(15/12/2006-2/1/2007)
From Nanning the scenery remained much the same, karst formations all the way to Hanoi, although the vegetation was now a bit more tropical looking. Our bus took us to the border which we then had to walk across to another bus after having a health check consisting of us paying a few yuan and getting a ticket. The fields we passed we now smaller, there were plenty of people in conical straw hats, far more motorbikes, less cars, the writing was in western script rather than characters (though we still couldn't understand any of it), there was similarly bad music on the bus, and every now and again we would pass bizarre colonial style building, several storeys high, looking like they'd been stolen from a street of attached houses in the South of France and dropped on their own in the middle of a field. Some were still being built, so obviously this was the Vietnamese style of architecture. Eventually we arrived in Hanoi and for simplicity took the first hotel that was offered to us (by a girl on the bus), which turned out to be pretty good, with hot water, a DVD player in the room (though we found it didn't work), satellite TV and free internet. We had a walk about, and then to make sure our first meal was good so as not to ruin our first impressions of the country, we ate at a fairly expensive restaurant, ordering a delicious seafood steamboat (which everywhere else called hotpot).
Our first day was a rest day, so we did nothing except sleep, internet and eat beef noodles, which were pretty good. Papa had sent me a list of buildings that my great-grandfather (on the French side) had designed when he was the chief architect for the occupying French, so the next day we went looking for them, first following the train tracks that went straight through the streets with no barriers to the station. This had been all modernised so didn't look to great, but as a World War and Civil War had passed through the country, along with decades of modernisation, that and the prison were the only two buildings we could find the first day. There were plenty of other colonial buildings, but their roles may have changed since they were built, and many were embassies guarded by plainclothes agents that told you off if you tried to take a photo. We did see a police station with a copy of Sherlock Holmes on the desk though. Having walked around for a while we went to the park for ice cream and bought a (cheap, photocopied, illegal pirate) copy of the Lonely Planet South-East Asia on a Shoestring guidebook, then finished the afternoon with tea and pain au chocolat in a nearby rooftop café.
In Russia I missed the chance to see Lenin, and in China I missed Mao, so I thought I should try to see at least one pickled Communist leader, but Uncle Ho's mausoleum was closed, so we just had our photos taken outside it. We did see the presidential palace though, which my great-grandfather designed, and then the Temple of Literature that after China seemed refreshingly unrestored and genuine. We followed this with a meal including Christmas pudding and some shopping for our trip to Halong Bay booked for the next day. Unfortunately though we ate at the night market, making the mistake of not eating where all the locals ate, so I got food poisoning and spent the next day in bed, and only felt marginally better the day after. We both posted boxes of stuff home so as not to carry it and then went to the rooftop café again where Sally had "mango macerated with milk". I could only manage eating potato salad that day though.
Two days later then planned then we went on our cruise in Halong Bay. It was a few hours bus ride then we changed to our boat, which was a reasonably sized "traditional" style ship (all done up for tourists of course) with about 10 other people aboard, plus staff etc. The cabin was small but pretty nice too. It was a nice sunny day, there was a bit of mist but not too much, after China it seemed much clearer and warmer. Halong Bay is famous for all its islands, which are basically the same as the landscape around Yangshuo, but in the sea, so it was very nice. After cruising around for a while, having our photos taken with the captain who seemed very friendly, we were dropped on one of the islands to see a cave. This would have been a very impressive cave, if they hadn't ruined it with ridiculous lighting, draining the floor and concreting it and the ceiling, completely destroying its natural beauty. It was quite funny though. From there we went to an area where some people went kayaking, though we didn't because my hand still hurt quite a bit from Songpan, then the boat dropped anchor in an area with pretty much the whole fleet of tourist ships as the sun set. Dinner was almost exactly the same as lunch, which was OK, but then most of the evening was taken up with me and Sally arguing with the crew because we hadn't got change for our beer at lunch, assuming that they'd let us have beer later instead, but they claimed we hadn't paid. It was all pretty daft, especially when the captain got angry as it had nothing to do with him. Anyway, towards the end we just ignored them and played Scrabblecards with some of the other tourists.
At 8.20 the next morning we were dropped off at another island to climb up a hill where we got a 360 degree view of the bay, and then we slowly cruised back to the harbour, passing various rocks that allegedly looked like heads or fighting cocks, or anything else you wanted them to look like, and also floating houses, which weren't houseboats but looked like just houses with verandas stuck on floats. Lunch was at a restaurant in the town, and was very similar to the other meals we'd had, but then they were all included so we didn't really expect anything spectacular, and then it was a minibus back to Hanoi to pick up our luggage and get a bus to our next destination. Unfortunately Sally felt ill now, but didn't want to stay in Hanoi any longer so we got the bus anyway. As we waited for the bus to fill up there was a very loud and annoying American guy, joined by several other idiotic foreign tourists, who complained that the bus didn't leave on time, and then that they were over filling it with people sitting in the aisle and so on. They had clearly forgotten that this was Vietnam.
I don't think either of us slept much on the bus as it was noisy and uncomfortable, as were nearly all the night buses we took in South-East Asia. The bus was a jump-on jump-off tourist bus all the way down the Vietnam coast, which meant that we had to get off at Hue and hang around for a few hours to get the next one to Hoi An where we wanted to go. It was a nice enough town to wait around in, though we saw hardly any of it as we spent all our time sat by the Perfume River so Sally could recover a bit. Apparently on the bus to Hoi An we passed lots of nice beaches, but as usual I was asleep so missed it. Once there we went on a bit of a quest for a cheap hotel with an Australian couple, but ended up getting the one we'd started off at, then we went for a meal by the river consisting entirely of starters: the local dish "white rose" which is a bit like an open spring roll, spring rolls, and wonton soup.
The next day we had to change hotel as they were booked out, and as it was Christmas Eve we decided to pay a little bit more for a nice one with a friendly Chow Yun Fat lookalike guy working there, and then went walking around down. It was all fairly old and rundown colonial buildings, although full of tourist shops, and every other one seemed to be a tailor, so if we go back I'll get a bunch of clothes made. This time though we just both got hats with red stars on and I got a Tintin T-shirt, then we spent the rest of the day eating, as is traditional. There were lots of nice restaurants with good seafood, so we started with crab (I had mine steamed with ginger), and followed it with grilled duck, and finished at another place with delicious French-style mango and chocolate cakes. Christmas Day we also spent eating all day, with a few breaks to phone family and sleep. We started with white rose and spring rolls with mango juice and a coconut, followed by seafood hot pot with cocktails and then mango sorbet and coconut ice cream accompanied by a lime beer and an almond beer, then after a break we had steamed duck and vegetables with beer and wine, and finished the evening with mango and strawberry cakes from the same place we had the night before, with cocktails, then had to collapse on the bed from eating too much.
For our final day in Hoi An we decided to do something more than just eat, so we got motorcycle taxis to the My Son ruins. This is a complex of temples out in the jungle built by an ancient Vietnamese culture, and as there weren't too many tourists and it was still surrounded by jungle it looked very cool, and felt much more like a historic sites than most of the ones in China. After that we found a nice little café tucked away by a fountain near our hotel and had ice coffee with sweetened condensed milk (it's delicious and everywhere in South-East Asia), got some sandwiches in baguettes from one of the little sandwich making stalls they have everywhere in Vietnam, and got on our night bus to Nha Trang. It wasn't quite as crowded as the other night bus, but still not pleasant, so we didn't get alot of sleep before arriving in Nha Trang in the early hours. As we had got in the habit of doing, we left our bags at the office or hotel we were dropped at and then went looking for a hotel, as that way we attracted fewer touts. Once we had a room and had breakfast we set off for a walk.
Nha Trang is an alright city, nothing special really, though it is right by the beach, and has lots of tourist agencies organising diving and boat trips. We didn't bother with any of them, and spent the first day wandering around by foot, first to a big Buddha on a hill for a view and to get pestered by beggar children (I gave one of them the weird Korean thing the Russian girl had given me in St Petersburg as she hadn't replied to my emails since I told her I was an atheist in response to her crazy Christian ranting), then went for a snooze on the beach after lunch. Just next to the beach is the Yersin museum that I visited on instructions from home because apparently apart from doing lots of medical research himself, especially about the plague, Yersin also stole some from one of my ancestors and claimed it as his own. It was pretty interesting anyway, and after that we had ice cream and I got my haircut by one of the street barbers that you find on the corners of Vietnamese cities, as you can see from the photos Sally took. The guy next to me was even having his ears cleaned! For dinner we had blood clams and eel, which was remarkably close to the vegetarian version I'd tried in China. The next day we rented a motorbike as Sally can ride, and intended to go looking for Suoi Giao where my family used to have a house, but no one knew where it was and it wasn't on the map, so instead we went for a nice drive along the coast, coming back in the evening to get our bus to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon as it is still also known as).
The first day in Saigon was spent first looking for a hotel as we arrived really early again and they all seemed to be full, then once we had somewhere, sleeping, eating then sleeping. The next day was a bit more productive as in the morning we'd booked to go to the Cu Chi Tunnels, used by the VietCong during the war. Or so they claimed, but this was a stupid touristy outing, the bus stopped at a souvenir place even before we'd left the city, then our guide told us that they were the rubbish tunnels built for tourists and that there were some much better ones somewhere else, and it generally felt like a kind of VietCong World. Attractions included looking at boobytraps as used by the VietCong, bad moving models of VietCong, a destroyed American tank, some tunnels you could go in (possibly original, more likely recreated), and having a go on a rifle range if you felt like it (we didn't). Once we got back to the city, we had burgers then went in search of the house my grandma and great aunt used to live in when they were children, but all the street names had changed, and most of the buildings looked pretty new, so alot were presumably destroyed in the war or knocked down for modernisation. Anyway, we couldn't find it or the palace we went looking for on our way back, although we did have a nice chat with a student wanting to practice his English. We also passed a park that on the way had old people dancing in, and then later when we came back had people speed walking in a circuit.
The next day, New Year's Eve, we left on a "cruise" up the Mekong. This turned out to not be a cruise, as we stayed in hotels and got on several different boats. The first stay began in Mytho, in the Delta, and was the worst, because our idiot of a tour guide made those of us going for more than just the day tour cart our huge backpacks around all day, even though we came back to the same place as we had started, including on tiny boats only one person wide. It was also a pretty pointless, typical touristy tour of places built specifically for tourists, although it wasn't all bad, the coconut toffee was pretty nice, and going in the little boat would have been fun if we hadn't had our backpacks. Once we got back to the shore though, we thankfully were put on a different tour with a different guide, a hilariously camp guy called Hung who enjoyed singing to us and made jokes that were actually funny. After a short ride in a crowded minibus we were dropped and had time for ice cream before being put on a different bus with the same guide, which was bigger but a Spanish guy and I still had to sit on the floor (it was Vietnam after all). The day finished rather better though, as Hung took as all to a good restaurant where Sally and I finally tried snake (it was tiger snake apparently, and delicious, like really good chicken), and the town had a cool Uncle Ho statue surrounded by chain made up of stars. Then with the Spanish guy and a Swedish couple we went to a café and sat on the roof drinking cocktails until midnight with the other handful of foreigners in town, including some Germans and some other Aussies. As in Asia they use the lunar calendar, it wasn't New Year for them, so they turned off the lights and left at 11.30, which seemed a little odd.
New Year's Day was much better than the day before, as we got to see a real floating market, which was pretty interesting, and a traditional rice noddle factory that also had a pig, allowing our guide to give a hilarious explanation as to why they eat sows and not boars, involving the phrase "too much boom-boom make the meat smell" being repeated about 20 times. Sadly we then had to say goodbye to Hung as those of us taking the full three day tour into Cambodia got a bus to Chau Doc whilst everyone else went back to Saigon. Once we arrived, the Spanish guy, Sally and I were given a free lift to the base of a "mountain" (small hill) in a rickety motorbike trailer, and claimed it for a pretty stunning view of the Mekong plain at sunset, passing a monk playing foot-badminton (a popular game throughout Asia it seems, where people kick a feathery thing between each other trying to keep it airborne as long as possible).
The next day we got a boat to first a fish farm (not so exciting, people got to through food at the fish so they went wild and it looked like the water was boiling) and a Cham village (a Muslim minority group in Vietnam), then it was a long boat trip to the Cambodian border where we got our visas (and saw some bloody big spiders in the trees) and were put on a new boat. Along the shore of this last part of the boat trip, the settlements got more and more basic, particularly on the Cambodian side, where most of the house seemed to be built on stilts. All the kids here seemed ecstatic to see us, running down and jumping in the river, screaming "Hello! Hello!" and waving. Finally, a little after the sun had set we docked and were transferred to a bus for the 1 or 2hrs journey to Phnom Penh, eventually found a hotel and had a pretty good cheap dinner.
29 March 2007
20 March 2007
Yangzi River to Nanning
(3/12/2006-15/12/2006)
Early in the morning of the first day the boat docked at the "Ghost City". Following everyone else up a steep hill we found ourselves in a pretty uninspiring restored temple complex. Once we came down again and took the left fork, we found where we should have gone: the "Ghost Palace". If anything this was even more ridiculously restored, but here there were cool demons , all the souvenir stores had Halloween masks, and inside there was a display like a much more over the top and expensive version of the Chengdu ghost house, although not as fun. We could also see some dark steps leading up to a closed off area that looked alot more interesting and old, but didn't have time to go up to see it. After that we spent the rest of the day drinking beer on the boat, until in the evening we arrived at a temple that had hilariously tacky neon lights adorning it. Back on the boat we were treated to the only film that they seemed to have, which played repeatedly throughout the voyage (when there wasn't any karaoke or tourism trailers): the Chow Yun Fat Hong Kong action classic, "God Of Gamblers' Return".
The next day was gorge day, the first of the three we saw from the main boat, then transferred to a smaller boat to see the Little Three Gorges, which were pretty impressive, although somewhat spoiled by the continuous (really, non-stop, except for when someone disconnected the speaker) high pitched sales chatter in Chinese. Unsurprisingly, we also had a couple of stops at places built specifically to sell tourist tat and you could if you like pay to have a bad photo taken of you at strategic spots. For the last part of this side expedition we were moved to small roofed boats 4 people wide, which meant those of us in the middle couldn't see anything, although apparently there were monkeys, and some Chinese guide chattered away and sang. The Chinese tourist experience was all pretty kitsch and tacky, but you had to laugh, otherwise you'd keep whinging constantly, like the two Irish women on the trip. They were right about alot of the things they complained about, but after a while it got pretty tiresome.
That was it for the day, and pretty much for the cruise. There were more gorges the next day, which we viewed from our room, but they weren't really that impressive. Maybe they were before they built the dam, or maybe I've been spoilt by seeing the Grand Canyon. Anyway, we could have paid to go and see the dam (which a Polish guy encouraged us to see as it is "one of the great engineering disasters of our time") but we decided to just get the bus to Yichang so we could find a hotel and get train tickets for the next day to the Zhangzhajie National Park. Yichang was nothing special, although we did get a great stir fry meal in the street for 4yuan. For both of us. That's about 13p each.
We travelled hard seat to Zhangzhajie City with the two Irish women, arriving at night and having to run the gauntlet of touts who wanted to take us on tours or hotels, but eventually found a hotel. Unfortunately, due to language problems, the girl at reception seemed to tell us that there was only one bus to the village where the park was and it left at 5.30 in the morning, when really there were loads of buses, it was the bus station that opened then. So we had to get up stupidly early to get the bus, and once in the village had to get rid of another load of touts by going to the most expensive hotel and asking them if there were cheaper ones. Luckily a young man working there wanted to practice his English, so phoned up the only other hotel open, then walked us over there, showed us the rooms and negotiated the price for us before going back to work!
Anyway, we then went and got our insanely overpriced (by Chinese standards) ticket, which we then had to be fingerprinted for to enter the park. If anyone wants to go there, don't bother paying, other than the main gates there didn't seem to be any fence stopping you just in, just don't get caught. The scenery was pretty spectacular though, despite the fog and drizzle which really only added to the effect, which was something very close to what you can see in many traditional Chinese paintings, making the huge great limestone pillars look more mysterious. As to be expected, there were some funny signs. One explaining how a particular rock looked like two turtles mating where "one raises its head gladly and the other bears the weight willingly, and you must remember that they are playing and touring" or something like that. Another we thought was a mistake as it claimed the path we were about to walk on was a "bodybuilding" path, but it turned out that this meant it featured stepping stones and other activities.
Later in the day we managed to get lost. After climbing up a bunch of steps, we assumed we could follow the road down, as we had no map, but it turned out that you couldn't. After much difficulty, and with the light fading, we found the only way down was to pay (again) to take a glass lift that they had built in the cliff face (only in China!), which did give as a good view. From the bottom we were told to take first one bus, and then another, but people must have misunderstood where we wanted to go, because we ended up in a different town to where our hotel was. The Irish women, convinced they had been cheated insisted on constantly banging on about this, rather than trying to find a way back. We tried the police, and again they kept repeating they'd been cheated, and when they called a taxi saying they would take us to the village for 100 yuan they decided the cops were trying to cheat us too.
Maybe they were, but we were then stuck in a strange town trying to flag someone down and explain to them where we wanted to go. Eventually a minivan stopped, and although they didn't speak English, they took us to the school where an English teacher could talk to us. It turned out that they were the school bus, and for 200 yuan they would take us where we wanted to go, which turned out to be a pretty fair price really, as they had to go along windy mountain roads in the dark and fog. The Irish women were still complaining, saying they would go to the customer complaints officer the next day or something, but me and Sally decided to lie in and then had a nice quite walk on our own in the park the next morning up and down a mountain (or "fantsatic mounpain" as the poster in the office in Chongqing had called them) before getting the bus back to the city where we had already booked our onward train. Without the women it was much more relaxing, and at the station we were befriended by three Chinese girls who studied English and were going on the same train, who then escorted us to our carriage before running down to the other end of the train to theirs.
As the train approached Guilin the next day, we noticed that the air was a bit clearer, and we could see in the distance the tall, mountain like karst formations the area is famous for, though not as thin as those we'd just seen in the park. From Guilin we got a bus to the little town of Yangshuo in amongst the mountains, the centre of which is a hilarious island of Western tourism. We managed to find a really good room with the most amazingly powerful shower (the Bamboo Inn's new building, if anyone plans to go there), then had pizza and some of the really bad local beer. It didn't taste too bad or strong, but after only a couple we both passed out and woke up with a horrible hangover.
We got up late, so after breakfast/lunch we decided to go for a walk along the river. As we passed through the town though, who should be coming in the other direct but Luca! After 10 minutes of surprised greetings, we let him go find somewhere to stay (he managed to get a bed in a drafty dorm for 10RMB) and continued our walk out of town to some fields and woods where a tiny woman was walking her water buffalo. In the evening we had dinner with Luca and then later in a bar a small boy came in trying to sell us flowers, so Luca gave him a piggyback and ran through the streets trying to sell people flowers.
The next day we went on a cookery course. First we were shown around the local market where they had various vegetables, meats and live fish. There was also an area where they killed and prepared dogs, which I refused to go to but Sally went and had a look. After that we were taken to a farm house where they taught us and 4 others how to cook five very tasty dishes that we then ate: stuffed pumpkin flower, tofu ball and mushroom; chicken with cashews and chili; beer fish (a local dish); aubergine; and green vegetable. We spent the afternoon climbing some of the hills in the park, which also included a "lotus pond" that was just covered in green stuff. We ran into Luca again who was looking for somewhere to warm his bones, apparently.
For our last day we went for another walk in the opposite direction to before, through small villages, fields, past some ruins, to an area where in peak season they did demonstrations of cormorant fishing but not when we were there, although the cormorant guy still posed for us, then along a bamboo lined path that didn't seem to see too many other tourists, up to some huge stadium lights aimed at the mountains on the other side of the river. To finish our stay in Yangshuo we tried to do some shopping, but couldn't get the price of the Mao bags down low enough or decide what else we wanted, so instead we had a party with Luca and the randoms he'd managed to collect around him.
Our final destination in China was to be Nanning, which we reached by a super luxury bus with only three seats in each row, passing more karst formations all the way through the province of Guangxi. Even though we arrived a bit after the Vietnamese Consulate was meant to close, they still let us put in our passports to get visas for Vietnam, which we picked up the following evening. Nanning was actually a pretty nice city. Not a lot for tourists to do, but it as nice and spacious to wander around, plenty of trees, wide avenues, a river through the middle with pleasant parks to walk in, and the air was much clearer than any of the other major Chinese cities I'd been in. We tried to do some shopping again, but here there wasn't any tourist tat, so we ended up just getting some more tea jars (plastic jars that you put your tea leaves in, then on trains or in hotels or anywhere with hot water you add it and there's a gauze thing to stop the leaves going in you mouth and the lids are watertight, so everyone has them) and food for our bus trip into Vietnam the next day. To round off our visit to China nicely, we found an all-you-can-eat-and-drink buffet, which had pretty good food too. After that we went to bed, as the bus the next day left pretty early.
Early in the morning of the first day the boat docked at the "Ghost City". Following everyone else up a steep hill we found ourselves in a pretty uninspiring restored temple complex. Once we came down again and took the left fork, we found where we should have gone: the "Ghost Palace". If anything this was even more ridiculously restored, but here there were cool demons , all the souvenir stores had Halloween masks, and inside there was a display like a much more over the top and expensive version of the Chengdu ghost house, although not as fun. We could also see some dark steps leading up to a closed off area that looked alot more interesting and old, but didn't have time to go up to see it. After that we spent the rest of the day drinking beer on the boat, until in the evening we arrived at a temple that had hilariously tacky neon lights adorning it. Back on the boat we were treated to the only film that they seemed to have, which played repeatedly throughout the voyage (when there wasn't any karaoke or tourism trailers): the Chow Yun Fat Hong Kong action classic, "God Of Gamblers' Return".
The next day was gorge day, the first of the three we saw from the main boat, then transferred to a smaller boat to see the Little Three Gorges, which were pretty impressive, although somewhat spoiled by the continuous (really, non-stop, except for when someone disconnected the speaker) high pitched sales chatter in Chinese. Unsurprisingly, we also had a couple of stops at places built specifically to sell tourist tat and you could if you like pay to have a bad photo taken of you at strategic spots. For the last part of this side expedition we were moved to small roofed boats 4 people wide, which meant those of us in the middle couldn't see anything, although apparently there were monkeys, and some Chinese guide chattered away and sang. The Chinese tourist experience was all pretty kitsch and tacky, but you had to laugh, otherwise you'd keep whinging constantly, like the two Irish women on the trip. They were right about alot of the things they complained about, but after a while it got pretty tiresome.
That was it for the day, and pretty much for the cruise. There were more gorges the next day, which we viewed from our room, but they weren't really that impressive. Maybe they were before they built the dam, or maybe I've been spoilt by seeing the Grand Canyon. Anyway, we could have paid to go and see the dam (which a Polish guy encouraged us to see as it is "one of the great engineering disasters of our time") but we decided to just get the bus to Yichang so we could find a hotel and get train tickets for the next day to the Zhangzhajie National Park. Yichang was nothing special, although we did get a great stir fry meal in the street for 4yuan. For both of us. That's about 13p each.
We travelled hard seat to Zhangzhajie City with the two Irish women, arriving at night and having to run the gauntlet of touts who wanted to take us on tours or hotels, but eventually found a hotel. Unfortunately, due to language problems, the girl at reception seemed to tell us that there was only one bus to the village where the park was and it left at 5.30 in the morning, when really there were loads of buses, it was the bus station that opened then. So we had to get up stupidly early to get the bus, and once in the village had to get rid of another load of touts by going to the most expensive hotel and asking them if there were cheaper ones. Luckily a young man working there wanted to practice his English, so phoned up the only other hotel open, then walked us over there, showed us the rooms and negotiated the price for us before going back to work!
Anyway, we then went and got our insanely overpriced (by Chinese standards) ticket, which we then had to be fingerprinted for to enter the park. If anyone wants to go there, don't bother paying, other than the main gates there didn't seem to be any fence stopping you just in, just don't get caught. The scenery was pretty spectacular though, despite the fog and drizzle which really only added to the effect, which was something very close to what you can see in many traditional Chinese paintings, making the huge great limestone pillars look more mysterious. As to be expected, there were some funny signs. One explaining how a particular rock looked like two turtles mating where "one raises its head gladly and the other bears the weight willingly, and you must remember that they are playing and touring" or something like that. Another we thought was a mistake as it claimed the path we were about to walk on was a "bodybuilding" path, but it turned out that this meant it featured stepping stones and other activities.
Later in the day we managed to get lost. After climbing up a bunch of steps, we assumed we could follow the road down, as we had no map, but it turned out that you couldn't. After much difficulty, and with the light fading, we found the only way down was to pay (again) to take a glass lift that they had built in the cliff face (only in China!), which did give as a good view. From the bottom we were told to take first one bus, and then another, but people must have misunderstood where we wanted to go, because we ended up in a different town to where our hotel was. The Irish women, convinced they had been cheated insisted on constantly banging on about this, rather than trying to find a way back. We tried the police, and again they kept repeating they'd been cheated, and when they called a taxi saying they would take us to the village for 100 yuan they decided the cops were trying to cheat us too.
Maybe they were, but we were then stuck in a strange town trying to flag someone down and explain to them where we wanted to go. Eventually a minivan stopped, and although they didn't speak English, they took us to the school where an English teacher could talk to us. It turned out that they were the school bus, and for 200 yuan they would take us where we wanted to go, which turned out to be a pretty fair price really, as they had to go along windy mountain roads in the dark and fog. The Irish women were still complaining, saying they would go to the customer complaints officer the next day or something, but me and Sally decided to lie in and then had a nice quite walk on our own in the park the next morning up and down a mountain (or "fantsatic mounpain" as the poster in the office in Chongqing had called them) before getting the bus back to the city where we had already booked our onward train. Without the women it was much more relaxing, and at the station we were befriended by three Chinese girls who studied English and were going on the same train, who then escorted us to our carriage before running down to the other end of the train to theirs.
As the train approached Guilin the next day, we noticed that the air was a bit clearer, and we could see in the distance the tall, mountain like karst formations the area is famous for, though not as thin as those we'd just seen in the park. From Guilin we got a bus to the little town of Yangshuo in amongst the mountains, the centre of which is a hilarious island of Western tourism. We managed to find a really good room with the most amazingly powerful shower (the Bamboo Inn's new building, if anyone plans to go there), then had pizza and some of the really bad local beer. It didn't taste too bad or strong, but after only a couple we both passed out and woke up with a horrible hangover.
We got up late, so after breakfast/lunch we decided to go for a walk along the river. As we passed through the town though, who should be coming in the other direct but Luca! After 10 minutes of surprised greetings, we let him go find somewhere to stay (he managed to get a bed in a drafty dorm for 10RMB) and continued our walk out of town to some fields and woods where a tiny woman was walking her water buffalo. In the evening we had dinner with Luca and then later in a bar a small boy came in trying to sell us flowers, so Luca gave him a piggyback and ran through the streets trying to sell people flowers.
The next day we went on a cookery course. First we were shown around the local market where they had various vegetables, meats and live fish. There was also an area where they killed and prepared dogs, which I refused to go to but Sally went and had a look. After that we were taken to a farm house where they taught us and 4 others how to cook five very tasty dishes that we then ate: stuffed pumpkin flower, tofu ball and mushroom; chicken with cashews and chili; beer fish (a local dish); aubergine; and green vegetable. We spent the afternoon climbing some of the hills in the park, which also included a "lotus pond" that was just covered in green stuff. We ran into Luca again who was looking for somewhere to warm his bones, apparently.
For our last day we went for another walk in the opposite direction to before, through small villages, fields, past some ruins, to an area where in peak season they did demonstrations of cormorant fishing but not when we were there, although the cormorant guy still posed for us, then along a bamboo lined path that didn't seem to see too many other tourists, up to some huge stadium lights aimed at the mountains on the other side of the river. To finish our stay in Yangshuo we tried to do some shopping, but couldn't get the price of the Mao bags down low enough or decide what else we wanted, so instead we had a party with Luca and the randoms he'd managed to collect around him.
Our final destination in China was to be Nanning, which we reached by a super luxury bus with only three seats in each row, passing more karst formations all the way through the province of Guangxi. Even though we arrived a bit after the Vietnamese Consulate was meant to close, they still let us put in our passports to get visas for Vietnam, which we picked up the following evening. Nanning was actually a pretty nice city. Not a lot for tourists to do, but it as nice and spacious to wander around, plenty of trees, wide avenues, a river through the middle with pleasant parks to walk in, and the air was much clearer than any of the other major Chinese cities I'd been in. We tried to do some shopping again, but here there wasn't any tourist tat, so we ended up just getting some more tea jars (plastic jars that you put your tea leaves in, then on trains or in hotels or anywhere with hot water you add it and there's a gauze thing to stop the leaves going in you mouth and the lids are watertight, so everyone has them) and food for our bus trip into Vietnam the next day. To round off our visit to China nicely, we found an all-you-can-eat-and-drink buffet, which had pretty good food too. After that we went to bed, as the bus the next day left pretty early.
13 March 2007
Chengdu to Chongqing
(19/11/2006-2/12/2006)
When I got to Chengdu at 5 in the morning it did seem warmer, which was to be expected being a few hundred kilometres south of Xi'an, but the temperature gradually dropped and then it started to rain the next day. For the next week I did pretty much nothing, as I was recovering from my cold and on the Monday put my passport in to get a visa extension, which meant that I couldn't leave the city. Luckily the hostel I stayed at, Mix Hostel, was really good: as well as having weird Maoist propaganda themed promotional material and an unexplained obsession with donkeys (which Sally and I found particularly amusing, as once in Mongolia Luca had been explaining what animals he had, and he described his donkey as "she's very funny - and you can eat him!"), it had a DVD room, good food, electric underlay in all the rooms and dorms, and a nice courtyard. I was also not alone: Bart was staying there, having left Xi'an the day before me, and so was Nina in a different hostel.
Sichuan, the province Chengdu is in, is famous for it's spicy food, so as I like chillies I wanted to try the hotpot. Unfortunately, Bart and I managed to find the overpriced place with a ridiculous amount of staff (at one point we had 5 at our table), and it wasn't even that great. The chillies were weak, and the famous "Sichuan pepper" wasn't really spicy, it just tasted weird. After that Nina and I had great difficulty finding somewhere not selling hotpot. We tried the vegetarian restaurant in the monastery near the hostel with Bart, but we arrived late and it had closed, so then had to spend three hours traipsing across town to the Tibetan quarter.
On my fourth day both of them left, so I spent the day watching DVDs, including one called "And Starring Pancho Villa As Himself" which was actually pretty good, while I waited for Sally who arrived that afternoon, having returned from Japan. The next day we also did nothing as it was still raining heavily, but the following day we ventured out to the vegetarian restaurant I'd previously failed at, and had among other delicious dishes one called "eel". There we met a Swedish guy staying at our hostel, and once I'd picked up my passport we went with him looking for an amazing sounding theme ride in one of the city parks. The Lonely Planet described it as involving aliens, cowboys, and ending by going through the mouth of a shark, but we couldn't find it, despite wandering all around the park.
However, we did find something else. A couple of official looking guys stood at the entrance, we had no idea what we were going into but as it was only about 5 yuan we paid and entered. At first it was just some dimly lit corridor, apparently a disused bunker for high up party officials judging from the decor and rubble, but soon we were walking past bizarre ghost exhibits that started when we walked past and emitted crazy noises. There were demons, people being tortured, people rising from coffins, and a couple of rather disturbing ones featuring laughing pigmen. Half of them weren't even lit, but luckily Sally had a torch, so we could wander around Resident Evil style until we finally got tired of them.
The next day we went to the pandas, the main reason we had come to Chengdu, and in Sally's case, the main reason she'd come to China. For this we went to the panda breeding centre and saw them at feeding time. They were very cute, and also very lazy as they didn't do a whole lot except eat, some not even bothering to sit up to do so, despite having pretty huge areas to roam around in. One we saw was perched in the tree asleep, but woke up as we passed and proceeded to scratch himself for a full 10 minutes. We also got to see the babies they'd managed to breed in captivity. Unfortunately my camera hadn't been mended as it cost too much, and the rubbishy cheap film one I'd bought didn't work either, so I got no photos.
After that we had lunch at the vegetarian restaurant again, this time we tried the fantastically named "Dance of Dragon and Phoenix", a tasty tofu dish. Then Sally went to buy jeans while I spent a couple of hours in the two huge buildings known as computer street, eventually buying a nice little Nikon camera to replace my broken Fujifilm one. I also got a nice fake fur hat, as we had booked to go horse trekking in Songpan the next few days, which promised to be a bit chilly.
So the next day we had a horribly early wake up, left most of our stuff in the hostel luggage storage, and got the bus to Songpan. We were joined on this by an Israeli girl by the name of Ila. The journey took something like 8 or ten hours up windy mountain roads, the air getting steadily clearer the higher up were went until finally we could see miles into the distance, as Songpan as about 4000 metres above sea level. On the way we passed yaks who had been all dressed up in colourful clothes, although I missed this as I was asleep most of the time. Once there the route for the next few days was explained to us: the first day we would trek to the base of Ice Mountain, the next day we would go up to the top of it's 5500m+ peak and back again, and the last day we would come back.
They gave us a room in the hotel and then we went wandering around the town for supplies such as food, waterproof clothes, and poncho blankets. Songpan is quite a nice town, the centre is in an old wall and full of tourist shops, but it is set in the mountains. It was very very cold though. When we weren't moving we huddled in our beds under several layers of blankets, and outside had to wear most of the clothes we'd brought at once. And it turned out we had two nights there, as the next day Sally was ill, almost certainly due to the pancakes from the restaurant known as Sarah's, so we moved everything along one day.
The day after she was better though so we set off, accompanied by a guide each. Again we had little horses like in Mongolia, and these were loaded with blankets, our bags, and other equipment so that our seats were much more comfortable than if we had been on bare saddles. This was lucky, going up snow covered mountains on little horses isn't that much fun, as you're constantly in danger of falling off as they slip all over the place, and Ila did so twice. I did too, hurting my hand (which continued to hurt for a month or more afterwards), although this was more my fault for being too eager to get off the standing horse to go to the toilet and not realising that I was affected by the altitude than the horses.
In some places when we had to go down steeply we had to get off our horses, which is lucky as I saw one fall off the edge as it went down the path. It landed on its feet and trotted on, but it wouldn't have been fun to be on it. The longest of these breaks must have been very high up as I felt very weak and dizzy, trudging down in a daze, so I didn't notice that the two girls fell behind and got lost until I had to wait for ages with one of the guides while the other two went off to find them. The fact that it kept snowing didn't help matters either, so we were all relieved when we reached the small village where we'd be staying the night, although it was very picturesque riding through the snow, I kept thinking of the beginning of "The Great Silence", and the landscape was stunning. The wooden, drafty house we'd be spending the night in was also home to a family, including funny little boy who kept pretending to want his photo taken and then hiding. To keep us warm the guides offered us long, Tibetan style coats, which I tried on but found my coat was warmer. Everything we didn't wear at night we piled on top of the pile of blankets and sleeping bags the three of us would be sleeping under.
The next day we decided it was too dangerous to go up a high mountain with the weather that there was and the equipment we had, so we asked the guides if the next day we could instead just ride around the area for a bit. This proved much more relaxing, as we weren't going up and down too many steep slopes and could stop whenever we wanted to admire the view (so we saw Ice Mountain), look at goats, or whatever we felt like. We were back in time for lunch and were asked if we wanted rabbit for dinner, meaning the dead rabbit we'd seen on the balcony, which Sally and I agreed to. After lunch the two of us went off wandering, looking at the frozen stream and some temple we found, we tried to build a snowman but the snow was too powdery so instead had a snowball fight with the little boy, and also admired the pool table outside the pub. The rabbit was OK, but nothing special.
The trek back was along a different route, which didn't go quite so high up, and no one fell off, so it seemed like a success to me. we stopped at a monastery which wasn't too exciting, although the constantly mewling cat in one of the houses which was tied to a stove was rather disturbing. Back in Songpan we went to a different hotel, as the previous one was too cold, this one with an en suite bathroom and electric underlay., and in the evening we played cards with an English couple and their crazy Israeli friend who were to go on the same trek the next day. While Ila was going somewhere even colder, Sally and I were heading south, back to Chengdu, which took all day and was not tremendously exciting, apart from the bit when some villagers just dragged a pig into the street, killed it and proceeded to wash and shave it by the side of the road, and the amazing horror B-movie "Mosquito" that was shown on the bus between the usual dreadful karaoke pop.
We only had one night in Chengdu though as the next day we had another early wake up to get the bus the Chonqing where we would get the cruise down the Yangzi river in the evening. The city was a typical modern, skyscraper laden Chinese city, built on a hill, but we managed to entertain ourselves for the afternoon, first with (finally) a good hotpot (though we avoided the chicken feet) and then scrabble cards and tea in the park where everyone else was playing normal cards and tea. Scrabblecards, if you've never encountered them, is the same as scrabble but the letters are on cards instead (plus a few other minor differences), and it certainly intrigued the Chinese as we soon had an audience, including a policeman, crowding around trying to work out what we were doing.
Once we'd bought supplies for the cruise we headed back to the office of the tour company, who tried to get us to go on their tour of the Zhangzhajie national park at the other end of the cruise, and then with a handful of others were escorted down to the dock where we had to pay for a "cable car" to the boat, which turned out to be a funicular railway down a slope that had steps running parallel to it we could easily have walked down had we known. Anyway, we got a view of the city at night, which was much prettier than by day, and finally got to our second class cabin. It was quite nice, reasonably spacious with two bunk beds, a TV, sofa and en suite toilet, and we shared it with a friendly Chinese couple in their early thirties. Going out on deck we watched the lights of Chongqing fade away and then went to bed.
When I got to Chengdu at 5 in the morning it did seem warmer, which was to be expected being a few hundred kilometres south of Xi'an, but the temperature gradually dropped and then it started to rain the next day. For the next week I did pretty much nothing, as I was recovering from my cold and on the Monday put my passport in to get a visa extension, which meant that I couldn't leave the city. Luckily the hostel I stayed at, Mix Hostel, was really good: as well as having weird Maoist propaganda themed promotional material and an unexplained obsession with donkeys (which Sally and I found particularly amusing, as once in Mongolia Luca had been explaining what animals he had, and he described his donkey as "she's very funny - and you can eat him!"), it had a DVD room, good food, electric underlay in all the rooms and dorms, and a nice courtyard. I was also not alone: Bart was staying there, having left Xi'an the day before me, and so was Nina in a different hostel.
Sichuan, the province Chengdu is in, is famous for it's spicy food, so as I like chillies I wanted to try the hotpot. Unfortunately, Bart and I managed to find the overpriced place with a ridiculous amount of staff (at one point we had 5 at our table), and it wasn't even that great. The chillies were weak, and the famous "Sichuan pepper" wasn't really spicy, it just tasted weird. After that Nina and I had great difficulty finding somewhere not selling hotpot. We tried the vegetarian restaurant in the monastery near the hostel with Bart, but we arrived late and it had closed, so then had to spend three hours traipsing across town to the Tibetan quarter.
On my fourth day both of them left, so I spent the day watching DVDs, including one called "And Starring Pancho Villa As Himself" which was actually pretty good, while I waited for Sally who arrived that afternoon, having returned from Japan. The next day we also did nothing as it was still raining heavily, but the following day we ventured out to the vegetarian restaurant I'd previously failed at, and had among other delicious dishes one called "eel". There we met a Swedish guy staying at our hostel, and once I'd picked up my passport we went with him looking for an amazing sounding theme ride in one of the city parks. The Lonely Planet described it as involving aliens, cowboys, and ending by going through the mouth of a shark, but we couldn't find it, despite wandering all around the park.
However, we did find something else. A couple of official looking guys stood at the entrance, we had no idea what we were going into but as it was only about 5 yuan we paid and entered. At first it was just some dimly lit corridor, apparently a disused bunker for high up party officials judging from the decor and rubble, but soon we were walking past bizarre ghost exhibits that started when we walked past and emitted crazy noises. There were demons, people being tortured, people rising from coffins, and a couple of rather disturbing ones featuring laughing pigmen. Half of them weren't even lit, but luckily Sally had a torch, so we could wander around Resident Evil style until we finally got tired of them.
The next day we went to the pandas, the main reason we had come to Chengdu, and in Sally's case, the main reason she'd come to China. For this we went to the panda breeding centre and saw them at feeding time. They were very cute, and also very lazy as they didn't do a whole lot except eat, some not even bothering to sit up to do so, despite having pretty huge areas to roam around in. One we saw was perched in the tree asleep, but woke up as we passed and proceeded to scratch himself for a full 10 minutes. We also got to see the babies they'd managed to breed in captivity. Unfortunately my camera hadn't been mended as it cost too much, and the rubbishy cheap film one I'd bought didn't work either, so I got no photos.
After that we had lunch at the vegetarian restaurant again, this time we tried the fantastically named "Dance of Dragon and Phoenix", a tasty tofu dish. Then Sally went to buy jeans while I spent a couple of hours in the two huge buildings known as computer street, eventually buying a nice little Nikon camera to replace my broken Fujifilm one. I also got a nice fake fur hat, as we had booked to go horse trekking in Songpan the next few days, which promised to be a bit chilly.
So the next day we had a horribly early wake up, left most of our stuff in the hostel luggage storage, and got the bus to Songpan. We were joined on this by an Israeli girl by the name of Ila. The journey took something like 8 or ten hours up windy mountain roads, the air getting steadily clearer the higher up were went until finally we could see miles into the distance, as Songpan as about 4000 metres above sea level. On the way we passed yaks who had been all dressed up in colourful clothes, although I missed this as I was asleep most of the time. Once there the route for the next few days was explained to us: the first day we would trek to the base of Ice Mountain, the next day we would go up to the top of it's 5500m+ peak and back again, and the last day we would come back.
They gave us a room in the hotel and then we went wandering around the town for supplies such as food, waterproof clothes, and poncho blankets. Songpan is quite a nice town, the centre is in an old wall and full of tourist shops, but it is set in the mountains. It was very very cold though. When we weren't moving we huddled in our beds under several layers of blankets, and outside had to wear most of the clothes we'd brought at once. And it turned out we had two nights there, as the next day Sally was ill, almost certainly due to the pancakes from the restaurant known as Sarah's, so we moved everything along one day.
The day after she was better though so we set off, accompanied by a guide each. Again we had little horses like in Mongolia, and these were loaded with blankets, our bags, and other equipment so that our seats were much more comfortable than if we had been on bare saddles. This was lucky, going up snow covered mountains on little horses isn't that much fun, as you're constantly in danger of falling off as they slip all over the place, and Ila did so twice. I did too, hurting my hand (which continued to hurt for a month or more afterwards), although this was more my fault for being too eager to get off the standing horse to go to the toilet and not realising that I was affected by the altitude than the horses.
In some places when we had to go down steeply we had to get off our horses, which is lucky as I saw one fall off the edge as it went down the path. It landed on its feet and trotted on, but it wouldn't have been fun to be on it. The longest of these breaks must have been very high up as I felt very weak and dizzy, trudging down in a daze, so I didn't notice that the two girls fell behind and got lost until I had to wait for ages with one of the guides while the other two went off to find them. The fact that it kept snowing didn't help matters either, so we were all relieved when we reached the small village where we'd be staying the night, although it was very picturesque riding through the snow, I kept thinking of the beginning of "The Great Silence", and the landscape was stunning. The wooden, drafty house we'd be spending the night in was also home to a family, including funny little boy who kept pretending to want his photo taken and then hiding. To keep us warm the guides offered us long, Tibetan style coats, which I tried on but found my coat was warmer. Everything we didn't wear at night we piled on top of the pile of blankets and sleeping bags the three of us would be sleeping under.
The next day we decided it was too dangerous to go up a high mountain with the weather that there was and the equipment we had, so we asked the guides if the next day we could instead just ride around the area for a bit. This proved much more relaxing, as we weren't going up and down too many steep slopes and could stop whenever we wanted to admire the view (so we saw Ice Mountain), look at goats, or whatever we felt like. We were back in time for lunch and were asked if we wanted rabbit for dinner, meaning the dead rabbit we'd seen on the balcony, which Sally and I agreed to. After lunch the two of us went off wandering, looking at the frozen stream and some temple we found, we tried to build a snowman but the snow was too powdery so instead had a snowball fight with the little boy, and also admired the pool table outside the pub. The rabbit was OK, but nothing special.
The trek back was along a different route, which didn't go quite so high up, and no one fell off, so it seemed like a success to me. we stopped at a monastery which wasn't too exciting, although the constantly mewling cat in one of the houses which was tied to a stove was rather disturbing. Back in Songpan we went to a different hotel, as the previous one was too cold, this one with an en suite bathroom and electric underlay., and in the evening we played cards with an English couple and their crazy Israeli friend who were to go on the same trek the next day. While Ila was going somewhere even colder, Sally and I were heading south, back to Chengdu, which took all day and was not tremendously exciting, apart from the bit when some villagers just dragged a pig into the street, killed it and proceeded to wash and shave it by the side of the road, and the amazing horror B-movie "Mosquito" that was shown on the bus between the usual dreadful karaoke pop.
We only had one night in Chengdu though as the next day we had another early wake up to get the bus the Chonqing where we would get the cruise down the Yangzi river in the evening. The city was a typical modern, skyscraper laden Chinese city, built on a hill, but we managed to entertain ourselves for the afternoon, first with (finally) a good hotpot (though we avoided the chicken feet) and then scrabble cards and tea in the park where everyone else was playing normal cards and tea. Scrabblecards, if you've never encountered them, is the same as scrabble but the letters are on cards instead (plus a few other minor differences), and it certainly intrigued the Chinese as we soon had an audience, including a policeman, crowding around trying to work out what we were doing.
Once we'd bought supplies for the cruise we headed back to the office of the tour company, who tried to get us to go on their tour of the Zhangzhajie national park at the other end of the cruise, and then with a handful of others were escorted down to the dock where we had to pay for a "cable car" to the boat, which turned out to be a funicular railway down a slope that had steps running parallel to it we could easily have walked down had we known. Anyway, we got a view of the city at night, which was much prettier than by day, and finally got to our second class cabin. It was quite nice, reasonably spacious with two bunk beds, a TV, sofa and en suite toilet, and we shared it with a friendly Chinese couple in their early thirties. Going out on deck we watched the lights of Chongqing fade away and then went to bed.
08 March 2007
Datong to Xi'an
(8/11/2006-18/11/2006)
The train arrived in Datong at some ridiculously early hour in the morning, and somehow I managed to leave my money belt with my passport in it on the train. Luckily the train terminated there so I went to the CITS (the national tour service for foreigners) and they were very helpful in getting it back for me. I didn't trust myself that day after that though, so I decided to pay for the day tour to the Hanging Temple and the Yungang Caves. Although it was a bit pricey, it turned out to be not so bad, as by public transport it would be hard to fit both into one day, the entry fees were quite a bit, and it included a meal.
The Hanging Temple was quite impressive, being built on a sheer cliff face with narrow walkways to get around, but the main reason I had come to Datong was to see the Yungang Caves. These were caves that over 2 thousand years or so had had thousands and thousands of Buddhas carved into them. These ranged from huge great statues 20 metres or more tall to the decoration in frames and columns around the larger statues, made up almost entirely of smaller Buddhas. Thankfully over-restoration has not yet destroyed these caves, nor had they been too devastated by the Cultural Revolution or foreign looting, so some were well preserved, others with weather beaten, but you could see that they were definitely really really old.
Having seen everything I wanted to in Datong, I got the night train to Pingyao, an old walled city. Since then I have spoken to other people who seemed to think that it was very restored, so maybe it was just covered in dust from the roadworks they were doing (the two main streets completely dug up so you had to walk along crumbling piles of earth and planks next to great ditches with people working in them and even diggers - no public health and safety in China!) but I thought it as a very nice town. It looked alot like a set from the kung fu film Iron Monkey, which is probably why I liked it. Anyway, I spent two days wandering around it, visiting a Taoist temple with another model of hell, this time mostly tortures, old county courtrooms, a few houses of old bankers and took a walk half way around the town on top of the walls. The hostel I stayed at, the Yamen, was very nice, in an old house with friendly staff, and the night I left we made dumplings which we then ate (for free!).
My next destination was to be Songshan, famous for it's Shaolin Temple where Shaolin Kung Fu, subject of many many films, often featuring Gordon Liu, was invented. To get there though I had to go to Luoyang and then somehow get a bus, then find somewhere to stay, which was all rather daunting when you don't speak Chinese and haven't been travelling for too long. Luckily though, Chinese people are very friendly, so I had nothing to worry about. First of all there was a lady on the train who spoke English, and once she knew where I was going, she said that one of the other people in the carriage was going there to visit his son who was training at one schools there (amusingly, while she was doing this the guy sitting next to her was cleaning out his ear with his keys!). Hard sleeper in China is a bit like platzkartny in Russia: each "compartment" is open to the corridor and has a pair of three story bunk beds, and was how I travelled all the time except for very short journeys when I got hard seat - this is very crowded and the seats and too comfy. Anyway, I also mentioned that I was meeting a pen pal there, and she phoned her up to arrange it, and with the guy's help I got to Dengfeng (the main town) without any problems, he even paid for the bus, and met my friend AiLing who had found me a hotel for a pretty reasonable price.
All this help meant that by lunch time on my first day I was there had somewhere to stay, so I went to lunch with Ailing and her friend, then we went to Taishi Shan one of several steep mountains that tower over DengFeng. We climbed as far as the gate where you had to pay to go any further (you have to pay to go up most well known mountains in China) and there met an Israeli girl called Lala (seriously!) and a Swiss girl called Lena. This was handy because it turned out they were going to the Shaolin Temple the next day and AiLing was busy so I'd be able to go with them. They knew someone at one of the schools, and they'd offered to get them in for free provided we got up at 5am and took part in their school's film. it turned out to be a really pointless video, just people posing, and why they needed random foreigners looking confused in the background I don't know.
I had hoped to climb one of the mountains that day, but Lena, the only other one who could be bothered to get up that early, didn't feel like it, so after breakfast in the temple village with some guys from London visiting their friend (the one who got us in for free), we continued watching the filming until I got bored with the obvious fakeness of it so went of on my own. It turned out you had to pay to get into the temple itself, but they gave me a student discount without me asking so I wander around. It was insanely over restored, having been last rebuilt in 2004 or 2005 (!), but I but some random school girls, Yang CuiCui and Hu CuiLi, who decided to adopt me and practice their English, taking me all over the temple again, then to the Pagoda Forest (which was quite impressive) to meet all their friends, taking as many photos as they could with me and them in it, it was pretty funny. Apparently the schools around there take it in turns to have a weekend visit to the temple so they can practise English with the tourists.
After a while though they had to go so I decided to climb up to the Damo cave (the Damo was the founder of the temple) which was up a steep hill. Before I'd got very far another girl, Dong YanYang had adopted me and climbed all the way to the top with me, along with half her school, and then down again where she introduced me to the rest of her class including their teacher Lili, and after having my picture taken with all of them (what they do with these pictures I don't know) they gave me a lift back to the town. The next day I climbed Shaoxi Shan, the tallest of the mountains, with AiLing, which took about 5 hours from the bottom on one side to the temple on the other. Quite a few other Chinese people were climbing the mountain, some in their suits and even some women in high heels! People were very friendly, sharing food and asking about me, it was great fun, and the scenery was pretty impressive, despite the usual haze you get everywhere in China, although the atmosphere was somewhere spoilt on the last 45 minute leg down to the temple by the piped music. Especially near the temple they had the same droning chant playing constantly, it was very annoying.
After that I thought that as I was there I may as well see a kung fu demonstration, but it was rather disappointing, seeming more like an acrobatics show combined with cheap tricks than a demonstration of a practical fighting system. The next day I went to a nearby town to see the Ancient Observatory, which was not swarming with people like the temple, in fact most of the time it was just me and AiLing. In the afternoon I went to the Songyang Academy, which was also pretty quite, and the over restoration was counteracted a bit by the two trees that really did look very old, although whether they really 4000 years old as climbed I don't know.
From Songshan I intended to go to Hua Shan, one of the sacred mountains of China, but when I got there it was pretty wet and miserable so I just got on the next train and went straight to Xi'an. This was a rather disappointing city. I saw the main attractions, the Terracotta Warriors, the Drum and the Bell towers in the first day with a Dutch guy called Bart, but was not too impressed. It's hard to tell if the warriors are original or remade for tourists, and you can't wander down amongst them, just look from above, they not red as they often look in photos, they're grey, and also my camera, which had been getting gradually worse since being dropped in the Gobi desert, was entering its death throes. The evening was much better though as there were two French punk bands staying at the hospital who I had met at the station on the was to Hua Shan, and they invited us to a meal with them. Meals in China are better the more people you have because then you can order loads of different dishes and try loads more, so the meal with 12 people was one of the best and cheapest that I'd had.
Unfortunately though the next day I was ill, so after visiting the other main tourist attraction, the Big Goose Pagoda, and being unimpressed, I bought a train ticket to Chengdu for the next day and missed the bands' gig that evening. Bart did introduce me to a shop with some very tasty baked goodies though.
At this point I think I should have a tea update, as their haven't been any since Russia: in Mongolia there was mare's milk tea, which was sweet and salty. I quite liked it, although Sally thought it was disgusting. Apparently they brew it for ages, which is why there was a weird black sediment at the bottom that looked like earth. Then in Beijing I tried several teas at the hostel with exciting names such as Dragonwell and Maojian (which was the best), in Pingyao I tried green and white teas, the latter being the best, and finally in Dengfeng there seemed to be two types of tea, the yellow flower tea and the one apparently made just of water with nothing in it, both of which were tasteless.
The train arrived in Datong at some ridiculously early hour in the morning, and somehow I managed to leave my money belt with my passport in it on the train. Luckily the train terminated there so I went to the CITS (the national tour service for foreigners) and they were very helpful in getting it back for me. I didn't trust myself that day after that though, so I decided to pay for the day tour to the Hanging Temple and the Yungang Caves. Although it was a bit pricey, it turned out to be not so bad, as by public transport it would be hard to fit both into one day, the entry fees were quite a bit, and it included a meal.
The Hanging Temple was quite impressive, being built on a sheer cliff face with narrow walkways to get around, but the main reason I had come to Datong was to see the Yungang Caves. These were caves that over 2 thousand years or so had had thousands and thousands of Buddhas carved into them. These ranged from huge great statues 20 metres or more tall to the decoration in frames and columns around the larger statues, made up almost entirely of smaller Buddhas. Thankfully over-restoration has not yet destroyed these caves, nor had they been too devastated by the Cultural Revolution or foreign looting, so some were well preserved, others with weather beaten, but you could see that they were definitely really really old.
Having seen everything I wanted to in Datong, I got the night train to Pingyao, an old walled city. Since then I have spoken to other people who seemed to think that it was very restored, so maybe it was just covered in dust from the roadworks they were doing (the two main streets completely dug up so you had to walk along crumbling piles of earth and planks next to great ditches with people working in them and even diggers - no public health and safety in China!) but I thought it as a very nice town. It looked alot like a set from the kung fu film Iron Monkey, which is probably why I liked it. Anyway, I spent two days wandering around it, visiting a Taoist temple with another model of hell, this time mostly tortures, old county courtrooms, a few houses of old bankers and took a walk half way around the town on top of the walls. The hostel I stayed at, the Yamen, was very nice, in an old house with friendly staff, and the night I left we made dumplings which we then ate (for free!).
My next destination was to be Songshan, famous for it's Shaolin Temple where Shaolin Kung Fu, subject of many many films, often featuring Gordon Liu, was invented. To get there though I had to go to Luoyang and then somehow get a bus, then find somewhere to stay, which was all rather daunting when you don't speak Chinese and haven't been travelling for too long. Luckily though, Chinese people are very friendly, so I had nothing to worry about. First of all there was a lady on the train who spoke English, and once she knew where I was going, she said that one of the other people in the carriage was going there to visit his son who was training at one schools there (amusingly, while she was doing this the guy sitting next to her was cleaning out his ear with his keys!). Hard sleeper in China is a bit like platzkartny in Russia: each "compartment" is open to the corridor and has a pair of three story bunk beds, and was how I travelled all the time except for very short journeys when I got hard seat - this is very crowded and the seats and too comfy. Anyway, I also mentioned that I was meeting a pen pal there, and she phoned her up to arrange it, and with the guy's help I got to Dengfeng (the main town) without any problems, he even paid for the bus, and met my friend AiLing who had found me a hotel for a pretty reasonable price.
All this help meant that by lunch time on my first day I was there had somewhere to stay, so I went to lunch with Ailing and her friend, then we went to Taishi Shan one of several steep mountains that tower over DengFeng. We climbed as far as the gate where you had to pay to go any further (you have to pay to go up most well known mountains in China) and there met an Israeli girl called Lala (seriously!) and a Swiss girl called Lena. This was handy because it turned out they were going to the Shaolin Temple the next day and AiLing was busy so I'd be able to go with them. They knew someone at one of the schools, and they'd offered to get them in for free provided we got up at 5am and took part in their school's film. it turned out to be a really pointless video, just people posing, and why they needed random foreigners looking confused in the background I don't know.
I had hoped to climb one of the mountains that day, but Lena, the only other one who could be bothered to get up that early, didn't feel like it, so after breakfast in the temple village with some guys from London visiting their friend (the one who got us in for free), we continued watching the filming until I got bored with the obvious fakeness of it so went of on my own. It turned out you had to pay to get into the temple itself, but they gave me a student discount without me asking so I wander around. It was insanely over restored, having been last rebuilt in 2004 or 2005 (!), but I but some random school girls, Yang CuiCui and Hu CuiLi, who decided to adopt me and practice their English, taking me all over the temple again, then to the Pagoda Forest (which was quite impressive) to meet all their friends, taking as many photos as they could with me and them in it, it was pretty funny. Apparently the schools around there take it in turns to have a weekend visit to the temple so they can practise English with the tourists.
After a while though they had to go so I decided to climb up to the Damo cave (the Damo was the founder of the temple) which was up a steep hill. Before I'd got very far another girl, Dong YanYang had adopted me and climbed all the way to the top with me, along with half her school, and then down again where she introduced me to the rest of her class including their teacher Lili, and after having my picture taken with all of them (what they do with these pictures I don't know) they gave me a lift back to the town. The next day I climbed Shaoxi Shan, the tallest of the mountains, with AiLing, which took about 5 hours from the bottom on one side to the temple on the other. Quite a few other Chinese people were climbing the mountain, some in their suits and even some women in high heels! People were very friendly, sharing food and asking about me, it was great fun, and the scenery was pretty impressive, despite the usual haze you get everywhere in China, although the atmosphere was somewhere spoilt on the last 45 minute leg down to the temple by the piped music. Especially near the temple they had the same droning chant playing constantly, it was very annoying.
After that I thought that as I was there I may as well see a kung fu demonstration, but it was rather disappointing, seeming more like an acrobatics show combined with cheap tricks than a demonstration of a practical fighting system. The next day I went to a nearby town to see the Ancient Observatory, which was not swarming with people like the temple, in fact most of the time it was just me and AiLing. In the afternoon I went to the Songyang Academy, which was also pretty quite, and the over restoration was counteracted a bit by the two trees that really did look very old, although whether they really 4000 years old as climbed I don't know.
From Songshan I intended to go to Hua Shan, one of the sacred mountains of China, but when I got there it was pretty wet and miserable so I just got on the next train and went straight to Xi'an. This was a rather disappointing city. I saw the main attractions, the Terracotta Warriors, the Drum and the Bell towers in the first day with a Dutch guy called Bart, but was not too impressed. It's hard to tell if the warriors are original or remade for tourists, and you can't wander down amongst them, just look from above, they not red as they often look in photos, they're grey, and also my camera, which had been getting gradually worse since being dropped in the Gobi desert, was entering its death throes. The evening was much better though as there were two French punk bands staying at the hospital who I had met at the station on the was to Hua Shan, and they invited us to a meal with them. Meals in China are better the more people you have because then you can order loads of different dishes and try loads more, so the meal with 12 people was one of the best and cheapest that I'd had.
Unfortunately though the next day I was ill, so after visiting the other main tourist attraction, the Big Goose Pagoda, and being unimpressed, I bought a train ticket to Chengdu for the next day and missed the bands' gig that evening. Bart did introduce me to a shop with some very tasty baked goodies though.
At this point I think I should have a tea update, as their haven't been any since Russia: in Mongolia there was mare's milk tea, which was sweet and salty. I quite liked it, although Sally thought it was disgusting. Apparently they brew it for ages, which is why there was a weird black sediment at the bottom that looked like earth. Then in Beijing I tried several teas at the hostel with exciting names such as Dragonwell and Maojian (which was the best), in Pingyao I tried green and white teas, the latter being the best, and finally in Dengfeng there seemed to be two types of tea, the yellow flower tea and the one apparently made just of water with nothing in it, both of which were tasteless.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)