Four seasons in China

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At the end of this blog you will know everything about:

• crazy chinese tourists
• crazy western hippies
• cheating temple monks (probably also crazy)
• crazy entrance fees and better: how to avoid them
• our first real case of sickness called “travellers fatigue” (us getting crazy?)
• our three highlights in China and how we went through the four seasons in four weeks time

So, hmmm...where shall we start? We ended our last blog with the story about entering China.

After entering we immediately headed for Kunming, a provincial city in the south-west of China. Kunming was quite a surprise. We had expected a sleepy provincial town (like we had seen some in our earlier visits to china, cfr. Bart's fourth visit and Raf's third to China) with it's occasional shopping malls, but still with the obligated old ladies doing tai-chi in the park and the old men sitting in the streets smoking too many cigarettes. But suprise suprise: instead, we entered a bustling, post-modern, neon- lit, skyscraper city. Even more suprisingly, all motorcycles were electrical. A major contradiction with the madly honking motorcycle gangs in the rest of south-east asia!

Was this provincial China? China, a green consciousness??? That's a story we don't often hear in europe......! It seems to us that the west portrays China always in a negative way, perhaps a bit in fear of their quickly growing economic powers (remember that we saw a whole new city being built on our way from Vietnam to China? cfr. Our last blog). Collapsing coalmines and exploited laborers are probably more soothing stories for our western ears to hear. But then again, these stories are also a reality!

Anyway, about Kunming: The chinese themselves like to call it “the city of eternal spring”. A nice marketing stunt? Probably! But also very true in our case. Imagine the best spring you ever had and then you have the average year-round weather forecast for Kunming. The first highlight of our trip to China was a visit to The Stone Forest near Kunming. For the Belgians: if you remember the series of the first Peking Express: they also passed through the Stone Forest. It's basically that: a forest of giant monolithic stones. You can walk (or crawl in some places) through it and it really is very impressive. The Stone Forest was also the first place where we got hit with crazy entrance fees (this first time we payed them nicely as a good tourist) and got introduced to the crazyness of how a chinese tour works. But more about that at the end of our blog...

From Kunming we took a plane to Zhongdiang on the tibetan plateau (3300 m altitude). The Chinese claim that Zhongdiang is the mythical, paradise-like “Shangri-lá”, mentioned in the book of James Hilton from 1933. We had never heard about the book, but the name Shangri-lá did ring a very distant bell about something paradise like... In order to attract more tourists to the region the chinese drastically changed the name of the city to Shangri-lá. Boy, these Chinese sure now the concept of city marketing!

Well, Shangri-lá is very very nice but it isn't paradise either. It's still in China, but it is close to the border with Tibet and 90%!o(MISSING)f it's population is Tibetan. It's as close as it can get to Tibetan if your are travelling on a budget like us. In Shangri-la it was allready near the end of autumn and allready much colder (+- 5 degrees ). We did some nice hiking to small villages here, right through brownish coloured farming fields and seeing yaks, ending our trip with a cup of yak butter tea at a farmers house. We also saw our first tibetan temples and a monastery with the typical Tibetan prayer flags. Again, the governement asked an incredible high entrance fee for the monastery but....sshhht....you can just sneek in through the back:-)

After acclimatizing to the height for a few days we went further up north, even closer to the Tibetan border (Deqin). You might hop over to Tibet here without knowing it (whoops, sorry China!) and some backpackers "accidently" do. Our Lonely Planet Bible told us: don't even think about going there in November or December because you can get snowed in and will be stuck for days as the roads are not passable anymore. Well, we took our chances and glad we did. We had to pass over some very high mountains to get there and we went to 4850 meters. The highest we ever went!

And there it was....you guessed right and so did Lonely Planet: after spring and autum, winter! Finally, after all these months in tropical weathers! Temperatures soon dropped below zero, at night going to -10, and yes yes yes, we had snow. The second highlight of our chinese trip was here. We visited the Mingyong glacier. A hard walk up a mountain (you have to climb from a valley at 2200 meters to 3300 meters), but you have a clear sight on a beautiful glacier with snow peaks in the back. So hard but so rewarding and the temperatures were also good when we did the hike up. If you belong to a crazy chinese tour group (more later) you can rent horses to go up the mountain, but that's cheating so we did it on foot. Oooooh yes, we are really getting sporty here!

After all the cold in the north we quickly made our way down to warmer temperatures. We will spare you the details about all the little villages we visited, but we definitely have to tell you about our third highlight in China and that is Tiger Leaping Gorge. Tiger Leaping Gorge is one of the deepest canyons in the world and you can climb up to the sides of the canyon and then do some hiking there. There isn't much to tell about it, except that the views are really spectacular. We talked about making a top 5 of must-do's in Asia (of all the things we saw or will still see that is) when we get back home and there is a high chance this will be in it!

Next stop : Dali. Once a real backpacker's paradise (according to our Bible), now apparently one big tourist business place with pizza and spaghetti as much as you like. Oh yes we like! This is the place where we bunked down for 5 days/6 nights after we got hit by a serious case of travellers fatigue. It seems every longtime traveller has this disease somewhere along the road. Signs are: not being able to get out of bed, not bothering anymore to do all the things listed on your itinerary schedule, getting bored at watching yet another temple, etc... The cure: stay where you are, eat loads of pizza's with too much cheese on top, sleep till noon, read, watch chinese tv even if you don't understand anything, get absolutely bored with doing nothing.

We are still in the curing fase, but I'm sure we will manage with some more pizza...From Dali we took a plane to the warmer Jinghong, next to the border with Laos. We are again closing in to tropical temperatures now and by the time you read this we will probably be in Laos. Yes: summertime!

To end this blog, here are some things we want to tell about crazy people and crazy things:


Crazy chinese tourists

Perhaps all Chinese are a bit crazy. Why oh why did they ever invent karaoke TV in the first place? How do they manage to eat a whole plate of food in just a few seconds? It's probably because only half the food reaches their mouth and the other half ends on the floor or the table. When a chinese group has passed through a restaurant it allways looks a bit like a battlefield, after the battle or like an ordinary foodfight has taken place. And what is that thing with spitting on the ground? First they make sounds like they are choking, you are just thinking about jumping in to save them (will I have to do mouth-to-mouth with this old lady??) and then suddenly there comes out this giant pool of saliva like you have nerver seen before. But of all the Chinese, chinese tourists probably spand the crown in crazyness. They never come alone, they allways travel in flocks, packed in their tourist buses. They sit eight hours on that bus, hop off at a sight and before you are even able to say “Look, another crazy chinese tour group!”, they have allready snapped a few pictures, spit on the ground and are back on their bus smiling happily at you from behind their window seat. Chain smoking chinese tourists are another great phenomenon to watch. As they can't make it up the stair or mountain, they rent horses or donkeys to go up while they smoke a cigarette sitting on top. Apart from that, chinese tourists are just very very lazy in general: they do everything to avoid any physical labour (not that we want to generalise here, oh no:-) ). If there is a donkey or a horse: they take it. A cable car to the top of the mountain? Let's take it. Fantastic panoramic views or great temples up the mountain but no cablecar or donkey??? Sorry, no can do! Then again, this phenomenon can be quite a help in knowing what to visit. You just pick something which demands some physical exercise. Never worry, you won't be overrun by any chinese tour groups....:-) While chinese tour groups can be a pain in *** ***, drunken chinese tourists are when it really gets scary. They come knocking and shouting on your door “ni hao (hello)” in the middle of the night, probably because they want to be friendly and want to have a drink with these white westerners. How nice of them....

crazy western hippies

Then again, we in the West have our fair share in all the crazyness. We got some crazy hippie people walking around in China as well. Mostly male, occasionaly accompanied by a dreadlock girl. We saw a lot of them in Dali. What is it with these backpackers going hippie-style??? Just because they are on a long travel, they seem to believe they have a great excuse to walk around in shabby clothes (we got one mistaken for a beggar), not wash and let all their body hair grow freely untill it touches ground. I really doubt whether there parents recognise them on the pictures they send home....

crazy entrance fees

The chinese governement loves figuring out what places tourists visit, then they put up a ticket booth at the place and charge you a lot of money, in some cases for seeing something not so special. Some examples are:

- viewpoints next to roads where tourists often seem to stop to take a picture. Hmmm....how can we make money of this? I know what: let's build a very high wall in front of the view so no one can see and then charge money to go behind the wall!
- Public parks where western tourists go for a short walk. Let's build a ticket booth for the foreigners!
- A little village with nice old houses. Let's charge money when they leave the busstation!

Temples, monasteries, lakes,.....really everything is charged and after a while you really get angry. Asking money to enter a national park is absolutely normal, we can't argue with that. But in China the governement really exagerates. Can you imagine a ticket booth on the Meir in Atwerp asking money from people if they want to continue shopping? A wall in front of our cathedral or a ticket office in our public parks? I can't! But the thing about these ticket offices is: they are often easily avoided and backpackers share with each others tips about this. They always forget to put up a ticket booth at the side or back entrance so you can often sneek in. If they build a high wall to block a view, you can just go the hotel across the street and ask if you can have a look from their roof top. Another great thing we did (for example if you want to sleep in an old town where you normally have an entrance fee) is to arrive very late or very early: the ticket offices are then closed and you can just walk in. The same thing goes for the Tiger Leaping Gorge. A quick lesson in cheating the chinese governement....

cheating temple monks

So, you make your way around China, trying not to step into too many tourist traps/ticket offices the governement set up and then you step right in a trap set up by some monks. Yes, even monks can be weak when it comes to hard tourist dollars. When we visited a temple in Dali two monks approached us in an overfriendly/overhappy manner. We were offered incense to burn and could make a wish. Then we had to write down on a piece of paper our name, birth date and the wish. I thought we were going to get a prediction of our future based on our name and birth date or someting like that. But that wasn't the case. They stamped the paper and then asked for 100 yuan (10 euro), but you can have 5 dinners for that money here). In other temples we had payed just 10 yuan to burn a candle so it was clearly a scam. We didn't want to encourage them in this kind of scam (you can thank us later future travellers) and so we left with giving them some small change, in return getting angry shouts from the monks back. I guess our wish must be cursed by now. Tsss....your hairs start raising when even monks start joining in the tourist dollar hunt....!


Well, that's about it! I hope we weren't too negative in the end of our blog:-) Between all the crazy chinese tour groups, high entrance fees and other tourist traps still lies a fantastic country to visit. Even after visiting China for several times, it still remains one of our favorits and the three highlights mentioned above were fantastic experiences that make everything worth. They have fantastic landscapes and you can still find a lot of old medieval villages if you look hard enough. Just try to get away from the tourist crowds. We have allready talked about another visit to China in the future. But for now, there are a lot of other things on our to-see list.....

See you on our next blog!

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Comments

[Eve]

Verhuis staat voor de deur!!!
Dag reizigers, Heb hard gelachen met China hoogtepunten en ergernissen: jullie blog is mijn drug geworden, ik kan gewoon niet meer zonder aaarch!!! Verhuis staat voor de deur nog meer aaarch maar ook good vibrations! Goeie vibes stuur ik graag ook jullie richting uit, dikke zoenen, ps Wouter wil wel wisselen indien jullie het niet meer zien zitten, kus Eve