When in China, do as the Chinese

A warm Ni Hao to you all,

From Shangri-La, a little village on the border of China and Tibet, our latest update: China... a weird and wonderful place!!! We started at the bottom, made our way up to Beijing (the northpole of our travels) and have just hit the bottom again, to slowly get ready for our pilgrimage to Tibet. We have spent nights and nights on busses and trains with some bizzare sleeping arrangements happening from time to time: sharing cabins with utterly clothed buddhist nuns and semi naked sumo-style chinese alike. We have had to downgrade from 'soft sleepers' to 'hard sleepers' when sleeping on the train, which isn't as hard or grim as it seems, but does involve carriages with 20 rows of triple bunk beds and chinese fellow travellers as far as the eye can see. We once nearly didn't make it onto the bus we had booked - it took a team of 3 beefy travel agents pushing and shoving the busboy around, and parking their cars in front of and behind the bus so it could not leave without having us on board - why we weren't welcome I still don't know.

You could say we have fully embraced the chinese culture: we burp, we slurp, we hawk up with the best of them and if something spitworthy happens to materialize, we spit it on the floor with all our might. We have become experts at pushing in, elbows and all - it's a great sport, and nobody sees to mind! We get stared at, whispered about, taken photos of, and have had many a conversation which starts and ends with 'hellohowareyou??', as that is the extent of a lot of people's english skills. It's great though, we have come across so many situations where neither party has any idea what the other is saying, but we laugh our heads off trying to get our point across. People are smiley, curious, yes, a little disgusting at times (but I think they are working at this) and overall just very very friendly. There is no such thing as discretion- people think nothing of planting themselves a meter away from where you are, and just stare at you for 10 minutes or so. When in a public toilet in e.g. bus or train stations, people (or really I can only speak for the women) love to have a wee with the door open and look you straight in the eyes whilst relieving themselves. Bizarre? Very!!

We have taken tight arse backpacking to the next level - we have even bought ourselves a couple of thermos flasks to make cheap coffees/teas whenever we want to. China has a great boiling water system in place: it is available for free anywhere anytime so as to enable the chinese to quench their thirst for tea and hunger for instant noodles, and we are certainly making the most of it! China is still pretty cheap though, so luckily we don't survive on coffee and noodles alone... It's just the actual getting from A to B which costs a fortune, and there has been a fair bit of that happening. Background music to our travels happens to consist of a lot of Spice Girls, Backstreet Boys, Boney M, and John Denver. A great mix making for some excellent humming along!!

China is not at all what we were expecting. From the minute we entered from Vietnam, and found ourselves on a 6 lane highway with no cars for 3 hours straight, everything has been brand spanking new. Highways, buildings, whole cities are so, so modern - the authentic China has all but disappeared, and this is the new 'real' China. At times there are great characters contradicting this era of modern-ness, such as the people sweeping highways with hand made straw brooms, and those waiting in shiny new trainstations in their overalls and blue caps with their backpacks made out of old potato-sacks... It's great in one way, sad in another, and we have to travel Extensively (yes, with a capital E) to get from one little chunk of authenticity to the next.

To give you a brief impression of our time in China so far, here's a rundown of our itinerary:

Having come in from Vietnam, we started our chinese adventure in and around Guilin. It's easy to see why the Chinese love this area so much - it is very pretty, with on the one hand the limestone mountains around Yangshuo (where we whiled/biked/hiked away a day or four), and on the other hand the beautiful rice fields around Longsheng. We did a 6 hour hike through the rice paddies, accompanied by a wonderful tribal chinese lady, whose only vocabulary was: one, two and lunchi lunchi. She chewed our ears off for most of the 6 hours, probably sharing her life story including full medical history, religious beliefs and the latest village gossip, but (un)fortunately we didn't catch any of that, which is just as well as we were concentrating on trying to make it to the end.

After Guilin, we took a sleeper bus (the one we nearly did not get on) to Shanghai - 18 hours flat on our backs in a bus filled with bunkbeds. We had a fantastic long weekend in Shanghai - a most decadent few days with wonderful lunches, brunches, dinners etc etc etc. We stayed with our friends Laila and Jason and their two beautiful little girls, and were shown all around town in their car with driver!! A fantastic break from backpacking, and it was brilliant to see them again after all this time.

Onwards to Beijing - another massive city, though not as big as Shangai's 20 million... We did the main sights here, such as the Summer Palace, Tianamen Square and the Gate of Heavenly Peace, the Forbidden City (with the pinnacle of China's westernisation: a Starbucks right in the middle of this most historical place... Daniel was mostly interested in the concubines and how the emperor managed to keep them all happy), and of course, the Great Wall. We did a 10 kilometre walk on top of the Wall, which was just magnificent. The experience of walking the Wall, rather than just looking at it, was amazing, and we both agreed that this was our top day in China. Well, so far, anyway...

We made our way down through Datong (where we met our friend the nun, who was at first quite shocked to be sleeping in the same room with Daniel, but later became best buddies with him), and I guess this is where we really began to notice the pollution. By now we were heading towards central China - coal mining country. The haze and smog were unbelievable, thick and smokey, and taking photos of anything further than 5 metres away was useless, really, as the picture would turn out washed out and grey. We did get a good look-in at yet another China: workman's country, where everyone drives dirty-white volkswagens and wears mining overalls (men and women alike). Of course this is only a 6 million 'backwater', so we couldn't expect too much high fashion...

From Datong to Pingyao (a very well preserved, yet still smoggy, walled town), where due to the 'International Photograpy Festival' we struggled to find accommodation, and where the streets were absolutely swamped with chinese photographers (the festival didn't look to international to us) taking pix of anything that moved, including us... A great place to spend a few days had it not been so busy - so we moved on to Xi'An. The night train started to feel like a bit of a home to us; a place to relax, though sleep is usually a bit hard to come by.

Xi'An - more pollution, and other than the Terra Cotta Warriors there is not too much happening here. The same goes for Chengu, where we caught up with some fantastic panda's, and moved on swiftly.

We are now in a province called Yunnan, and it is just the most beautiful place on earth. Miles and miles of rolling hills covered in rice paddies (by now golden) and corn fields. It is harvest time, and the fields are packed with people working away - a great sight, and it's strange to think that when we started our travels in Thailand in may only the tiniest spriggs of green were popping out of the mud... It's been a while since we've been on the road - in fact, we are halfway now... Time is going too quick and we've still got so much to do!!

Our favorite place in China is a town called Lijiang, where we spent quite a few days. It has a most fantastic, well preserved Naxi old town (Naxi being the local minority people). It 's an absolute joy to just be walking around, checking out the biddies and old pricks (the latter being Dan's input) dancing and singing in the cobble-stoned streets. Everyone wears traditional clothing, the houses are white, the canals have little wooden bridges, and at night the lanterns are a glowing bright red. Lijiang is the China from storybooks and we didn't want to ever leave. Somehow we managed to drag ourselves away, and have spent the last two days walking the Tiger Leaping Gorge, at a 2700m altitude against a backdrop of 5000m mountains... The views were amazing, and kept changing after every corner and with every breath of wind blowing beautiful clouds our way. At night we had wolves howling underneath our window (at least that's how close it sounded). Scary...

Our Chinese adventure has come to an end, and tomorrow we're off to Tibet!! Very, very exciting - and promising to be very impressive. We were close to making a 7 day journey by jeep into Lhasa, but after being stuffed about by Mr. Jeep man we decided to fly in after all. We have teamed up with a great Australian couple, which will make it easy to rent a jeep once we are in Tibet, and explore the Roof of the World...

That's it for now - a big electronic hug from the both of us. We'll be in touch in a month or so, when we'll be sending some snow-capped mountains your way.

Lots of love,

Daniel & Kris

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