Postcard From Zhuhai - Part One

Where do you start with this one?

First things first - in an increasingly homogenised world, what a pleasure it is to visit a foreign country that actually feels like a foreign country, where even some of the more familiar things have elements of difference that stop you in your tracks!  More of that later though.

With huge thanks to Stuart Scott and his excellent team at Cambridge Business Travel we dodged a bullet and were persuaded to transfer our travelling allegiances from the once mighty Cathay Pacific to Virgin Atlantic - recent experiences flying from Gatwick to Orlando with Beardie Airways had persuaded us incorrectly that standards were slipping - happily though the Gatwick fleet of Alitalia cast off 747s are a pale shadow of the newer, more comfortable and better equipped A340s on the Asian routes, with excellent in-flight entertainment and reasonable space even in Economy - Thanks Stuart.

12 hours in the air is nobody's idea of a good time but with entertainment ranging from the excellent Senna documentary via the usual blockbusters and my personal discovered gem 'The Guard' starring Brendan Gleason - try it, you'll like it. The time well, errrr, flew by!

Hooking up with Andrew 'Skippy' Hall in Hong Kong we made our way to the (Australian built!) Zhuhai Ferry, an excellent example to others on baggage management, our cases delivered to us on the quayside at Zhuhai without our having to touch them since Heathrow!

Via Customs, a much anticipated hurdle smoothed out very considerably by the helpful attendance of the enormously helpful and charming Christina Wu from Zhuhai International Circuit. Christina was the first, but by no means the last, 'local' to show just how welcoming Zhuhai intended to be to we mere visitors, an eye opening experience and a real difference both to the expectations ingrained in us by decades of news and political rhetoric and by the far less welcoming examples of others around the globe!

That said we still emerged from the Ferry Terminal in the late evening - 21:59 to be exact and we were starving! Happily though help was at hand in the shape of an American Colonel no less - KFC!

Now I can guarantee that if four blokes struggled into any UK branch of a fast food restaurant with 15 seconds to go until closing time dragging a mountain of luggage behind them there would (at best) be an excuse and apology offered rather than food!  Again Zhuhai showed its hospitality and the staff not only prepared the food without batting an eyelid, they left us in peace to eat it too!

Then it was time to take our first leap of faith in the shape of a VW Jetta, the booted Golf is the weapon of choice for Zhuhai cabbies and we'd need two of them to get us to our hotel.

First things first - no Zhuhai cabby we came across speaks a word, even a syllable of English so it was a matter of pointing to a card with the hotel name written in Chinese and hoping for the best - We needn't have worried - 15 high octane minutes later, after a drive that would have had our man counting the points on his licence with both hands and both feet in the UK we were delivered (sort of) safely to the hotel door - the fare wouldn't have bought a coffee back at home and tipping is apparently actively frowned upon!

Our hotel looked fantastic - Way better than the usual standard we suffer on DSC away missions - 4 star and cheaper than a Belgian 2 star!  What could possibly go wrong?

Happily nothing at all!  After a minor wobble on check-in, as a c.£120 deposit was requested - all would become clear later - we were left to go and discover our room's 4 star plushness.

And very nice it was too - Two huge beds (Skippy and I were roomies for the duration). Plenty of circulation (for which read baggage dumping) space and a large bathroom - hang on though - what was behind that full width curtain?

Ah, that was covering a glass wall between the bedroom and the bathroom's walk in shower!   Note to self, book same hotel for holiday with Mrs DSC Editor!

In addition to the peeping tom's paradise in the bathroom area there was a surprising amount of 'stuff' around in the room: Toiletries, snacks, playing cards, vast array of condoms - Whoa!

Yes, it seems that every room is well stocked with a wide variety of alternative ways of ensuring that you don't bring home an unwelcome souvenir! 

All of this 'stuff' meanwhile had a price tag, Ah, that explains the deposit!!  In fairness though the prices were such that the level of seaweed cracker fuelled poker playing and prophylactic usage required to swallow up the £120 would have taken substantially more than our time available, even if I did feel that way about Skippy, which I don't, even if he is a very nice bloke, which he is, just not in 'that' way, unless you're Mrs Skippy that is.

So then, it was near midnight after a journey that had seen us on the go for over 17 hours and with a packed racing schedule ahead of us - There was only one sensible thing to do - Time for a beer!

And onto the mean streets of harbourside Zhuhai - and they were buzzing, whilst many urban areas have vice problems, Zhuhai has, well a vice! Clearly a daytime facility at the local hardware store, by night it becomes, in equal part, a curio and major tripping hazard.

And its not the only one!  There were holes in the pavements where you could lose large domestic pets or small (or even large) children, and these were no cracks to the hardcore beneath, these went a long way down!

Brushing that aside though we were bound for the local street market - yes at midnight - a narrow alley lined with a bewildering array of fruit and veg stores, a barbers shop and a gambling den!  A little further on and the alley opened out into a dead end street lined with tables and stalls offering a very Chinese version of street food, not before passing the elderly lady plying her seamstress trade on a sewing machine, at midnight, in an unlit street!  Yup this place is different all right!

A quick Tsing Tao beer and the first of what would be a trip long series of conversations / arguments about just what a Paddle Pop Lion is (google it - Yes that's how intellectually stimulating a DSC trip can be!) and it was back to the hotel, pausing only to comment, not for the first or the last time, that the button to floor 3 wasn't working (though the occupants of the floor most assuredly were!). This we gather is a regular feature of many hotels in China, we'd be content with a seaweed cracker and bed.

Friday morning dawned sort of brightly and as I opened the curtains - Oh My God!  Just across the road from the hotel lay the biggest fishing fleet I have ever seen, something which I hadn't seen at all in the inky blackness the night before - German sentries must have felt like this on D-Day, though I'll admit that a Sherman tank is a more frightening prospect than a halibut.

We'll come back to the Fishing fleet later.  For now it was time to head to the circuit, and the best way to get there was another trip into the unknown in a VW Jetta.

No problem, the hotel doorman would hail a cab for us - Back at home the protocol for doing this is clear, you raise your arm above your head and the cabbie acknowledges you, indicates and pulls safely to the side of the road - They do it a little differently in China, the doorman marching from the frontage of the hotel to the six lane highway beyond and, Oh my god!!!!! Walking straight into the stream of traffic gesturing to any passing cab he can find before stopping them in the middle of the road, no matter which lane they were travelling in, and pointing towards us!

Well it worked! Though I'm pretty certain that they get a fair turnover of doormen!!

With our cases at the hotel we could (just) manage to get aboard a single cab, though for the duration I was nominated for 'The seat of death' up front, our three brave snappers literally wedged into the back seat.

It was an eye opening experience, if there are rules of the road in China then they are either hugely liberal or entirely ignored - As a petrol head I'm always looking for something interesting on the road and here you didn't have to look far.

Traffic was made up of a simply unparalleled number of makes and models, Japanese, Korean, domestic Chinese and European, familiar shapes with unfamiliar names and badges, it's a mark of the cookie cutter familiarity of the western urban scene that it was a real surprise to see cars with their make and model chrome badges in Chinese - Why wouldn't they be!  There was though still some evidence of a liberty or two being taken with designs culled from non domestic manufacturers - take this van spotted in Zhuhai for instance - Ring any bells?

I noted later to Audi's Martyn Pass that either Audi sold a lot of black A6Ls (a model unique to this market) or that one was following us everywhere.  Happily and unsurprisingly it was the former - Audi sell a massive 300,000 cars in China, the vast majority are A6Ls.

Arriving at the circuit gates there was a familiar figure waiting, Olivier Lombard looking for a way in as he took a busman's holiday during a break in Hong Kong.

Again the helpful circuit staff came to the rescue, the young lady on the media accreditation desk responding wonderfully to the revelation that this was a driver from the team which had won the Championship in Europe, loaning him her pass and arranging for him to be escorted through the gates and into the circuit.  Try asking for that at Silverstone and they'd call the Police!

And so to our home for the next few days but the Press Room was still in use for a Drivers/ Team Managers briefing when we arrived, 5 minutes to kill we dropped the bags and did the usual European thing of lounging around leaning on things - Bad mistake!  It turned out the table that I chose to perch upon actually wasn't screwed together in any way whatsoever, cue almighty crash, a flurry of concerned looking circuit staff and the predictable gales of laughter from the DSC snappers!

Again In the UK the incident would have involved incident tape, a full and lengthy report from Health and Safety and a potential prosecution, and certainly several dozen texts, calls and letters from ambulance chasing lawyers - In Zhuhai there was an apology to yours truly and then the staff propped up the still unattached components once again - I checked and it didn't even make the evening news!  In truth they're lucky I didn't sue - they wouldn't have had a leg to stand on!

In Part 2 - McNish Flag Fail, Octopus and Chips, Top Gun Twosome and On The Waterfront