a stimulating train ride.
Streaking along at 168kph on a gloomy, rainy and foggy day, it's surprising that I managed to get any images at all from the train between Shanghai and Hangzhou; especially since I was using a tourist-quality $200 Panasonic camera. It's definitely a study in gray, but an interesting progression never the less, if you like train rides:-)
The train journey is a study in contrasts; surprisingly there are still many old micro sized farms with the associated vegetable patch or small field; many abandoned old grungy industrial sites; and very evident new, extremely large scale industrial, residential and commercial buildings under construction. And the residential buildings are huge, and in huge numbers.....they don't build just 2 apartment towers at a time, they build 12!!Our guide Nelson said he had read recently that the entire area we passed through over the course of an hour and a half train ride would simply be an extension of the suburbs of Shanghai by 2020, considering the current growth-rate of Shanghai. Scary, but probably true, especially as we had visited the Shanghai Urban Planning Museum two days prior and could barely grasp the scale of growth they are projecting.Before we arrived in Hangzhou there was a distinct architectural change; bizarre, vaguely Russian-Orthodox style turrets graced the roofs of new homes, that we understood were built by farmers whose farms had been bought out by developers (or the government), who built their "disney-esque" fantasy castles cheek by jowl by the dozens.And if this train isn't quick enough, we could see construction of the rail-bed for a maglev train, scheduled for completion between the two cities in 2012. A bone of contention by some, who feel the clean, fast, high speed rail currently in use is more than adequate. Stimulus in China sometimes amounts to spending government money on projects whether needed or not!
CASUDI on a train in CHINA 12 November
