China

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Traveling China.

I arrived in Kunming, China after taking an overnight sleeper bus from Odomxai, Laos. Entering China was like coming to another world and luckily my first impressions of the Chinese people proved to be untrue for the rest of the trip. Crossing the Boarder was surprisingly easy but my bags were searched at the boarder and twice in the space of a few hours afterwards when the bus was stopped and searched buy the Chinese military.

My next issue was getting money. We stopped in a small city just after the boarder for an hours rest. I spent this time running around the city trying every ATM I could find but every single one only accepted Chinese Bank cards. Then when I arrived to Kunming I spent my first few minutes on Chinese soil pushing my way passed all the Taxi drivers yelling Chinese at me and not comprehending the fact that I didn’t have a clue what they were saying. I then spent the next hour walking around the bus station trying to work out where I was going to get some money from. Luckily I ran into a guy from Austria that was willing to swap some Yhan for a few US dollars. The only problem was that he only had large notes and not a single shop would change any money for him. In the end we grabbed some noodles to split his bill.

I left the bus station convinced that what I had read in old travel books was true. some of these bookes described that traveling in China could be very dificult, writing about how the Chiese seemed to disllike us round eyed people and that the Chinese were in general a pack unfriendly bastards. Luckily this was soon put to rest when I jumped on a bus to the city with two Israelis who had taken the same bus as me from Odomxai. Looking confused on the bus, we had a Chinese woman who could speak a little English go out of her way to help show us where to go and kindly pay for our bus tickets, as none of us had the correct change.

This sudden bout of un friendliness followed buy the complete opposite proved to set the trend that every day spent in China is almost guaranteed to throw a giant contradictory at you that leaves you feeling like you know absolutely nothing about the place what so ever. However mostly the Chinese seem to be the friendliest race of people I've ever met.

I spent a few days in Kunming before getting a train to Chengdu. The first thing that surprised me about being in a Chinese city after traveling through South East Asia was how clean all the streets seemed to be. I also started to work out that most of the literature I had read on China was completely wrong in a lot of respects due to the fact that most of it was ten years older or more and the whole country has totally transformed itself in a ridiculously short amount of time.

Kunming 15 years ago was a small city with no high rise buildings and all the buildings were all built out of wood. Today it's a huge modern city with all the old wooden buildings having long been bulldozed and replaced with giant modern concrete sky scrapers.

The train ride to Chengdu took 18 hours, which was spent sitting in a seat, as all the beds had long been booked out. It seems with all of china's recent changes and development millions can now afford to travel, pushing most transport systems to capacity. 18 hours sitting around a small table with four Chinese was a lot of fun, but by the end I decided that I was never going to spend such a stupid amount of time sitting in a hard plastic seat, eating chickens feet and Sun flower seeds with the Chinese ever again. However. Talking about this amongst other travelers I realised my small stint of 18 hours was nothing. One person I talked to had spent 36 hours traveling on a hard seat. I find it hard to imagine even contemplating such a crazy idea.

Chengdu tuned out to be one of my favorite city's in China. It is a small enough city that I could get around without too much stress and big enough that you felt like you were in a Chinese city. Also it had only a small population of western people and the locals seemed to be extremely nice and helpful. As I only had six weeks in China, I Decided to make Chengdu my base to travel around. I stayed in a place called Sims Hostel while I was there and it has to be one of the best Hostels I've ever been too. The people who stayed there were always great and the staff were fantastic to the point I ended up going on a three day holiday with them to a small city called Emishan.

From Chengdu I traveled north for two days, stopping in some small towns along the way. One was completely brand new due to the recent earth dukes in China leveling the entire place. I spent the night here marveling at all the new buildings, built to try and bring Tourists in the town. Walking around felt it like being on a TV set. Everything was made to look old but was very obviously brand new. I didn't see any westerners there but there was quite a few Chinese tourists happily walking round taking millions Of photos as all Asians on holiday seem to do. From here I traveled to a place called Songpan where I camped up in the highlands behind the town for 2 nights.

From Songpan I went back to Chengdu then Caught a high Speed train to Chongqing. Every body I spoke too that had heard about Chongqing couldn't work out why I wanted to go there, as supposedly there's nothing to see except for pollution and ugly buildings, but for me the place was truly amazing and being quite green and hilly, a pleasant change from Chengdu which is completely flat.

Chongqing is if you consider the surrounding municipalities, one of the largest cities’s in the world, with a population of about 35 million people. It’s located on the Yangtze River and is one of the industry and financial centers of China. The City is incredibly big on a scale I have never seen before in my life. It's located around the river and is in a mountain region, so the City's very hilly. Again most of the old city is gone except for a few interesting small pockets scattered about. The rest has all been replaced by sky scrapers. Lots of sky scrapers. Walking and driving around the City left me awe struck. Every where you went and every where you looked, for as far as the eye Could see there is nothing but masses of sky scrapers sticking out of the ground like huge clumps of forest. One of the days I was there I spent nearly half a day walking around an entire suburb that was still under construction. The suburb must have contained enough huge apartment buildings to house 100,000 people and it was being built as a complete suburb from start to finish before anyone had even moved in. Chongqing is one of the fastest developing cities in the world and the whole city really showed how fast China has developed in such a short period of time, into one of the worlds most powerful countries.

Looking about at the amount of Concrete used to build such a place, you really struggle to believe that there are enough resources in the whole of the world to keep up with China's growth. I don't think the Chinese consider anything impossible providing that there's enough raw materials and workers to get the job done. Even traveling through the country side you spend a lot of time driving through tunnels that bore straight through massive mountains and can spend hours traveling beside free ways that are literally getting built from start to finish and stretch for hundreds of kilometers.

While I was in Chongqing I stayed with a Chinese couple I had found on couch surfing. This was also another highlight. Their hospitality was truly amazing. I was taken out for the day to visit one of the old towns that had escaped being flattened and is now a tourist attraction and taken into a near by forest park which had some very interesting Chinese history. The parks contained two former prisons which were used to detain political prisoners during the early 19 hundreds when the Chinese Democratic Party was over thrown by the communist party. It was only a very small glimpse into Chinese history, but a glimpse that really showed the hardship and tragedy the Chinese people have gone through in the past.

Chongqing is also famous for its unique style of Chinese food that is the hottest and spiciest food in the country and my hosts were only too happy to spend their time taking me out eating tons of it. The most famous dish from Chongqing is their hot pot. The hot pot consists of a large pot of spicy soup that sits cooking in the middle of the table. You then choose what types of meat and vegetable you would like to eat then cook it yourself in the hot pot.

In the few days I stayed in Congquing, I ate many different Chinese dishes and every one was amazing. I also think I managed to eat every part of a mammals Anatomy possible. From ducks tongue and pigs brains to chickens heart and Cows stomach. Not surprisingly, like all Chinese food, every bit was delicious. Buy the end of my trip in China I had come to realise just how wasteful the western culture is when it comes to meat products. we continually hear that eating meat is unsustainable which it probably is, especially when you consider that we throw three quarters of a perfectly good animal caucus away due to some sort of phobia we've developed over time and that everything else that's not a rib or a leg is disgusting and will make you sick, when in actual fact some of these parts are amongst the healthiest and tastiest bits of animal you can eat.



From chongqing I went back to Chengdu then I traveled up to the Siguniang Mountains. Getting to the Siguniang mountains was a lovely 16 hour hour drive in a small Chinese car as there were no busses running due to some recent floods destroying sections of the road. I went there with a very stereo typical whining winging Israeli guy who insisted on sitting in front for the whole day, and two Tibetan locals who jammed in the back with me. The ride took us in a huge loop, taking almost twice the distance of normal due to the most direct route still being shut off from recent floods and earthquakes. We Arrived to Rilong which is the nearest town very late that night with cramps in every joint of my body.

The next day I set off to walk up the Haizi valley which is one of three valleys that travel up through the Siguniang mountains and is accessed only on foot making it a rare national park in China. If there is one thing I did learn about the Chinese, it’s that they hate walking anywhere with a sweet passion, so most parks in china have great big roads built through them so the Chinese can see everything from the window of a bus.

After spending a good half hour at the parks office convincing them I would be ok going in alone and wouldn't die of altitude sickness I was off into one of the most amazing places I've ever been. The path started off on the out skirts of town and was a horse track use by some local farmers who lived up in the valley. The track started off at about 3250 meters and climbed up to about 4500 meters. The track runs along a valley below the Siguniang mountain range, which consist of 4 main mountain peaks, one reaching over 6000 meters.

My first day hiking took me up through some medium dense forest broken up by rolling grass hills and plains before reaching a beautiful lake surround by grass plains and a couple of small farms. During the first days walking I came across the reason for the park staff not wanting me to go in alone when I got chatting to a Swedish guy who was looking after his 2 friends that were being fed oxygen and had been throwing up for the previous night and day. They obviously were overly susceptible to altitude sickness as most people are fine at these heights, but the lack of air was very noticeable, especially with a pack on your back. Walking up any sort of slope rendered you instantly out of breath and doing something like sneezing or even swallowing for too long would make you have to stop and take a break.

Up until I arrived to the first lake there was also many Chinese tourists being led on packs of horses buy the local Tibetan, people who were taking them on day or over night tourist trips into the valley. I spent the first night camping along side the first lake before getting up early the next day and walking up to the end of the valley where there was another lake and an amazing view of the surrounding valley and peaks. The days walk was very long and tiring with the last stretch being very steep taking me to about 4500 meters. At 4500 meters I really did find myself constantly out of breath to the point I had to stop walking up any steep slope for a rest after just a few steps.

That afternoon after setting up camp I fell asleep, before being promptly awoken again buy a Tibetan Man one horse back who had just moved his Bulls up into the area. He came over to me, saw my socks were wet so pulled up most of the surrounding shrubs, lit them on fire and started drying them for me. While I was staring dumb founded at him drying my socks he started trying to tell me in sign language that if I stayed where I was I would either be eaten by wolf's or trampled by his Bulls. I had camped with bulls the night before and I'm pretty sub there is not too many Wolf's left in the area, but decided it would be interesting to go back with him to his house where he had offered to cook me tea and a place to stick my tent in the cattle yard out side, so I packed up my stuff and started following him down the hill. When we arrived back down into the valley we met up with his friend who had two Chinese tourists riding on horses with him and we went back together to his house.

Getting to spend the night at his house was an amazing experience and the closest I've ever been to seeing somebody living the same as there ancestors have for centuries. His house consisted of a square dry stone room with a thatched roof and dirt floor. There was an open fire with no chimney in the middle and two wooden planks set up around the fire place to sit on. There was no electricity, no running water, no sink and no windows in the house and my new Tibetan friend lived happily up here all year long raising a few Yaks, horses and cows to provide food and a very basic income to supply him with the essentials he needed.

He was also one of the most generous people I have ever met, especially considering how little he had. When we arrived back to his house he cooked a massive meal then forced as much as he could onto me until I couldn't eat another mouthful and again became obsessive about drying my shoes and socks for me. For the in between times He constantly tried to force feed me Yaks milk and cigarettes, then before going to bed he took me fishing in the streams which spread out in some low lying plains below his house.

The fishing was performed by either finding the fish with a light and grabbing them by hand out of the water or by sticking a net across one of the many small streams and going up stream and stomping your way back down towards the net, chasing all the fish into it. After a couple of hours there was about 30 small fish collected ready for breakfast. The next morning the fish were gutted then cooked whole over the fire and eaten with sticky rice and fresh damper. At about mid morning I finally managed to set off back down the valley. Even offering a pack of cigarettes as a small gift to this man was blatantly refused, and this was a guy who had to ride a horse for over 13 hours just to go to the nearest shop..

I spent that night camped further down the valley next to a base camp ran buy two guys from Nepal who were taking people up the surrounding mountains.





To be continued.

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