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Published: March 9th 2011
From Lhasa we took the Qinghai-Tibet Railway, with the line topping the 5072m Tanggu-la pass, and with 80% of the Golmund to Lhasa stretch being over 4000m, this is the world’s highest railway. It’s 160km of bridges, the costs only $4.1 billion so far!!
The train ride was probably the best we had since our start! It was only 24 hours and for the first 12 hours we had the coupe for ourselves.. There were duvets and nice soft pillows! And even extra oxygen if we needed!!
The next morning we arrived in Xining.. Thinking we could extend our trip to Xi’an straight away, but no!!!! Josh jumped in the queue with all the other Chinese to get us a ticket to Xi’an as soon as possible! We kinda made a mistake with Xining.. Thinking last little town on the Tibetan plateau should be nice, but it’s a massive city with more then 2 million people!! Hello Josh and Ariska your are in CHINA!!! A population of 1.3 billion people! A small town is a huge city!
But Josh managed to get us tickets for a night train on the same day to Xi’an.. But what to do the whole
day is was -9 and hanging around on the streets didn’t seem like a good option.. So we checked in to a hostel for a day and chilled.
To catch the train was an experience on it’s own!! Almost the end of Chinese New Year every Chinese possible was trying to get home..Arriving on the train station was something we’ve never seen before.. Queue’s everywhere.. police shouting through there megaphones in Chinese trying to keep order..We felt like a piece of caddle moving around! But we made it on the train and the next morning we arrived in Xian.
Xian Xian with a population of 4.270000 million people was once the terminus of the Silk Rd and a melting pot of cultures and religions, but now it’s a roaring modern city with a few historic sites that remain.
Our first goal was to get our visa extended! But arriving at the immigration was our first big NO answer! Cause we were on a group visa on paper and not in our passports the lady just told us “sorry guys you have to go to Hong Kong to get a new visa” we had to change our plans
completely.. Our visa was only until the 28th of February and it was already the 10th of February… Making plans quickly we decided to defiantly do Beijing just in case for some reason we couldn’t get back into China (never thinking this would happen really?)
Josh again made it to the train station and got us tickets for an overnight train to Beijing.. Now it was time to see the highlight of Xi’an.. The most famous archaeological finds in the world: The Army of Terracotta Warriors!! Big hopes for this.. But arriving the buildings around looked really new and modern. .. And we kinda found that the Terracotta Warriors were a bit disappointing… You just walk around the three pits that are visible and look down and half of it is still not excavated.. And some pits are just dark!! But hey you can’t go to Xi’an and not seen it!! So check and done!
We’ve wandered around town the rest of the time.. Seen the Clock Tower and Bell Tower, went to the Muslim quarter where you can buy any food you possibly can think of! And most of the time we chilled in our hostel.. especially after doing
a tour for 8 days where you are none stop doing things, seeing things and talking to things!!
Beijing Again a smooth train to Beijing! But arriving in a city with more than 15 million people it’s a bit confusing where you wanna go and how to get there!! Trying to find a bus was already a mission.. We got help from a lady, who brought us to the police and then we’ve been put in a bus not really knowing where this one was going.. But fingers crossed they understood where we wanted to go!
And they sure did!! We only had to walk a block to check into our hostel!! Right next on our plan was to meet up with Benoit and Marion! Two frenchies from our trip in Tibet! But we had some time to kill and went to the Tiananmen Square. It’s the world’s largest public square! Everywhere we looked pictures where taking with the Chinese little flags in their hands and of course not to forget the peace sign!! (we thought it was Japanese, but hey why not?)
We thought just to walk to the hostel of the frenchies, but what a huge
city Beijing is!! It took us a 2 hour walk just to get in their area! But we find them and went out for dinner.. Talking about everything what happened to us and them after Tibet! Good catching up time!
We’ve spend all days together till they left to take off to Mongolia. We visited the Lama Temple (pfff big huge disappointment after just being in Tibet!!!), went to the Olympic area (where everything was closed, expect for the Birds Nest), visited the Wangfujing street (the guys eat whatever was possible: spiders, scorpions, starfish, silkworms and more), a quick look a the Temple of Heaven (suppose to be really old but with a new coat of paint it just looked like build yesterday) and of course not the forget the Great Wall of China!
We went to a part that was the further out of town, Jinshaling. Normally you can walk 10km over the wall to a part that’s called Simatai, but of course it was closed for renovation! The Chinese really love to renovate everything! The first part we walked looked like brand new, but after 3 towers you could see “the Real Wall”. It was not a disappointment
even when the weather decided not to be with us! It was grey around us but that made all more mysterious. Sometimes you could just see the wall disappear into the fog far away! It’s insane to think it’s build by human hands and that you sometimes walk over the remains of human bodies that been buried inside the Wall! We didn’t think that walking the Wall was so though, but sometimes you literary walked 90 degrees up and 90 degrees down!! Exhausted after that we went back to Beijing and did sweet all after that!
On Wednesday Benoit and Marion left us behind and moved on with their awesome trip to Mongolia and Russia. We had till Sunday morning in Beijing before we catched our flight to go to Shenzhen on the border with Hong Kong. We took the time to organize and plan what to do after renewing our visa and to shop a little around!
Hong Kong We took a flight from Beijing to Shenzhen (no trains available, fully booked) and made it easy to the border of Hong Kong. There our first warning came around the corner! We had both a stamp of China
in our passports (proud we got it at the border with Nepal and Tibet) and we stood in no man’s land for about half an hour before the let us into Hong Kong.
Found ourselves a cheap but still expansive little room in Kowloon. The next day to the embassy of China to get our new visas for China!! Filling out all the forms and waiting in a queue for 2.5 hours we finally made it to the window!! A nice lady behind the window told us straight up when she saw our stamps in the passports that for China our passports where illegal now.. Cause we had a stamp in but not a stamp out! Maybe if we went back to our home countries we could get a new visa but not in Hong Kong!! Both in shock we walked out of the embassy building and completely clueless what to do next! We went for a massive shopping sprawl. Coming back to our little room in the evening we looked at flights and found out that the cheapest one we could find was to Penang in Malaysia! Easy, booked it right now! We had 3 more days in Hong
Kong and we spend it almost just on shopping for new clothes and only did the Victoria Peak.. Finding out that the touristic part of it, the little train up to the peak, wasn’t working anymore.. So jumping a bus we went for sunset on a cloudy day to the peak!
Hong Kong is like a shot of adrenaline. Skyscrapers march up steep jungle-clad slopes by day and blaze neon by night. Sleek luxioury boutiques and five-star-hotels stand next to ageing tenement blocks and traditional Chinese shops. Day and night is busy with people.. We always wondered where they were going and what they were doing!
The only thing we can say it we’ve got defiantly stamped out of China… even if it’s without the actual stamp in our passports!
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Anita & Rick
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Hi There!!! Wat een verhaal weer! En gave foto's hoor! Heb de hele zondag mn tel. in de aanslag gehad, maar helaas :( Zal wel wat tussengekomen zijn denk ik?! Hoe is in Maleisie? En hoe zien de plannen eruit?? Tot over 100 dagen ofzo?? hihi XXX