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Published: December 15th 2006
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East meets West
We've been trying the local specialities...honest. Difficult to know where to start with this one, really. We'd intended it to be a gentle ramble through the second half of our travels in Australia - sun, sea, scuba-diving, desperately trying not to mention the cricket - but being the lazy sods we are we didn't get around to writing anything before we left the place. And the problem is, even though we've only been in China five minutes, it's been such a gigantic shock to the system that Australia and everything we did there seems a bloody long way away - and not only that, not particularly memorable any more. So if this entry sounds even more lame and ill-conceived than usual, I'll apologise in advance.
But the fact is, Beijing is probably the most mind-blowing place we've visited so far. Coming on the back of a visit to Australia - which, let's face it, is like kind of like being back home but with much better weather and much worse local radio - it feels like we have arrived on another planet. Bone-chillingly cold, chock-ful of smog and pollution, with the toughest language barrier and scariest pedestrian crossings you'll ever encounter, it's still utterly, mesmerisingly brilliant:
Tian'anmen Square
Soldiers but thankfully not a tank in sight steeped in history yet bang up to date, buzzing with pre-Olympic fever but intensely curious about (and very much amused by) anybody or anything Western, and full of history and culture for which we have no frame of reference whatsoever.
Beijing is not supposed to reflect the 'real' China, by which I guess they mean that it features more of the trappings of 'globalisation' than Inner Mongolia, say. That does not mean, however, that it's like any other capital city we've visited. Hilariously, we'd decided to prove our 'independent traveller' credentials by arriving here without the usual plethora of guidebooks, maps et al. After spending our first morning here eating at Starbucks and Pizza Hut and walking away from, as opposed to towards, Tian'anmen Square from our hotel, we decided that this might not have been the best idea we'd ever had. It's not that it didn't occur to us that we might not be able to crack Chinese on our first day in the country, more that nothing could prepare us for being utterly unable to understand anything we read nor communicate with most of the people that we met.
Since then, though, we've got truly stuck
Smog
The State issued a warning to stay indoors. But we will not be dictated to so we ignored it. Hah! into the place - which, as Beijing in its entirety is about the size of Belgium, takes a bit of legwork. So far we've had a quick wander around Tian'anmen Square - a sprawling concrete jungle that seemed to hold more soldiers and hawkers selling Chairman Mao watches than it did tourists - and the Temple of Heaven, a palatial park devoted to the worship of mother earth and featuring the most amazing ancient Chinese architecture. We've bargained for knock-off clothes in one of the markets, which meant running the gauntlet of an army of frightening all-female traders who literally scream at you until you buy; and had an all-over Chinese massage, which essentially involves being led into a darkened room and given a good shoeing for an hour. We've toured the
hutongs - the old alleyways and courtyards where Beijingers used to live before they concreted over the place - in a rickshaw, climbed to the top of the city's ancient drum-tower to survey what little we could see in the smog, and narrowly avoided being ripped off by a local 'student' who pretended to be our best mate until we told him where he could stick his exorbitant
When in Rome
We're not tourists, we're adventurous independent travellers... with big teeth. tea-house luncheon. Not only that, but we have just eaten delicious tucker in the world's dirtiest restaurant with a giant white rabbit sat at our feet. Not that similar to Kingston, all told.
And perhaps as a result, everything we did between our last blog and coming here (a good three weeks' worth of hard travelling) seems dwarfed by the scale of everything here - which is a shame, because the time we spent driving up Australia's east coast and camping out of the back of our borrowed Volvo was, to use the vernacular, bonza. Okay, it got off to a bad start, what with going to watch the first Ashes test in Brisbane (the less said the better) and celebrating Adele's birthday (28 again!), but we decided to mark the latter in a way that only two people closing in on mid-life crises could - by learning to surf. We spent two days in a place called Noosa Heads near Brisbane being flung off surfboards, shouted out by our swarthy tutor ('You're going to kill yourself if you hit a wave like that, mate...') and knackering various bits of our bodies; my knees came in for particular punishment,
to the bemusement of everybody we met who knew how to surf. Fortunately no pictures exist of this shameful spectacle, although we were both standing up by the end of it. Honest...
After that, we headed north up the coast to go sailing around the Whitsunday Islands. This is a beautiful, beautiful part of the world, blisteringly warm and right on the edge of the Great Barrier Reef, and we were lucky enough to get onto a great boat with a lovely bunch of people (only a couple of whom were interested in cricket). We passed three laid-back days there swimming, snorkelling, seeing God knows how much coral and fish (including a giant Maori Wrasse which we were both quite scared of) and generally pretending to be on holiday. This included a visit to a place called Whitehaven Bay, which is right up there with Praia Lopez Mendes in Brazil in our unofficial search for the world's greatest beach - although admittedly Lopez Mendes didn't have stingrays and reef sharks knocking about in its shallows.
Inspired by our first taste of The Reef, we decided to get a bit closer by learning to dive, and signed up to
The Drum Tower
All very Shogun 'do our badges' at a cheap course on Magnetic Island near Cairns. In the process we discovered that a) staying in a 'backpacker resort' is a bad idea if you are over 30, b) teenage Californians are THE most irritating people on God's green earth and c) fortunately, we both absolutely love diving. It turned out that Magnetic isn't a great place to do it, because the waves are so fierce that it's like diving in a cement mixer, so on our final day in Australia we torpedoed even more of our dwindling funds and went diving on the Outer Reef in a specialist dive boat. Helpfully, we've come out to write this without the CD of pictures that were taken of us in the 20-metre depths, but it was an experience that has left us itching to do more when we get to Thailand.
We will be in the latter in about three weeks' time, but first we have the rest of China to negotiate - a journey which looks like being the most fascinating of our travels so far. It's not about to get any warmer and we need to make some progress with the lingo pretty
Cold
And to think, a week ago we were in Cairns... rapidly if we're going to avoid eating anything too unsavoury, but what the hell: at least nobody here knows anything about cricket.
Take care,
Rob and Adele xxx
Catchphrase of the week
No 12: 'Pay attention, a***hole... God is watching you, you thieving b*st*rd.' - God, how we'll miss those refreshingly direct Aussies. This was a bumper sticker attached to the entire fleet of a popular camper-van firm. (There were no asterisks either, but give us a break - my Mum reads this.)
Catchphrase of the week
No13: 'And when I get home, I'm going to buy myself a guitar... and another guitar... and a bass guitar... and then a drum machine... and I'm going to convert the spare room into a recording studio... and then we can start jamming... even though I don't know how ... and pretty soon we could be knocking out some pretty good stuff, you know? Although I do only know three three chords... or is it four... ... no, it is four, sorry...' - Surely the best phone conversation ever, as ear-wigged by us on a tram in Melbourne, between a bored (and barking) Queenslander in
Hutong
And I thought Somerset House was crowded (work joke...) town to visit his 'nana' and his mate back-home who
really obviously did not want to be disturbed by him at work. When his mate finally extricated himself, possibly by leaping into the bath with a heater, said Queenslander began talking to us. His opening gambit? 'I knew you weren't from around here - nobody here would dress like that.' They said in the guide book that Queenslanders are a bit... different. They weren't wrong.
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Jim and Lucy
non-member comment
Long time no speak.......
Just got to grips with this whole blog thing! (How long have you been away for!). Hope all is well, you lucky, lucky, lucky people...... enjoy Christmas! Still planning to be in India in February? I'll be in the Delhi vicinity from 9th to the19th.