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My allergies were back again. Not as bad as in Bangkok, so they didn’t make me look strange, but I woke up in the night in Yanshuo with my whole back driving me crazy with itching and with large welt-like rashes on it again. It made it hard to sleep, so I dug around in my first-aid kit and found some of the left-over anti-histamines, the ones the first Bangkok doctor prescribed me and the second doctor told me to not take, and fell straight back to sleep, probably because they’re the ones that cause drowsiness. The same thing happened the second night. I mainly ate pretty boring Western food, so I don’t think it’s anything I ate. I feel like I’ve become allergic to mosquitoes, is that possible? Anyway, there’s no Mosquitoes here in Beijing, so I’ve been fine lately.
There’s a heap of stuff to do in Yangshuo, it’s really targeted at tourists, as I mentioned in the last blog. Many of these are Chinese tourists, some of them clustered together like ants in a package tour following some Chinese tour-guide with a flag. Even here, most of the shop owners and such-like don’t speak English, they seem
Yangshuo
from the cruise down the Li river, downstream from Yangshuoto have the idea that there’s more of them than there is of us, which is fair enough too. Part of the problem in the smaller cities (Guilin, just up the road from Yangshuo, is “only” 1.3 million people) might be the level of English education, I met some people majoring in English at the university who really didn’t speak particularly good English. Anyway I didn’t do much interesting, the scenery around the town is quite impressive as it is. I had some “house-keeping” stuff to do, mailing stuff home and buying new clothes and such-like. I did a cruise down the Li River, and saw much the same sort of scenery, although it’s good to see it from the river level, passing local fishermen and families tending to their water buffalo.
I only realise now that somewhere between Nanning and Guilin (a week or two ago) I crossed the tropic of Cancer. I’d have realised this a lot sooner if the bastards hadn’t taken my atlas off me (see last blog)! Anyway, this marks the last time I’ll be in the tropics for the next few months, probably until September. Yangshuo was pretty much on the tropic anyway,
Yangshuo
from the cruise down the Li river, downstream from Yangshuo and the difference isn’t too obvious since of course it’s spring here. Beijing of course has very extreme summers and winters, so I’m pretty lucky to be here at this time of year (one of the few places I got right in terms of the weather so far on my trip) as it’s lovely weather here. The amount of tourist crap you can get in Yangshuo is amazing: T-shirts with Osama bin Laden painted on them, your name written in “more Chinese” letters, all manner of Children’s toys, animals made of straw, Tibetan necklaces, and all the usual paraphernalia. This area is also one of the traditional areas of Cormorant fishing, where the fishermen train birds to catch fish for them. Of course nowadays they prefer to use nets, but there’s still some who’re happy to put on displays for the cameras, which is where all those images you see in books come from. There was one guy just standing there with his two cormorants, in the sun with his traditional raincoat on, on the road several metres from the lake, surrounded by Chinese tourists paying him 5 Yuan (a bit over $AUS 1) to take his photo.
I
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from the cruise down the Li river, downstream from Yangshuo didn’t find the post office people much more helpful than the banks. Even the shop assistants, while going out of their way to sell you stuff, seemed to feel a bit put out at having to do anything; not doing anything to disabuse me of the stereotype I’ve been left with by other travellers, that they’d just rather say “no” then do anything which requires them to fill in a form.
The train from Guilin to Beijing takes about 26 hours. I’d hoped to take the one leaving on Saturday afternoon, but the Friday and Saturday ones were all full when I tried to get a ticket about three days before. Likewise for the sensibly-timed Sunday train. All that I could get was a “hard seat” on the train leaving Guilin at 19:00 and getting in at 23:00. I was a bit skeptical that they could actually be full, but if the crowdedness of my carriage was is any indication, they really were full. “Hard seat” is cattle class. They’re just seats, comfortable enough as seats go, curved, in the way of seats everywhere, to fit the normal back, which is a bit smaller than mine. Chinese aren’t particularly
Yangshuo
from the cruise down the Li river, downstream from Yangshuo small people (I just Wikipedia-ed it, and depending which studies you use, they have the same mean height as Australians; every time you mention Chinese height of course, someone feels compelled to point out that the Hakka are exceptionally big; I don’t know who the Hakka are but I know that they’re big), but I’m above the normal curve in both populations, so such seats force me to sit slouched over, and make it hard to sleep. The hard sleepers cram you in with basically three people to a bench seat with seats facing opposite ways, so you get six people in a little “pod”. Every seat was full, but at various stations more people got on, standing, sometimes for 12-hour trips or more. I don’t know if the railways sell “standing room only” tickets, but I can only conclude that they were, since the other tickets were numbered with seat numbers, and no-one was trying to evict anyone from their seats (not after the train left Guilin).
Of course to get back to Guilin I had to make the 1.5-hour bus trip back, down from Yangshuo. This time before I got on the bus, the guy who couldn’t
Yangshuo
from the cruise down the Li river, downstream from Yangshuo speak English raised six fingers and said “Six! OK?” but I didn’t know what he meant ... Six Yuan? six o’clock? After the last blog, I hoped it was six Yuan. But after the bus took off he came to me and I only had a 100 Yuan note. He gave me 50 Yuan change and went to walk off, but I made a “that can’t be right” look, and he took the money back, counted it, and returned it with an extra 15 Yuan. Before I could make the international “that still can’t be right” face, he’d moved on in the bus and without a word of a common language there wasn’t much I could say about it later. So I don’t know if the bus fair should be 40 Yuan like I got changed the first time, 35 like I got charged the second time, or 10 like the Lonely Planet says.
Of course to get to the Guilin train station to be ready to leave at 19:00, I had to leave my hotel at Yangshuo at about 16:30. This meant I didn’t really have any dinner on Saturday. I picked up some bananas on the way,
Yangshuo
from the cruise down the Li river, downstream from Yangshuo so I had half a pack of Pringles and a bag of bananas for dinner. They did bring dinner around to buy, but their methodology was to yell in Mandarin at the top of their voice, and then race through as quickly as possible, which meant that I had no idea of what was going on. The food was usually in a metal trolley which looked more like a rubbish trolley than a food trolley. I managed to buy a pack of cherry tomatoes, so the next morning I had the cherry tomatoes and the other half a can of Pringles for breakfast.
The book I brought along was a real page-turner which is good for the author but since it was also rather short this meant that I’d finished it in a few hours, and then I used up my laptop battery in a few more hours, which meant that I had almost 20 hours to amuse myself by pretending to be asleep. None of the others in my “pod” spoke a word of English or were very good at sign language. There was a short time, about 16 hours into the trip, where they thought it would
Yangshuo
from the cruise down the Li river, downstream from Yangshuo be cool to try to teach me Mandarin, but I clearly wasn’t learning fast enough for them - they seemed to think it was easy, whereas I couldn’t even get the tones right - but they soon gave up on this. A jovial round man from another “pod” a few rows away probably in his late 20s smiled very friendly-like at me on the first night and started talking away in Mandarin, ignoring my protestations that I couldn’t understand a word he was saying. The next day I passed him again and he was so talkative, and motioned me to sit down (on a miraculously free seat just in front of him). He started chatting again, and the same thing happened for a bit, him talking in Mandarin and me talking in English. I looked at his friend next to him (I don’t know if they knew each other or only met on the trip) and said “this man looks like he can speak some English” to which he shook his head, but after a while with the round fellow jabbering away, he began translating. We chatted for a bit, and since his English was limited I got a world
Yangshuo
from the cruise down the Li river, downstream from Yangshuo map (not a very good one because the bastards took my atlas, did I tell you?) and showed them the route of my trip, by which they were suitably impressed; as well they should be!!
Around 11:30 on the second day, the food trolley came around again. I’d learned to recognise it now, and ordered a meal for myself, by gesticulating wildly. It was rice with cabbage and tofu and a tiny bit of chicken. It was very bland and tofu-heavy, but tasted passable, but I blame it for making me very ill. So for the rest of the trip I felt very uncomfortable, and by the evening had to throw up. However unlike the gentlemen on the bus in Vietnam who featured in my blog last week, I was able to get out of my pod, force my way down the corridor full of people with the “standing room only” tickets, and into the toilet, aiming perfectly at the little Chinese-style squat toilet. It’s funny, writing about that doesn’t make me feel bad at all, but I had to write the middle section almost a week later than I wrote all the rest of the blog so far,
Yangshuo
from the cruise down the Li river, downstream from Yangshuo because it still makes me sick to think about the food. It must have been the food which made me ill since it was unlikely to be the Pringles, and I obviously peeled the bananas. I guess it could have been the cherry tomatoes, but they were very clean (not like the ones you get from Coles in Australia!) and shrink-wrapped.
So I finally arrived in Beijing just before 23:00 - yes the train arrived early, and after about 40 minutes standing in queue for a taxi, I managed to get to the backpackers I thought I had booked, just before midnight, almost dead on my feet from lack of sleep and suchlike. It turned out that they hadn’t got my booking, and after rearranging a few things in their booklet of who’s in what rooms, they finally decided that they did have a bed, although probably only for one night. I collapsed into bed but of course couldn’t sleep for a bit. I woke up at 06:30 because there was a noise and because it was way too hot.
I spent my first day in Beijing trying to organise the visas. I was chasing four: Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan,
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from the cruise down the Li river, downstream from Yangshuo Iran, Syria and Jordan. I’d written down the addresses of the embassies, but finding them was a different story. The embassy area is massive, so I spent about five hours mainly just walking around. Most of them were on small streets that didn’t show up on my map, so the addresses were somewhat useless, except I knew I was in the right area.
The Syrian embassy has this thing whereby they won’t process visa applications from citizens outside of the country they’re in, unless they have a letter from your own embassy. They claim it normally takes four working days and Wednesday might be a holiday, so it might be late next week but they could try to hurry it up. I also found the Iranian embassy, which for some reason had a great queue in front of it. At about 11:30 some Iranian came out and in English said to the Chinese man manning the counter that the queue was too long and to send half of us home, which of course caused a shambles. I was able to get a form, and asked him how long it would take, and he told me three weeks.
Three
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from the cruise down the Li river, downstream from Yangshuo weeks was useless for me, if I have to stay in Beijing for three weeks it would put me way behind schedule, it’s only about six weeks I think until I have to be in Amman. I can’t even apply with my Swiss passport and then fly back from somewhere else, because I’d need to get another Chinese visa for that. I also found the Jordanian embassy, which was shut but when I pressed the buzzer they let me in and I spoke to a Jordanian man in a suit, who told me that I can just apply at the border, which would be the same as applying at the embassy. I knew one could get visas at the border, but I wanted to get a forty-day visa not a fourteen-day one, but he seemed to say that one can renew it in the country, although he became distracted at this point with other customers.
As it was now after 12:30 and most of the visa sections were shut for the day, I headed off to the Australian embassy to get the letter for the Syrian embassy. The Aussie embassy was shut, but I couldn’t quite understand from the
Yangshuo
from the cruise down the Li river, downstream from Yangshuo guards whether it was shut for the day or just for lunch, they spoke no English and were much more interested in clicking their heels and saluting each other than helping people. I always thought that your embassy was meant to be a place you could run to for sanctuary if you were being chased by Red Chinese, but I guess that’s a myth like that one about Eskimos. It was here that I bumped into a group of other Aussies who were planning a trip much like mine. They gave me the suggestion of an online site which helps arrange Iranian visas in ten working days, and one can pick them up at any embassy. So I’m doing this for my Iranian visa, and hopefully pick it up in Almaty (Kazakhstan). The site might be dodgy but it looks OK, so we’ll just have to see, I guess. The Australian embassy finally let me in at 14:00 and wrote a very non-committal letter restating only information that’s in my passport, and including the phrase “we cannot vouch for Mr Gerber”. They wouldn’t even confirm that I was resident in Australia and in China on a tourist visa. I have
Yangshuo
from the cruise down the Li river, downstream from Yangshuo yet to see if the Syrian embassy will accept this. I went back to them on Wednesday and gave them the paperwork so I’ll find out on Monday morning.
It was after this that I got bad gastro. I don’t know if it was from something else, or a delayed reaction to the food from the train. After basically not eating since Friday, lack of sleep, and such-like it really threw me around. My medicine kit from Traveldoctor has a good flow-chart about how to treat yourself and suchlike but I had already used the medication I needed. I went to a pharmacist to try to get some more, but they don’t speak English and none of their tablets had the chemical name written in English, which I thought was a bit strange - perhaps it was a Chinese medicine pharmacy, but it looked like a real pharmacy - they gave me some stuff but it had no effect. The flowchart says that if it continues four days it could be giardia, so on the fourth day I took my giardia tablets. These seemed to help, but it meant that I’d wasted nearly a week in Beijing without having
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from the cruise down the Li river, downstream from Yangshuo done anything. So it seemed that it was giardia after all, although those tablets also work against amoebic dysentry.
Today I attempted to go to the Forbidden city and Tian’anmen Square, but got lost and ended up at the Temple Of Heaven instead. This is a massive temple dating back to the 15th century, dedicated to Chinese Heaven Worship. Of course, nowadays Zen Buddhism and Taoism are the main religions in most of China, not counting Atheism, but centuries ago Chinese religion seems to have been more centred around “heaven”, and its role in bringing good crops, etc. There seem to have been very elaborate rituals performed by the emperor, involving animal sacrifice, with special animal slaughtering halls and corridors so that the purity of the animals wouldn’t be compromised by sand or snow. The architecture has numerous references to the number 9 (which they found sacred in some way) and the I-Ching. That’s what the little audioguide device said anyway, I obviously don’t know enough to see it for myself. It’s a massive complex, which is nice enough because of the gardens, and I guess since it was May Day, everyone was there - it was pretty crowded.
Beijing
outside the Sanlitun embassy area Some people seemed to come just to enjoy the massive parklands. Still, it’s disconcerting to see a sign pointing to the next pavilion and saying it’s 1100 metres away. It’s spring time here of course, and it rained a bit in the morning. It’s the first time I’ve been really cold (other than from people cranking the air conditioning up to ridiculous levels) since before I left Australia, so that was kind of cool. It wasn’t as cold as back home in Melbourne, nor anything like the crazy temperatures Beijing gets in winter, but still, it made a change from all the tropical weather for the last four months.
After a few email exchanges with the Iranian visa mob I’ve decided they’re a pack of clowns, and it looks like I won’t be able to get my Iranian visa in time, which means I can’t get my Turkmenistan transit visa (they won’t obviously give a transit visa without one having a visa for the country to which one’s transiting). This means I’ll probably have to fly out of Kazakhstan. Since I couldn’t find the Kyrgyz embassy, and wasted too much time here being ill, I’ve also given up
on my idea of going through the Southern Silk Route into Kazakhstan via Kyrgyzstan. That would have been a bit of a waste of time anyway since I wouldn’t have had time to look around Kyrgyzstan, which is meant to be really nice. I’ll take the more direct route now, into Kazakhstan.
The only hope for getting to Jordan overland now would be if I can find a ferry from the far east of Kazakhstan through to Azerbaijan. The problem is these ferries are infrequent and so far I’ve not been able to find any information about when the next ones are. I don’t want to spend five days travelling across Kazakhstan (which is the size of Western Australia, or for the non-Aussies, 20% larger than Greenland) on the off-chance, especially when I only have a 13-day visa. The other problem is that I’ll be going to Almaty, the largest city in Kazakhstan and its previous capital but the Azerbaijani embassy is in Astana, the new, official, capital. Most other countries have embassies in both cities, or just in Almaty (I think most government departments are still based in Almaty), so that’s a bit of bad luck for me
too. The two cities are about 1000 km apart.
I’ll post this now even though there’s not much of Beijing in there, and hopefully I’ll have been able to see a bit more of it by next time. Tomorrow I have to go shopping for clothes that I’ll need in Jordan (not allowed to wear shorts of short sleeves, apparently!), so that’ll probably take a while, and probably pop in to the Ancient Coins Museum. It’s probably not something that I’d mark on my must-do list but it’s pretty close and I was just reading about how the Chinese silver
tael became the Japanese
ryo, the basis of their currency. Then I can squeeze in a few more of the local attractions in this part of town, before Sunday when I’m going on a day tour to hike along eight kilometres of the Great Wall. Hopefully I still have a spare day there to see the Forbidden City sometime, if I can find it this time! My Kazakh visa doesn’t become active till May 11 anyway, and the border, apparently, is closed that day.
I just realised that China has a larger population than four continents
Beijing - Temple of Heaven
For some reason people were dancing in the park to what I assume was Chinese classical music. put together. Isn’t that interesting? It also has about half of the world’s pigs, which would be less interesting if it weren’t for Swine Flu (which should be called “Mexican flu” if one cared about convention)
If anyone wants a simple brainteaser, here’s something I was thinking of. Perhaps rather than people leaving a comment with the answers, just leave a comment if you have a question or you disagree with the obvious answer. I’ll put the answer as I see it in my next blog.
We all know that China has long had a one-child policy for Han Chinese. While this was never absolute, Lonely Planet says that this has now been changed to allow families in rural areas to have another child if their first child was a girl. Presumably this is to reduce the gender imbalance since in some rural areas, apparently, boys are still considered more valuable than girls. My question is, will this work? If so, by how much?
I don’t know if you’re only allowed two girls, or if you can keep having girls until you get a boy. Does it make a difference?
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