Once I stayed in a gently decaying hotel in the Chinese seaside resort of Beidaihe. It was a nice place although everything was falling apart. There was green mould growing on the walls of our room, the shower didn't work - all the usual stuff. There was an empty swimming pool in the garden full of broken tiles and surrounded by waist-high grass and wild flowers.There was also an over-grown grotto made from concrete and shells. At one time water had flowed through twisting concrete channels, over little waterfalls and under pretty little bridges. The channels were cracked and dry and full of dead leaves. My friend Javier and I thought it was great as we were there to watch migrant birds. We only had to fall out of bed when the alarm went off at six-thirty then hang around the pool or the grotto. We saw a load of different little warblers without venturing out of the hotel grounds. When we did venture out, we went to the seaside sand flats and shrimp ponds, or explored the gardens along the promenade. Unlike India, where I have birded on numerous occasions and often had to flee the crowds of people who wanted to look through my binoculars, the people around Beidaihe completely ignored us. They were very polite if we needed something and asked, but otherwise we could set up our telescope within two metres of a clam-digger and he wouldn't even look up to see what we were doing. That sounds too close, I know, but since the clam diggers worked about four metres apart, we had no other choice.
We did notice one similarity with birding in India when we visited Lighthouse Point, which we quickly agreed should be renamed Shitehouse Point after the wall-to-wall turds. Much of the open ground around the harbour doubled as a toilet.
- Macbean! What are you doing talking about turds in a cook book?
Okay, I'm sorry. I'll just add that Lighthouse point was where we saw our first Black-browed Reed Warbler and the concentration involved in tracking it through the undergrowth was what caused me to step on the land mine which drew our attention to the area's less pleasant features.
After a hard twelve-hour day's birding, snacking on weird fried vegetable chips dusted with chemicals, Javier and I would head to the hotel restaurant to unwind. The decor here was in keeping with the rest of the place - stained table cloths and walls that looked as if they were covered with expensive flock wallpaper but which was probably an extensive covering of mould. The food, however, was excellent.
In Beijing I had asked a woman who spoke English to write 'I am vegetarian' in my notebook in Chinese characters. I later found out what she actually wrote was, 'I am a vegetable-eating person.' but it did the trick. Once I had directed the waitresses' attention to the page in my notebook, she would point to something on the menu and I would nod enthusiastically, then we would repeat the process until I figured I had ordered enough food. It was generally pleasantly surprising to investigate what turned up on the table. For drinks we would go behind the bar and point to a bottle then hold up fingers for one or two. Easy stuff.
This sauce was part of a starter, poured over par-boiled bamboo shoots. I couldn't find bamboo shoots at home so I used baby corn the first time and then a mixture of sliced raw vegetables - cabbage, carrot and cucumber.
Chop the garlic finely or crush it, then mix all the ingredients together. The sauce will take on a stiff consistency. Add a few drops of water and stir it in, repeating the process until the sauce has a creamy consistency. Now you can experiment by pouring it over different vegetable combinations.