|
Also in this issue...
01 |
02 |
03 |
04 |
05 |
06 |
07 |
08 |
09 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
Featured Companies
|
|
|
Extreme Travel
| Kerry Herndon
|
 
|
|
|
>> Published Date: 6/25/2012
|
|
|
 I have just returned from a two-week trip to the Far East. Using airline miles, the trip was very low cost. It’s been three years since I was last in China. Things change so fast in that economy that it’s always startling to see. The trip was well planned, as there were many stops in a short time span. Traveling from Washington-Dulles Airport to Beijing then Shanghai took about 26 hours. There is a hotel inside the Shanghai Airport, which was good because I arrived about 1:30 a.m. and had an early morning flight to Qingdao.
All of my internal flights and hotel reservations were made on a Chinese travel website, www.ctrip.com. The flights and hotels were very reasonably priced. Most flights were around $100. Each of the companies I visited arranged to pick me up at the airport and book local hotels. The first stop was a factory that manufactures wet pad and greenhouse fans. It is one thing to find what you think is a factory on Google and quite another to actually find the real factory. This is why I like to visit the factory and make sure it’s a real factory. I expect to save more than 10 times the whole cost of the trip just by ordering directly from the Chinese factory. The factory was about four hours from the airport. So, the next day they took me back to the airport for a flight to Nanjing to visit an old ceramics supplier three hours from the airport. Because I arrived late in the day the supplier dropped me off at the hotel, a Howard Johnson. It was like no Howard Johnson I have ever seen, and quite possibly the best hotel I have ever stayed in.
I walked around the city for a little while and was very impressed by the huge number of battery-powered scooters. This means of transportation was by far the dominant way of getting around. In this city they have gone electric overwhelmingly. At a small restaurant I clearly was having difficulty communicating so a 9-year-old girl walked up and said in perfect English, “May I help you?” There are almost more Chinese learning English today than there are Americans alive. This particular city is a major center for ceramics production. It’s where the Chinese come to buy fine purple clay teapots. They also are the largest producers of ceramic roof tiles in the country, with exports all over the world. These low-temperature tiles are produced in coal-fired kilns. The government has informed the hundreds of factories that as of the end of this year they will no longer be able to produce using coal. That means hundreds of factories will close.
The factory I was visiting produces a huge amount of roof tiles and also products I purchase using natural gas-fired kilns. They will only have to close 70% of their capacity. At the end of my tour and selection of products for future shipments they took me the three hours back to the Nanjing airport for my flight to the Guangzhou airport. I booked a hotel inside the airport. Upon arrival I found my way to the hotel and, after having been in the countryside for a few days, was shocked to see the high prices on everything. Fortunately, there is a metro station in the airport just minutes from the hotel. The first stop was a 50-cent fare to the outskirts of the great city with a bustling commercial street where it was easy to find lots to do, see and eat.
Because of a planning error I had a whole un-booked day in Guangzhou. I paid for it the next day as I had an early-morning flight to Meizhou and a three-hour drive to Dabu, a two-hour factory visit and back to the airport to Guangzhou for a four-hour wait for my flight to Bangkok, Thailand.
Thailand is my favorite destination for both the fabulous food and wonderful people. I was hoping to address the shortage of dendrobiums, but since 100 million plants were lost in the floods the shortage will continue. We will have to accelerate the production of these plants in our own lab.
This is what I call an efficient trip. Virginia would be proud. GP
Kerry Herndon owns and operates Kerry’s Bromeliad Nursery in Homestead, Florida. He can be reached at kherndon@kerrys.com.
|
|
© Copyright 2001 - 2013 Ball Publishing —
|
|
|
|
|