A China Summary & Hong Kong

Our China route changed quite a bit from our initial planning and the overland travel has felt quite epic!  So I thought this blog post would show where we’ve been, how we got there, how many hours of our lives we’ve lost to train travel and could let us have a little reflect on our time in China.

The Route –

 Beijing àDatong à Pingyao à Xi’An à Nanjing à Hangzhou à Souzhou à  Shanghai à Chengdu (Leshan) à Kunming (Shilin) à Dali à Lijiang à Kunming à Guilin à Yangshuo à Shenzhen  à Hong Kong!

Number of trains –                          Sleepers – 5

                                                                Hard Seats – 4

                                                                Bullet Train – 1

That is 82 hours spent on trains!

Number of long distance buses – 9 (Including day trips Chengdu to Leshan; Kunming to Shilin).

                                                                Sleepers – 1

                                                                                That is 43 hours spent on long distance buses!

Number of plane journeys –         1 (Shanghai to Chengdu)

Distance travelled –  11,229 km (6,977 miles Dad!)  Plus numerous metros/subways/intercity buses!

Number of provinces stayed in – 11! 

Beijing, Shanxi, Shanxii, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Shanghai, Sichuan, Yuannan, Guangxi, Guangdong, Hong Kong.

3 Things we won’t miss about China...

1.       The difficult communication – its hard being lost without anyone to ask and tough to find good food when you don’t know what you’re ordering!

2.       The amount of people (and the huge amounts of tour groups!)

3.       The toilets and the toilet smell – a huge population = a huge amount of waste!!

3 Things we will miss about China...

1.       The sights are SO impressive.

2.       The difficult communication – not many people selling you things / harassing you because they can’t!

3.       Good Chinese food (when we found it!) was delicious; free hot water everywhere we went meant our English tea bags where well used!

Our Top 5 Best Bits!

1.        The Pandas!

2.       Our time in Dali – relaxing, cooking, climbing, cycling, it was great!

3.       The Evening Shows (Shanghai Acrobats / Yangshou Light Show / Hong Kong Horse Racing)

4.       Terracotta Warriors / Yungang Caves (sorry it’s a tie!)

5.       The Bund.

Hong Kong has been brilliant.  So very different from China!  It has been much easier for us, as soon as we got off the train a man helped us find our bus to the hostel, everyone speaks English, everywhere has English menus, the cars drive on the correct side of the road, cars actually stop at pedestrian crossings, even my Gran could survive here as there is a Marks&Sparks at every corner!  Although much more expensive to stay here, a lot of the sights are free – a world away from China who would charge you to go into a City Park!  We’ve enjoyed a free light show from over the river in Kowloon, watching the SkyScrapers light up on Hong Kong Island.  We went on the Star Ferry over the harbour and visited the Avenue of Stars (Jackie Chan’s hands are surprisingly large!) and visited the flamingos in Kowloon Park.  We went on the huge outdoor escalators around Soho, took in a free museum about Dr Sun Yan-Sen and went up to Victoria Peak on the tram to see the city view.  My highlight was last night - we went to the horse racing!  A free glass of wine on entry was well received, sadly our luck wasn’t quite with us so no big wins, but our last pony ‘My Mate Andric’ placed at 3^rd so we made a bit of our money back! 

So Thailand has a lot to live up to!!  Will blog again when we have explored Bangkok a little more!

Lots of love K&C

Our Last Blog Post from China!

From where I left off last blog post we took a mini-bus from Dali to Lijiang with all of the friendly locals and about 10 massive bags of Garlic and other produce that filled up aisles of the bus both with their size and their smell! We helpfully got dropped off just outside the Old Town where our hostel was located. Unfortunately we didn't know this and had no idea where we were so we got lost for an hour in the maze of unnamed streets and markets!

Lijiang is full of picturesque old style buildings, streets divided up by canals and thousands of tacky souvenir shops all selling the same things. As with a lot of China to renovate anything with history it is first knocked down and then rebuilt in the same style, such is true of Lijiang's Old Town 'renovation'. We had a nice time wandering the pretty streets and we visited the Black Dragon Pool Park which gives a good view of the nearby Jade Dragon Snow Mountain.

From Lijiang we crossed the width of China to get to Guilin. This involved an 8 hour day train journey to Kunming where we stayed one night and the next day a 17 hour sleeper train journey to Guilin.

For me Guilin was disappointing. We'd heard that this is the place all the Chinese tourists love best to visit in China for its riverside setting and beautiful Limestone Karsts combined with a wild nightlife and a plentiful selection of Karaoke joints! They love nothing more! What we found was lots of rain and a big city with a brown river. We saw the Sun and Moon Pagodas which were nice in their lake setting and we also went to the Seven Stars Park which had a hill that looked like a Camel.

Yangshuo, which is an hour away by bus, was much more like what I was imagining Guilin to be. The place is tiny! Limestone Karsts surround you at every turn, frequently enshrouded by mist as they rise up into the sky. It's rained everyday but we've managed to enjoy ourselves with a Li River cruise on a 'bamboo' (plastic) raft, a visit to the 'real' Water Cave (there are many fakes!...) and a night out to see a show where the stage is the river!

On the raft, made of plastic pipes but called a bamboo raft (see Flickr for pictures) we travelled along the Li River from Yangdi down to XingPing (where the picture on the back of the 20 Yuan note comes from) with the aid of a local woman and a tiny propeller! We certainly got good views from the river and luckily the rain held off for our entire trip!

The Watercave was very impressive once we'd squeezed through the tiny entrance way, bent double in our little boat. We got shown around the cave by a guide, offered a mud bath which seemed to be dirty water rather than mud and the chance to try out the recently discovered geothermal pools, although more like recently installed plumbing…

Last night we went to the Impression Liu Sanjie show on the river. This show was directed by the same man who choreographed the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony and directed both of the popular Chinese movies 'Hero' and 'House of Flying Daggers'. It was quite amazing to watch over 400 local fishermen and performers take to the river and put on such a dazzling display of colour, light and music. Long strips of red ribbon were raised and lowered in time to music to give the effect of waves. Torches lit up the river like stars and someone even danced on the Moon!

Tonight we catch a sleeper bus from Yangshuo to Shenzen which is a city that borders with Hong Kong. This will be a new experience for us but from the pictures we've seen the bus has three lengthways rows of tiny horizontal beds. Bright and early tomorrow morning we should be off the bus and trying to find out how to cross the border… Assuming everything goes well we'll then be spending three outrageously expensive nights in Hong Kong! £11 per person per night for a box room! Our cheapest room in China was £1 per person per night – admittedly it was also our worst...

Wish us luck!

Chris & Kat. xxx

Old Town Charm

The day after the pandas we took a long bus ride from Chengdu to see a 71m tall Buddha carved into a cliff face in a town called Leshan. Originally this Buddha was being carved so that the swift river the Buddha faces would be calmed by its presence. Due to all the rocks that fell into the water during construction this actually worked!  We climbed up to the head which is about 4 times the size of me and Kat. Then we descended a small staircase carved into the side of the cliff allowing us to arrive at the Giant Buddha's feet and gaze up at him until our necks hurt!

After Chengdu we took a 17 hour overnight train journey to Kunming. We stayed two nights in all and on our second day we visited the UNESCO World Heritage Site of the Stone Forest in Shilin. The Stone Forest is a collection of limestone pillars that have been eroded, cracked and ravaged over the years by wind and rain to make impressive, jagged rock formations which stick up from the ground like trees. The main area of the Forest has thousands of the pillars (up to 30 meters in height) tightly packed together at all angles to form a claustrophobic natural labyrinth for us to wander. The Minor Stone Forest set slightly away from the main area had more wide open spaces filled with grass, lakes and of course huge grey limestone rocks jutting out of the ground. Both areas were amazing to get lost in for hours.

We left Kunming by bus as the Chinese National Holiday that was taking place meant that all the train tickets had sold out days in advance. We were expecting bedlam over that weekend and the following few days from speaking to locals and hearing other travelers stories but actually we were pleasantly surprised that it didn't really affect us at all! We travelled to Dali old town which is where we currently are now.

Dali is a very chilled out small town where we have stayed still for one of our longest times in China! That in itself has been lovely. No trains or buses to board for a few days! Here we took part in 'Rice & Friends' cooking school, a spot of rock climbing with Climb Dali and today we hired bikes to cycle to the three Pagodas (you see them on any advert for Dali) and down to the lake through lots of farmland and small Bai style villages (the local culture).

The cooking school was fantastic fun, our tutor Luxi was brilliant and the food we cooked tasted so good! It was really interesting to be taken around the food market in the morning as she explained anything that we didn't recognize.

The climbing was something I had never done before. We drove for just over an hour to get to the crag, got harnessed up and then we climbed 4 progressively harder routes figuring out how to get the next hand / foot holds as we went. It wasn't easy but it was really good fun and you feel such a sense of accomplishment when you reached the top and your legs and arms are burning from the effort! It's definitely something both Kat and I have said we'll try again.

Tomorrow we're heading to Lijiang which is another small town similar to Dali but with picturesque canals and bridges. We're planning to stay for two nights then catch a train onwards to Guilin and Yangshuo two cities famed for their riverside locations which will mark the end of our time in China after we cross over to Hong Kong.

Love Chris & Kat xxx

The Bund, Acrobats and Pandas!

So we made it to Suzhou, the bus was much more civil than the trains and we actually arrived with some energy to sight see!  We saw the twin pagodas and two different traditional Chinese gardens.  Suzhou is sold as being the Eastern Venice, so I was expecting a cutsie little canal town – but it's a HUGE city!  And it does have a population of 5.7million – so I should have known better!!

The bullet train to Shanghai was brilliant, it took us 30mins and we reached speeds of 330km/hr – best train journey yet!  We decided to view the Bund at night – what an introduction to Shanghai, it looked amazing!  The buzz of being there, seeing the high rises across the river and then the more traditional Western looking buildings opposite, it was spectacular.  Whilst in Shanghai we also visited the Propaganda museum, this was very randomly in the bottom of an apartment block!  When we arrived we thought we must be in the wrong place as there was no signs but the guard came up to us, very cloak and dagger, slipped us a small map of the apartment complex of how to get to the museum – perhaps the Government isn't too keen to advertise the museum!  It was interesting to see the lies the Government would tell, how they would show Americans to be grey little wrinkly men that mighty Asians should squash and how they would use it to promote general work and home ethics, pushing steel production or urging the younger generation to be schooled in the countryside.  Crazy to think the propaganda posters only stopped 30 yrs ago!

We splashed out and treated ourselves to an acrobatic show.  We went to see Era, performed at Shanghai Circus World and it was choreographed by someone from Cirque de Soleil.  It was amazing, the acrobatics where just great and the performers must be fearless!  The finale is outstanding and has 7 motorbikes circling around in a small metal sphere – I don't even know how 7 of them fit in there never mind how they then circled upside down and didn't crash into one another!

Our worse meal so far happened in Shanghai Airport, we were lured in by a chain advertised by Bruce Lee's face called 'Kungfu' – it appeared to be like McDs but with Chinese food.  Our meals came with chicken wings which were OK, warm lettuce in a kind of soy sauce and most alarmingly bone & chicken feet soup!  It's the most revolting thing I've ever seen and I couldn't bring myself to try it or much of the meal!!

We have now arrived in Chengdu (after cheating and catching our flight!)  After a confusing 2 hours trying to get to the pandas we abandoned the trip (as they sleep by late morning) instead we went to JinSha Museum.  It is an excavation site which has found objects from aprox. 1300BC in what they call the Shu Era.  It was very interesting; the gold mask was the centre piece but the sheer volume of pottery, jade, gold, bronze and stone statues that have been recovered is very impressive.

Today we successfully navigated to the Pandas!  And they are so so so cute!!  We saw fully grown pandas, sub-adults (3-5yrs old) and around 8 cubs (6-18months old).  As we were there early they were all quite active and playing around with each other, then came feeding and then by 11 it was bedtime again – it's a hard life being a panda!  The funniest thing was watching 3 keepers try to lure a cub down from a tree as it was nap time; he wasn't for coming down so they brought out step ladders, as soon as he saw them he climbed to a higher branch!  Cunning little thing!

You probably all heard us mention visiting Tibet in our travel plans before we came away; we were getting concerned with costs of this trip and now fate has made the decision for us as the Chinese Government are not allowing travel to Tibet nor to Northern Sichuan.  Funnily enough the travel lady in the hostel didn't know why there was a travel ban, they just seem to accept the limited information that the Government gives them; BBC news tells us that there has been a clash between Tibetan monks and the Chinese Police which has turned nasty.  So our route is now to go from Chengdu down to Yunnan Province as the scenery there is meant to be wonderful and Shangri-La is close enough to Tibet to show us some monasteries etc.  So that's our next plan, providing the Chinese Bank Holiday doesn't hold us back too much!

Love K&C

Too many trains!!!

We've noticed that a lot of the sights in China have an inappropriate Disneyesque feel to them. The Great Wall was littered with theme park style attractions such as a cable car to take you up and a Luge track to get you back down (some parts of the wall even have a zip-line!). Nearby 'Gift shops' were selling cheap Obama dressed as a communist T-shirts (who needs Mickey Mouse!) as well as popular slogans such as 'I heart BJ' – being of course Beijing... Most recently we went to an original section of the city wall in Nanjing that has a city gate of great historic significance. What we found was loads of carnival stalls blocking the entrance and really fake plastic statues throughout. None of which seem to be in keeping with the historical significance but the Chinese seem to love it!

We finished up in Pingyao by taking a trip to the Wang Family Courtyard (the Chinese equivalent of a impressive stately home) and visiting the Underground Castle. The Underground Castle is about 10 kilometers worth of tunnels underneath a small walled village built to protect against invaders. We hired an English speaking guide called Lily for Y40 (£4) as we didn't want to get lost underground in the dark and only about a kilometer worth of tunnels have been safely reinforced – plus Lilly amused Kat by saying 'willage' instead of village for the whole tour. It was really interesting to wonder through the tunnels and hear about all the traps that were set up across 3 levels, even if they were never put to use as the site was never invaded!

From Pingyao we caught a sleeper train to Xi'an which got us in at about 6am. We checked into the hostel and half-asleep went in search of the city walls with Hannah who we had met a few days ago on the train to Pingyao. Once we found the city walls and climbed up them (this took much longer than it should have thanks to my map reading!) we hired a tandem bike and set off to cycle all of its 14 kilometers within the 100 minutes that we had paid for. It certainly woke us up and it was great fun! We then finished the day by walking past the Drum and Bell Towers and visiting the Muslim quarter which had tiny streets stuffed with stalls selling all kinds of food and The Great Mosque which is a temple complex with a combination of Chinese and Muslim architecture.

The next day we then caught the bus to the Terracotta Warriors. We had spoken to quite a few people that had said they were disappointed by this sight but we both thought it was absolutely fantastic and one of the best things we've done in China so far. Truly 'epic' is an appropriate word to describe the aircraft hanger sized area pit 1 occupies. Seeing all those life-sized warriors lined up in rows is very, very impressive!

It was a long train journey to Nanjing the day after the Warriors. We left at 11am and arrived at 3am. We had to get a taxi to our hostel and when bartering with a taxi driver he gathered some of his friends around him, repeated a price Kat had said and they all went "Phwa-ha-ha-ha" like evil bond villains! Once we walked off his tone sobered and he agreed to our price…

In Nanjing we went to the Nanjing memorial museum that detailed the rape and pillage of the city in an unprovoked attack by the Japanese in 1937. It was quite brutal with very graphic pictures of the Chinese being executed – not one for the kids! It was interesting if a little bit biased as they left out any mention that the Nanjing council locked the common people of Nanjing in their city walls (whilst running away themselves) so they could become 'hardened like jade' from the attack. Over 300,000 people died.

We also went to the Purple Mountain (hills) in Nanjing which was a nice break from the city life as everything was green! There were of course still thousands of Chinese tour groups…

Yesterday we caught another train (yes we're really sick of them now!) to Hangzhou. This time it was a day time train so we booked hard seats, which are actually pretty comfy. The train was two hours late. When we arrived at Hangzhou no buses to our hostel were running so we had to get a taxi. We found out after a long queue that metered taxis ignore white people! All of them that wound down their windows shook their heads and drove off when we told them where we wanted to go. We managed to get a taxi from a train station tout that didn't have a taxi sign for about a pound more than we should have paid – I suppose we know now for next time.

Hangzhou is a great place with a lovely big lake right in the middle of it. Today we walked around the lake, climbed (well got the escalator and glass lift up!) a giant pagoda and saw a yellow dragon waterfall! Whilst it is still busy there were little pockets of emptiness where we were the only ones in sight! It's really picturesque and I think its helping us unwind from some of the stress of the big cities.

Next after another day in Hangzhou we're heading to Suzhou (by bus!) which has lots of pretty gardens then we'll be arriving to Shanghai by a half hour train journey. Instead of our original plan to catch a 44 hour train to Chengdu on the other side of the country we've splashed out and bought a plane ticket so that it will now take us a cool 3 hours instead!

Love C&K. x

The Great Wall, Train Journeys & Shanxi Province

So to pick up where we left off…the Great Wall was amazing to see, it was a real Beijing highlight. We had a lovely couple of hours exploring the wall and watchtowers.  However it turned out to be a Great (shopping) Wall Trip – this will teach us to book onto a cheap tour!  We got paraded around a ceramics museum, a silk factory, a tea shop (at least we got some tasters here!) and a free foot massage where an evil Tibetan doctor tried to diagnose everyone with some kind of aliment that needed immediate herbal medicine treatment!!  But they didn't get any money out of us and at least we got to see the Wall!

The next day we saw the beautiful Temple of Heaven.  Then on my birthday (thanks for all the birthday texts/messages) we headed for the summer palace.  This is a beautiful collection of temples at a lakeside with impressive bridges forming the walkway around the lake – it's a welcome break from the city-life of Beijing!  Unfortunately no Peking duck for my birthday tea L our tummies aren't quite equipped for the Chinese diet – so we had to settle for beer & western food in the hostel bar!

We then headed off on our first train journey adventure to Datong.  The train journey demonstrated one thing – just how curious the Chinese are of us!  Sometimes the curiosity is sweet; like the little Chinese girl sat opposite us taking a shine to Chris then doing a full photo shoot of the two of us for about ½ an hour!  Sometimes the curiosity is them trying to be helpful; like when they all (about 10 people walked down the carriage to see it) watched me write mandarin asking for an onward ticket to our next destination (and my dodgy mandarin writing worked!)  Then sometimes their curiosity is just a little odd; like when they all came to see what we were watching on the laptop – I presume that they won't look at it and think 'oh yes Big Bang Theory, I love that!'  It doesn't pay to be self conscious in China, as the watching and often then the laughing, seems to be a frequent part of our days!

Datong is a coal mining town and we had been told not to expect much from it and that to visit the sights and leave.  We actually quite liked it there as we found the people much friendlier than in Beijing.  We visited the 9 dragon screen in the centre of Datong which was cool to see.  But the main event there was going to the Yungang Caves – 5^th Century caves with the earliest Buddhist carvings in China.  There are 45 caves in the complex – some of them are massive and contain HUGE Buddha's – up to 17metres tall!  One cave had over 10,000 images of Buddha carved – it was very impressive.

Our next adventure was our first night train – up in the middle bunks it was lights out as soon as we got on and we slept really well until the conductor lady was tugging at our feet to tell us that we had nearly reached our stop – Pingyao.  Pingyao is described in the Lonely Planet as 'seeing the Old China in action'.  It's a small town (in China's standard as only 500,000 live here!) which still has its original city walls, lots of small streets or hutongs, lanterns hanging up everywhere, beautiful courtyards and lots of historical buildings.  It is fairly touristy though which slightly spoils the historical feel – but then getting a Coke float and a burger & chips is always an advantage to that tourist hotspot!  We have plans for a day trip to an Underground Castle which is nearby then we head by overnight train to Xi'an & the Terracotta Army! 

There are lots of photos to come on Flickr but China seems to intermittently ban our uploading, our emails and most websites – so not sure when we'll be able to get them up next! 

Love K&C.

Goodbye Nepal, Hello China!

The Chinese love to climb! This is what we have found out from our two days so far in Beijing. At any photo opportunity they start climbing, so much so that we regularly see signs telling people 'no climbing please'. Naturally these get ignored…

We were supposed fly out of Kathmandu on March 31^st but Air China had other ideas for us as we found out when we arrived at the airport and our flight had been cancelled, for about a month without us knowing! The next flight was in two days so Air China kindly paid for 2 nights in a 5* hotel, all our food and a taxi back to the airport. I had steak for breakfast two days in a row!!! The hotel was a world away from the noise of Thamel and had electricity all hours of the day! It did cost 30 times more than our original hostel though so you would expect something good for all that money.

When we did finally catch our flight we flew via Lhasa in Tibet and we were both worried we would need a permit just to transfer planes which you cannot attain unless you go via an organized tour. Luckily everything worked out fine and the views on the plane were phenomenal! We saw Everest and there were no clouds over Tibet so we could see the barren, rocky red landscape with crystal clarity.

We arrived to Beijing after 3 flights and caught the subway just before it closed to our hostel at the dead of night where we pretty much went straight to sleep. The next day we wondered around Tiananmen Square and had the obligatory photos taken with the giant portrait of Mao (when in China do as the Chinese do!). Mao is a much revered former leader of China who the Chinese love! We sidestepped the Forbidden City as it was a Sunday and crazy busy with Chinese tourists and instead went to the Ming Wall ruins where the cherry blossom festival was taking place. Whilst wondering around we began to realize just how big Beijing is. Especially compared to Nepal where we could (and did) walk to every sight!

Today we went to the Forbidden City which had lots of ancient gates, temples, very pretty gardens and Chinese tourists climbing everything for a photo! A nearby park with good views where we watched pensioners practicing Tai Chi, dancing and playing shuttlecock hacky sack, it looked great fun! The Drum tower, Bell tower and the Lama temple which had a MASSIVE Buddha 28 meters high carved out of a single piece of Sandalwood!!! It's in the Guinness book of records too!

Tomorrow we have booked onto a Great Wall tour where we'll be taking in the Mu tianyu section of the wall (little bit renovated, little bit crumbling down). We will also be seeing the Ming tombs and the Olympic stadium aka 'The Birds Nest'!

We found out that our blog is banned in China so hopefully this post will work!

Love K&C