China is the first country I have backpacked where neither do I speak the language nor does almost anyone speak mine. Under these circumstances, communication with anyone apart from other tourists or people directly involved with tourists in major tourist hotspots is exceedingly difficult. Without the finances to hire an English-speaking guide, this means that when traveling in remote or off-the-beaten-track parts of the country, I am very much reduced to the status of a silent observer - watching other people without really getting involved. This and the five following blogs will be largely based around this principle - they will be largely photographic presentations of the different ethnic groups I observed at six different markets along the Burmese, Laos and Vietnamese borders. There will very little to write about these events because I only spent ... read more

Tourists throng the streets of traditional wooden Chinese buildings, many of which have been converted into expensive pizza restaurants, curry houses, souvenir shops and backpacker hostels. I've been walking down this particular street for less than two minutes and already the third great-grandmother in the traditional dress of her ethnic minority is staggering up to me to say, "You want smoke ganja?" Dali, along with Lijiang and the so-called Shangri-La, is one of Yunnan's tourist hotspots. The houses, the city walls, the towers, the pagodas, the temples, the fountains have all been exquisitely renovated and the place is aesthetically very pleasing. But I cannot escape the impression of being in an artificial bubble of Westerness with a hastily added coat of Chinese paintwork covering the exterior. After I stop to take a picture of a building, ... read more

A stream of highly animated but utterly incoherent nonsense greeted us upon our request to the policeman for directions to the bus stop. Six months in the Philippines had got us into the habit of thinking that everyone everywhere must speak English; this encounter with the police officer was the first of several rude awakenings reminding us that travel in China is a completely different ball game from travel in the Philippines, one in which the rules are not always bent in the traveler's favour. Ten minutes after the plane had landed we had arrived at a queueless Immigration and been processed in a matter of seconds. On the front of the cheerful immigration officer's booth was a dial of five buttons in a row with faces of decreasing smiliness on each one and "Greatly satisfied," ... read more

Heading north from Manila the road and the transport serving it, with their gradual degeneration, mirror the disintegrating level of development of the surrounding areas. From the capital north to the city of Baguio is for the most part a smooth ride on a comfortable seat in an air-conditioned coach across the flat plains of Pampanga and Pangasinan provinces, the towns dusty and non-descript, the road only snaking up into the mountains of the Cordillera range during the last of the journey's seven hours. From Baguio, elevation 1500m, the sometimes concrete, sometimes dirt road thrashes its way left, right, backwards, forwards and above all up, further into the Cordillera. Its path seems even crazier than that of an intestine and is capable of producing similar feelings of sickness; at its highest point the road reaches 2255m, ... read more

We sat at a table at the front of the dining hall with Father Mark and two other Filipino priests sat with us while the other four tables were filled with young men between eighteen and twenty four who were training to join the clergy. The room reverberated the raucous sounds of twenty four shouting voices interspersed with high-pitched laughs and bellows of excited banter. One of the priests on our table turned around and shouted at one of the more boisterous trainees, "Hey, Antonio, how's your boyfriend?" Screams of laughter peeled from all around. "I don't have a boyfriend, Father," answered the boy, suddenly serious-faced but throwing an embarrassed laugh into his sentence as if to show he knew it was just a joke. Seeing as the jibe and the response had both been made ... read more