Graham visited Yiwu market last year and was amazed by it. Ever since he has told me "you have to see it to believe it" so we made sure to visit Yiwu on this trip. Even though he had told me about its size, it was still astounding.
We flew via Kunming Airlines from Chongqing. Fortunately, we left our hotel earlier than planned, as the trip to the airport took longer than the concierge estimated. On the basis that whether you're sitting in e hotel or the airport you are still waiting we decided that we'd leave early. There weren't too many hold ups with the traffic so I think the concierge may have been an optimist.
In the streets of Chongqing we saw a real mix of Chinese people, all ages, types, and socio economic backgrounds but we didn't see many Westerners. Everywhere we went, people stared at us with serious faces. If we smiled or said hello in Chinese we might get a nod, but not the usual smile or reply in turn. At the airport it was lovely to run into people who smiled at us and seemed delighted to try out their English on us. I guess they are more used to dealing with people of different nationalities.
Yiwu was a total contrast. Because this is a commercial marketplace, there are people from around the world here buying commodities to sell in their own countries. As a result, we didn't feel like outsiders. Everywhere we went people were saying hello, in Chinese or English.
Of course, the taxi driver tried to rip us off by offering to take us for three times the actual fare. It's such an irritation, as it happens over and over again. We ended up paying the price that was on the meter, which felt like a major victory. The hotel was lovely. We had a room on the top floor, which gave us a great view. It came complete with computer and fax machine. Obviously a lot of business is done at the hotel. It's located at the market so is an ideal location for buyers.
We dropped our bags and headed off into the market. I'll add a map into the blog to show you the size of the place. We went in through the entry at Hall 2. It was enormous, a huge cavernous space. You could see that there had been shops around the edges, but they were stripped out. Without being able to ask, there's no way to know if the businesses have relocated to the newly built sections of the market or if they have closed due to the economy. Once we went into the market place proper, there were stalls everywhere. My first introduction to the markets was the "tools" section. Graham's testerone levels immediately rose as he made contact with his inner toolman. I immediately checked the floor plan for more interesting products!
Navigating the hall looked easy. There were six, no seven streets I told Graham. He laughed at me! I pointed to the signs. We were on the second floor of five with Streets 1 - 6 and one marked middle street West. He beckoned me over to the end of the hall and around the corner, on the other side, there were streets 7 - 12 and middle street East. 14 streets across this section and stalls up and down as far as I could see in each direction. The building curves, so you can't see the whole way. I then looked at the stall numbers. I was in the middle of hall 2 and the stalls already numbered over ten thousand. The highest number I saw, over in Hall 5, was over 67000.
While the stalls varied in size, they seemed to average about 2.5 to 3 m wide. They were jam packed with products of all kinds. In e tool section there were stalls that only sold tape - duct tape, packing tape, sticky tape, electrical tape. Other stalls sold scissors, others had wrenches and socket sets. In the stationery section I thought I saw a stall selling pasta then realised they were displaying 25 kg sacks of rubber bands. We saw stalls that sold supermarket shopping trolleys and generators.
I enjoyed some sections more than others. The luggage section, with handbags, pursers, backpacks and suitcases, was fun. We bought Graham a really good quality set of two suitcases for 1200 yuan ~$185 Australian. We could have bought a 3 piece set for under 400 yuan, but we decided to go for better quality for our money. We'd looked at good suitcases before we left home and knew we were getting a real bargain.
We wandered through the toy section, which was a lot of fun. Again, so much choice. The stall holders start packing up at 4 pm, and our feet were killing us, so we decided it was a good time to head back to the hotel. I was pleased that I'd covered quite a lot of ground at the market place, but I later realised that I'd only been in halls one and two. There were three more to go!
We had been given a complimentary coffee voucher on arrival at the hotel, so we relaxed in comfort in the Executive Lounge. Sitting down was simply wonderful. After all the walking on the cruise and then in Chongqing and Yiwu, it was bliss.
After a rest we headed off to the night markets. Apparently we'd picked the taxi changeover time and were going to have to wait for an hour for a taxi at the hotel. We decided to go for a short walk. Next thing, a rickshaw driver approached us with his motorized rickshaw. We struck a deal for him to take us to the night markets for 25 yuan. We climbed in and it was on. I was hanging on to Graham tightly. The driver wound his way through traffic, over pavements, into narrow gaps, down the wrong side of the road. At one stage Graham warned me to keep my fingers inside the railing I was hanging on to for dear life as it looked like we'd be scraping past trees, fences and cars. Somehow, the driver squeezed through without damaging anything. He did have to walk the rickshaw at one stage. It was like being in a Fred Flintstone car.
He dropped us at the night markets. It was too early, which we'd known, but Graham navigated his way back to the hotel where he'd first stayed in Yiwu, and we found a restaurant nearby for dinner. We chose a restaurant with ducks hanging in the window and wood stacked outside. There were feathers in the doorway and the ducks were prepared and cooked in the window. We ventured in to find that the staff seemed like a gaggle of trainees. They hovered over us as we looked at the menu, and it seemed a team effort was required to take our order. When Graham ordered beer the bottle arrived but no glass to drink it with. A young waiter carried a couple of jugs from the kitchen, swinging them blithely, leaving a trail of water behind him. It was quite amusing.
The food was delicious. One of the dishes we ordered wasn't available, but no opportunity to order a replacement was offered. I would have liked a different vegetable dish for the variety but decided it was all going to be too hard to explain. As ever, there was plenty of food so we certainly didn't suffer as a result.
We bumped into a couple of Aussies in the lift at the hotel. I knew they were Aussies as they smiled and said hello. We saw them again in the street. They'd been dropped off at that end of the district and had no idea where to find the night markets, which were about five minutes walk away. We gave them directions, thinking we'd never see them again, but we kept bumping into them. Graham helped them out with an introduction to an agent to assist them to freight some purchases home to Adelaide, and we finally discovered their names - Jenny and Ryan. We ended up having dinner with them on Tuesday night, a lovely meal in the Western restaurant at the hotel. Quite seriously, I didn't want to walk any further than the lobby after spending Tuesday on my feet. I must have walked for a good 5.5 hours.
We also bumped into some fellow Aussies in the night markets. Graham and the guy struck up a conversation while I was buying my jewellery. The wife took the opportunity to do some jewellery shopping of her own.They were a Chinese-Australian couple from Sydney. We bumped into them again the next day near hall 1. It was amazing to bump into anyone we knew, however slightly, given the size of the place and the number of people that were there.
On the Tuesday, we aimed to get from one end of the markets to the other. We found the grand entrance at Hall 4. It was new when Graham was here a year ago and Hall 5 was not yet built. We got some great photos of a model of the complex as well as views from the outside of hall 4 and the end of hall 5. A large part of Hall 5 was empty and they were still fitting out parts of level 4 and all of level 5. What's amazing is that it will probably all be fully tenanted the next time Graham visits.
We then made our way to the end of Hall 1. We did make a purchase half way through, which we dropped off in the hotel as it was too heavy to carry around with us. We managed to buy a box strapping tool. There I was, with all sorts of serious shopping opportunities, and I handed over cash for a box strapping tool.
We worked out we'd been on our feet for four and a half hours when we finally stopped for a rest. If we'd stopped earlier we would never have made it back to the end of Hall 1. After half an hour I was ready to go again, as i did want to buy a handbag or two and a few hats. I left Graham in the hotel room and headed off into the markets again. It took me half an hour of quick walking just to get to the hat section. After all that I didn't end up buying any, as the stalls that sold the types of hat I liked didn't have signs up saying that they would sell at retail. I wasn't up to trying to talk them into selling me just one. I headed back to the hotel room.
It was already after four, so I didn't expect any bags places to be open. There were quite a few still open, but again, the ones that said they had stock didn't have the handbags I was interested in. I think I was overtired too, which meant that all I really wanted to do was get off my feet. I was pleased though that I'd had the courage to venture into the market on my own without Graham as back up.
It's probably just as well that I didn't buy too much in Yiwu. I still have to pick up my new clothes from the fabric market in Shanghai and work out how to get them all home. We're going to pack a suitcase with my old clothes and send it back to Australia via post or a parcel service. Graham is going to ask Jack to help us out with that. It will also solve the problem of how to get the box strapping tool back home. It's fairly heavy, and isn't something Graham would want to be lugging around China with him for the next four weeks.
The one thing that was disappointing about our stay in Yiwu was the television. We had HBO movies in English, but they were all dreadful! :-(
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