity to stop and watch the boats plying the river. Like much else in Shanghai, it was a shock of contrasts, oil tankers and container ships rumbling their way past a backdrop of the Bund and the office buildings of the city centre, sounding their horns as they manoeuvred way to or from the enormous dockyards downstream.
Fascinated by the maritime component of this great city, we booked aboard a tourist ferry which would take us up the river, through the dockyards, and out as far as the confluence of the Huangpu and the Yangtze. Discoverying that there was no food available on the ferry, we grabbed a bite to eat in a dockworker's cafe hidden under the pylons of the dock (we just pointed randomly at the menu and got served a very nice meal with a bottle of Tsing Tao beer), and then climbed aboard the ferry.
The towers and skyscrapers of the city soon faded into the heat haze, as we entered one of the busiest sea docks in the world. Everywhere there were container ships and tankers being built from new, or refurbished from the deckline up, tiny figures hanging like spiders over the sides as they worked away at the rust with handheld powertools.
And everywhere, darting between the huge hulks and running backward and forward between the docks, little liveaboard boats, each as far as we could see permanently occupied by a family, as indicated by the pots of food plants and the washing hanging out to dry.
Plying the centreline of the river, we passed perhaps a dozen little dredger boats. They seemed to be very busy sucking up the bottom mud and raking something out of it, but whether it was edible shellfish or something else, we were never able to discover...
