After a busman’s lunch (on the bus!), the next time-wasting activity on the agenda at Lǚshùn was a boat ride arranged for its own sake. We filed out of the tour bus and aboard an old boat and handed a slim satchel of sausage (prompting an instant misunderstanding: I thought the paltry offering of protein was for us to consume on the ride). The boat, carrying fifty or sixty Chinese nationals and myself, charted an oblong-shaped course, going out one side of the harbour and then returning the other thirty minutes later.

I have no notion of, nor was I enlightened as to what the purpose of the boat ride was. We were shown no notable sights or landmarks, saw nothing but empty stretches of water inhabited by other passing vessels some engaged in the same futile, unspecified mission as ourselves. All this leads me to conclude that the purpose was a nihilistic one, an existential muse on nothingness…or perhaps the real reason lay in the small portion of meat we were all given at the start. Everyone else on the boat quickly divested themselves of their piece overboard where it was gratefully snapped up by the swarming flock of seagulls which had been shadowing our boat’s course. With nothing else to do I duly followed suit. Clearly, the the boat trip was part of a supplementary feeding program for the local colony of seagulls in Lǚshùn.

In a twinkle we shape-shifted from clueless, futile wanderers in the Yellow Sea to gimlet-eyed consumers on a warehouse shopping junket. We were enticed with sparkling opals, beads and precious other gemstones. In a showroom an adolescent Chinese “Joe the Gadget Man” sales dude went through a “show and tell” routine demonstrating how either genuine the precious stones were or how expensive they, I couldn’t be sure which. The Chinese tour party seemed quite engrossed by his highly animated showy spiel, to me it was all a bit ho-humdrum. We moved to the food section of the building where we inspected rows of the dried fish delicacies and all manner of other comestibles that Chinese consumers like to stock up on in large quantities.

Our final Lǚshùn stop to waste an hour or so was the saddest experience of the day. It involved a trip to a Chinese “drive through” zoo. Not an enlightened zoo like Western Plains Zoo which places the animals’ welfare and happiness at a high premium by allowing them the distance, space and relative freedom to move – as only an open plains environment can do. No, this was more like the bad old western zoos of the 1960s which doubled down on confinement and captivity, corralling the creatures, mainly here Eurasian bears of various kinds and a few tigers, into tiny, unsanitary cages, so they could be stared at through the bars. Bored and immobile, they were pathetic sights.

The only animals given a bit of space and exercise were the zoo’s Bengal tigers and tigresses. These big cats were allowed to prowl round a dusty strip of turf, albeit a fairly restricted one. We, the humans, were permitted to take photos as we circled round the mainly listless tigers from a good, safe distance. Occasionally an attendant would throw them slabs of meat from a truck.

The last of the animals on display for the public’s enjoyment were a pair of large brown bears. Ostensibly, they were better off than their caged compatriots because they were sitting in a large pond of water. But I think that was just for the benefit of paying customers, so they can see them frolicking in a riverine environment. When the gates close for the day I suspect they get shuffled back into their 4 x 3 cages. In any case the water quality in the pond didn’t look all that flash, it looked a bit dirty, and this was not helped by visitors in the buses chucking water bottles into the pond to get the Ursus arctos to stand up so they can take better photos.

Having wasted enough time in Lǚshùn, some enjoyable, some so-so, we started back to Dalian and our digs at the ubiquitous Jinjiang Inn.

Footnote: there was one more time-waster thrown up by the tour on returning to Dalian. We stopped off at the “Dalian Bathing Beach” for a quick “Bo-peep”…the Dalian beach scene has got a bit of a reputation, sometimes described as “the Miami of Asia”. If this small beach is anything to go by, the sand quality looked decidedly more like unappealing pebbly Brighton Beach than golden sands Miami (with wall-to-wall portable beach huts replacing the British beach’s trademark reclining chairs). The park adjoining the beach was actually more interesting with its range of seaside-inspired sculptures. An on-site kiosk※ supplied all the sand buckets and shovels, inflatable toys and plastic balls any intrepid Chinese surf-adventurer might need. My attention was drawn to the large map sign and it’s list of beach regulations, most notably the rule forbidding “the removal of sand without permission” and the one discriminating against beachgoers who have various serious ailments by denying them (together with the inebriated) the right to swim at the (public) beach.

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※ the sign on the kiosk’s wall “No tea, no fun!” gives us a pointer to the type of wild, swinging beach parties the locals must get up to…absolute chai-fuelled beach-mania raves no doubt