(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.
13 March 2007
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.
26 February 2007
Beijing
(26/10/2006-7/11/2006)
The train journey from Ulaanbaatar was not that exciting to begin with, as the area of the Gobi it passed through was pretty flat and boring. Again I was travelling with Luca, but Nina stayed in Mongolia and this time were were joined by Sally. The border controls were a lot less strict than those in Russia, just a quick stamping of passports, but the wait was just as long because they had to lift all the carriages up and change their bogeys (the bits the wheels are on) as China uses a different gauge to Russia and Mongolia (who like to be different from the rest of the world...). We knew were were in China though because we were greeted by martial music and there was no more Cyrillic, just characters on all the signs. The next morning we woke up passing through Chinese countryside, obscured by the soon familiar haze of dust and pollution. Nearing Beijing were got our first glimpse of the Great Wall, the train even stopping so people could get out and have a look.
In all I spent 12 days in Beijing, the first day with Sally and Luca, then Sally left to visit a friend in Japan and Luca left to go down the east coast after just over a week, only a few days before Nina arrived. The first day the three of us went to see the Forbidden City, which despite three of the main buildings being under restoration at the time was nice to wander around in and provided amusement with names for halls such as the Hall of Literary Excellence, and signs telling you not to climb a wall because "A Single Act Of Carelessness Leads To The Eternal Loss Of Beauty". The next major tourist attraction I saw was the Temple of Heaven, which didn't impress me too much as it had been restored to look brand new (as many ancient buildings had been, I soon discovered, truly old attractions being something of a rarity in China), and the smog was so bad that day that everything further than a few meters away looked faded.
The hostel we were staying at offered a tour called the Secret Wall, which Luca and I went on. They took as to a part of the Great Wall not normally open to tourists, where it had not been restored at all. near the village that they dropped us at it was fairly ruined, but after walking along it for half an hour or 45 minutes we reached parts with whole towers and battlements intact, but trees growing in the middle of it. as there were only those of us who were in the minibus there on the wall, it was wonderfully empty of other tourists, and when we go back to the village we were given a home cooked meal, which was delicious. The next day we both went to the Summer Palace, which has huge grounds that we only had time to see less than half of. The parts of it that you pay to see (on top of the entrance to the ground) are obviously ridiculously over restored, although we did get a free demonstration of ancient music and dance which was cool, but wandering around the grounds is very pleasant. We got slightly lost and discovered a huge area of unrestored buildings, or at least they hadn't been restored for decades, which was far more interesting than the bits we'd paid to see. As it neared sunset we decided to get the boat across the lake to the island, and as the only foreigners on the boat became the star attraction, having our photo taken with about 30 different people, one after the other, which was pretty funny.
Of the other tourist attractions that you're meant to see, I saw the Drum and Bell Towers by accident while wandering around the streets looking for music shops, the main art gallery, and with Nina visited the Lama Temple (a Tibetan Buddhist temple) and the Dongyue Taoist Temple, which was interesting as it had full colour statues representing the Taoist Hades. I didn't know anything about Taoism before, other than some people had told me it was a nice hippy religion, but it turns out to be more like a Chinese version of Catholicism. The monsters were cool though. What was more fun than most of these attractions though was wandering through the hutongs (the traditional narrow winding streets that Beijing used to be made up of until they started ploughing new roads through them all for the Olympics) and the parks, where we saw girls fishing in a fish pond, an old man practising calligraphy on the flagstones with a giant brush dipped in water, and even visiting African delegates for the China-Africa forum that was happening at the time.
Food was another highlight, from our first meal (Peking duck of course) to our snacks of fried squid and sparrows on sticks for breakfast. After a few days (and a nasty experience where me and Sally ended up with 3 plates of different kinds of stomach when we wanted noodles) me and Luca settled on one restaurant about 2 minutes walk from the hostel, which had good, pretty cheap food, and a hilarious waitress, so we went there nearly every meal. After a while the food being so oily (nearly everything is fried in China) did get a bit boring, but after two weeks of mutton mutton mutton in Mongolia, it made a nice change.
Possibly the most interesting part of my stay in Beijing though, was the heavy metal gig I went to with Luca on his last night. According to the Lonely Planet Beijing had a decent metal scene, so having gone for more than a month without my music and getting tired of Asian pop everywhere, I did a search on the internet and found that there was a night with about 10 different metal bands playing. It took us a while to find the venue, as it was the other side of the city in the student area, and we were joined by 3 other Italians, Fabio (who travelled with Luca after he left Beijing) and a couple of guys in their 50s or 60s. The first band was a death metal band with a tiny girl vocalist who had the voice of a demon, and it just got better from there. At the end of the night I bought 5 CDs of Chinese death metal, classic metal, pop punk and folk rock.
After 11 full days in Beijing, I decided it was time to move on if I wanted to be in Chengdu to meet Sally and see stuff on the way, so on the day that I met both Sebastian (who I'd met on Olkhon Island) and Louise (who I'd met in Moscow) in the hostel, I got the night train to Datong.
The train journey from Ulaanbaatar was not that exciting to begin with, as the area of the Gobi it passed through was pretty flat and boring. Again I was travelling with Luca, but Nina stayed in Mongolia and this time were were joined by Sally. The border controls were a lot less strict than those in Russia, just a quick stamping of passports, but the wait was just as long because they had to lift all the carriages up and change their bogeys (the bits the wheels are on) as China uses a different gauge to Russia and Mongolia (who like to be different from the rest of the world...). We knew were were in China though because we were greeted by martial music and there was no more Cyrillic, just characters on all the signs. The next morning we woke up passing through Chinese countryside, obscured by the soon familiar haze of dust and pollution. Nearing Beijing were got our first glimpse of the Great Wall, the train even stopping so people could get out and have a look.
In all I spent 12 days in Beijing, the first day with Sally and Luca, then Sally left to visit a friend in Japan and Luca left to go down the east coast after just over a week, only a few days before Nina arrived. The first day the three of us went to see the Forbidden City, which despite three of the main buildings being under restoration at the time was nice to wander around in and provided amusement with names for halls such as the Hall of Literary Excellence, and signs telling you not to climb a wall because "A Single Act Of Carelessness Leads To The Eternal Loss Of Beauty". The next major tourist attraction I saw was the Temple of Heaven, which didn't impress me too much as it had been restored to look brand new (as many ancient buildings had been, I soon discovered, truly old attractions being something of a rarity in China), and the smog was so bad that day that everything further than a few meters away looked faded.
The hostel we were staying at offered a tour called the Secret Wall, which Luca and I went on. They took as to a part of the Great Wall not normally open to tourists, where it had not been restored at all. near the village that they dropped us at it was fairly ruined, but after walking along it for half an hour or 45 minutes we reached parts with whole towers and battlements intact, but trees growing in the middle of it. as there were only those of us who were in the minibus there on the wall, it was wonderfully empty of other tourists, and when we go back to the village we were given a home cooked meal, which was delicious. The next day we both went to the Summer Palace, which has huge grounds that we only had time to see less than half of. The parts of it that you pay to see (on top of the entrance to the ground) are obviously ridiculously over restored, although we did get a free demonstration of ancient music and dance which was cool, but wandering around the grounds is very pleasant. We got slightly lost and discovered a huge area of unrestored buildings, or at least they hadn't been restored for decades, which was far more interesting than the bits we'd paid to see. As it neared sunset we decided to get the boat across the lake to the island, and as the only foreigners on the boat became the star attraction, having our photo taken with about 30 different people, one after the other, which was pretty funny.
Of the other tourist attractions that you're meant to see, I saw the Drum and Bell Towers by accident while wandering around the streets looking for music shops, the main art gallery, and with Nina visited the Lama Temple (a Tibetan Buddhist temple) and the Dongyue Taoist Temple, which was interesting as it had full colour statues representing the Taoist Hades. I didn't know anything about Taoism before, other than some people had told me it was a nice hippy religion, but it turns out to be more like a Chinese version of Catholicism. The monsters were cool though. What was more fun than most of these attractions though was wandering through the hutongs (the traditional narrow winding streets that Beijing used to be made up of until they started ploughing new roads through them all for the Olympics) and the parks, where we saw girls fishing in a fish pond, an old man practising calligraphy on the flagstones with a giant brush dipped in water, and even visiting African delegates for the China-Africa forum that was happening at the time.
Food was another highlight, from our first meal (Peking duck of course) to our snacks of fried squid and sparrows on sticks for breakfast. After a few days (and a nasty experience where me and Sally ended up with 3 plates of different kinds of stomach when we wanted noodles) me and Luca settled on one restaurant about 2 minutes walk from the hostel, which had good, pretty cheap food, and a hilarious waitress, so we went there nearly every meal. After a while the food being so oily (nearly everything is fried in China) did get a bit boring, but after two weeks of mutton mutton mutton in Mongolia, it made a nice change.
Possibly the most interesting part of my stay in Beijing though, was the heavy metal gig I went to with Luca on his last night. According to the Lonely Planet Beijing had a decent metal scene, so having gone for more than a month without my music and getting tired of Asian pop everywhere, I did a search on the internet and found that there was a night with about 10 different metal bands playing. It took us a while to find the venue, as it was the other side of the city in the student area, and we were joined by 3 other Italians, Fabio (who travelled with Luca after he left Beijing) and a couple of guys in their 50s or 60s. The first band was a death metal band with a tiny girl vocalist who had the voice of a demon, and it just got better from there. At the end of the night I bought 5 CDs of Chinese death metal, classic metal, pop punk and folk rock.
After 11 full days in Beijing, I decided it was time to move on if I wanted to be in Chengdu to meet Sally and see stuff on the way, so on the day that I met both Sebastian (who I'd met on Olkhon Island) and Louise (who I'd met in Moscow) in the hostel, I got the night train to Datong.
Mongolia
OK, if you missed it on my livejournal blog, here is the account of my travels in Mongolia. Over the next few days and weeks I shall be updating my blog more as I now have time, what with being in Australia and all...
(14/10/2006-25/10/2006)
The unplanned train journey to Mongolia with Nina and Luca, with Miia and Chris the Canadians in the compartment nextdoor, was fairly uneventful, but as I was travelling with others for a change it was not so boring, even the 8 hours it took to cross the 5km between the Russian border check and the Mongolian one weren't so bad. When we got off in Ulaanbaatar we were surrounded by people trying to get us to go to their guesthouse, but we'd already decided we'd go to the Golden Gobi guesthouse as it had been recommended to us, and they had a free pickup for us too.
Once there we asked about tours we could do and discovered that Sally, the Australian I'd met on Olkhon, was waiting for others to go on a 10 day one to the Gobi, so that we were able to have it all organised before the afternoon to start the next day. That sorted, we got our train tickets for Beijing for when we got back, ate, and went to the black market, a huge place full of pretty much everything, although all I got were some gloves, the two girls got some pretty cool Mongolian boots.
The tour was for 10 days with the driver Tsengel and the guide Tsenguné a.k.a. Cowboy Clint in a Russian jeep-van-thing, but I don't have the time or energy to give a blow by blow account, so instead here are some of the highlights: on the first day, and quite frequently afterwards we could see some huge birds of prey, eagles, hawks and condors, not far from the road. Also on the first day we stopped at some very impressive rock formations that would make a good setting for a Western. We'd often see heards of various animals, sheep, goats, cows and horses weren't that exciting, but on the second day we saw some camels, and on the third Cowboy Clint yelled out "Yak yak yak yak yak!". The third day was the first really interesting stop at a place called Bearded Vulture Canyon, and then at a salt lake where we discovered some bones which we could only assume to be the remains of a Ninajoelosaurus Rex and a Sallysaur. After that we had some fun when Tsengel spotted some gazelles a while after sunset and drove of the road to chase them in the van headlights.
The fourth day featured the joys of camel riding. At first this wasn't much fun as the camels were stupid and slow so to reach the sanddunes before sunset they had to be tied together and rushed along so close that my shin kept banging into the bony arse of the camel in front. On the way back though I managed to get mine to gallop, which was great fun. We then saw the Flaming cliffs, where lots of dinosaurs were discovered, a ruined monastery pony trekking in some mountains to a waterfall, and finally Kharakhorum, Chinggis Khaan's ancient capital, although there is nothing left of it. Instead there's a new city and a Buddhist monastery with temples built in Chinese, Tibetan and Mongolian styles, and plenty of very violent and explicit paintings that undermine the hippy stereotype of Buddhism as a peaceful religion. And on the last day, as we all suffered from the vile cheap Mongolian vodka of the night before, we saw Turtle Rock and Penis Rock, which looked as you would expect them to.
Apart from one night in a hotel, all the others we spent in girs, commonly known as yurts in the West. They have a stove in the middle which heats it wonderfully, but if you forget to get up in the night and put more wood (or coal, or dung) on it then gets bloody cold. Another interesting experience was driving. Like Olkhon, out of Ulaanbaatar Mongolia has very few real roads, and those that do exist are in a terrible state, so everyday we would have about 300km of rollercoaster like driving. But it wasn't scary because you soon realise that Tsengel knows exactly what he's doing and you're probably safer than on the roads in the UK. Even when things break, such as the front right suspension did on the seventh day, ten minutes with a bit of rope was all he needed to fix it and it was fine right back to Ulaanbaatar.
The main problem in Mongolia was the food, as 4 out of 5 meals included mutton. The food was very nice, even camel (which tastes like beef), but mutton soon gets very monotonous, and I never want to taste it again in my life. The cold was also getting quite bad by the time we left, so even though that was by far the best and most fun part of my trip so far, I was still glad to be moving south to China.
(14/10/2006-25/10/2006)
The unplanned train journey to Mongolia with Nina and Luca, with Miia and Chris the Canadians in the compartment nextdoor, was fairly uneventful, but as I was travelling with others for a change it was not so boring, even the 8 hours it took to cross the 5km between the Russian border check and the Mongolian one weren't so bad. When we got off in Ulaanbaatar we were surrounded by people trying to get us to go to their guesthouse, but we'd already decided we'd go to the Golden Gobi guesthouse as it had been recommended to us, and they had a free pickup for us too.
Once there we asked about tours we could do and discovered that Sally, the Australian I'd met on Olkhon, was waiting for others to go on a 10 day one to the Gobi, so that we were able to have it all organised before the afternoon to start the next day. That sorted, we got our train tickets for Beijing for when we got back, ate, and went to the black market, a huge place full of pretty much everything, although all I got were some gloves, the two girls got some pretty cool Mongolian boots.
The tour was for 10 days with the driver Tsengel and the guide Tsenguné a.k.a. Cowboy Clint in a Russian jeep-van-thing, but I don't have the time or energy to give a blow by blow account, so instead here are some of the highlights: on the first day, and quite frequently afterwards we could see some huge birds of prey, eagles, hawks and condors, not far from the road. Also on the first day we stopped at some very impressive rock formations that would make a good setting for a Western. We'd often see heards of various animals, sheep, goats, cows and horses weren't that exciting, but on the second day we saw some camels, and on the third Cowboy Clint yelled out "Yak yak yak yak yak!". The third day was the first really interesting stop at a place called Bearded Vulture Canyon, and then at a salt lake where we discovered some bones which we could only assume to be the remains of a Ninajoelosaurus Rex and a Sallysaur. After that we had some fun when Tsengel spotted some gazelles a while after sunset and drove of the road to chase them in the van headlights.
The fourth day featured the joys of camel riding. At first this wasn't much fun as the camels were stupid and slow so to reach the sanddunes before sunset they had to be tied together and rushed along so close that my shin kept banging into the bony arse of the camel in front. On the way back though I managed to get mine to gallop, which was great fun. We then saw the Flaming cliffs, where lots of dinosaurs were discovered, a ruined monastery pony trekking in some mountains to a waterfall, and finally Kharakhorum, Chinggis Khaan's ancient capital, although there is nothing left of it. Instead there's a new city and a Buddhist monastery with temples built in Chinese, Tibetan and Mongolian styles, and plenty of very violent and explicit paintings that undermine the hippy stereotype of Buddhism as a peaceful religion. And on the last day, as we all suffered from the vile cheap Mongolian vodka of the night before, we saw Turtle Rock and Penis Rock, which looked as you would expect them to.
Apart from one night in a hotel, all the others we spent in girs, commonly known as yurts in the West. They have a stove in the middle which heats it wonderfully, but if you forget to get up in the night and put more wood (or coal, or dung) on it then gets bloody cold. Another interesting experience was driving. Like Olkhon, out of Ulaanbaatar Mongolia has very few real roads, and those that do exist are in a terrible state, so everyday we would have about 300km of rollercoaster like driving. But it wasn't scary because you soon realise that Tsengel knows exactly what he's doing and you're probably safer than on the roads in the UK. Even when things break, such as the front right suspension did on the seventh day, ten minutes with a bit of rope was all he needed to fix it and it was fine right back to Ulaanbaatar.
The main problem in Mongolia was the food, as 4 out of 5 meals included mutton. The food was very nice, even camel (which tastes like beef), but mutton soon gets very monotonous, and I never want to taste it again in my life. The cold was also getting quite bad by the time we left, so even though that was by far the best and most fun part of my trip so far, I was still glad to be moving south to China.
17 November 2006
Test post by email
I haven't posted for a while because blogspot is
blocked in China, this is just a test post to see if
posting by email works. in the meantime, I've created
a LiveJournal blog which is not (yet) blocked here, so
I shall be posting there as well as here. The address
is http://wanderingjoel.livejournal.com.
blocked in China, this is just a test post to see if
posting by email works. in the meantime, I've created
a LiveJournal blog which is not (yet) blocked here, so
I shall be posting there as well as here. The address
is http://wanderingjoel.livejournal.com.
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