The Chinese countryside

Quick blog update as were still a bit behind with them! Hopefully we'll get some photos to you soon. We've been very busy for the past 4 (?) days!.

We arrived in Guilin after our long train ride and had to get a bus to Yangshou - described in the Lonely Planet as a backpackers haven. There were certainy more westerners than we had seen up until that point but it was still a nice enough town with trinket stalls and nice food. The surroundings are what draws everyone to Yangshou, it sits on the river Li and is surrounded by huge limestone karsts - truly beautiful.

By the way, we stayed at the Fawlty Towers hotel - the manager's name was Basil!

As it is a small town we signed ourselves up for some activities. The first morning we thought we'd try our hand at some caligraphy. 6 of us turned up at the hotel lobby for our lesson and were met by 2 teachers who said there were too many of us and we'd need to be in 2 groups. The others went across the road to their lesson and we waited with the teacher. He said just a moment and the motos will be here to pick us up.

!!! Motos!! My obvious reaction was that I wasn't getting on the back of a motorbike, but Rosie said that's what all the taxis will be like in Vietnam so I gritted my teeth and held on tight and we're both still alive to tell the tale! Chris thought it was fun!
It turned out that there was plenty of room at the other lesson and we were diddled a bit some how. But it was a good lesson with a nice guy so we don't mind too much.

That evening we went on an hours boat ride along the river. The scenery was stunning (photos soon) and we ate in a small restaurant in the middle of nowhere at the end of our journey.

Chris went white water rafting with our guide the next moring. Everyone else was playing it safe and either went Kayaking or stayed in town. It turned out that Chris had by far the best time out of everybody! Qimin said it's twice as scary rafting with Chris than the times she's done it before!!

That afternoon we took part in a cookery school, it was great. The teacher picked us up from our hotel to take us to the local market. Big piles of chilis, ginger, unidentifiable greens, chickens in cages, toads in nets and somewhere in the background yelping dogs.

We cycled (yes Dad, I cycled) 1/2 hour to the hostel we were staying at that night and then walked down to the school.
We were taught how to cook steamed chicken, chili pork, garlic greens and egg wrapped dumplings. It all tasted yummy, and we bought a cook book so that when we eventually returned home we can have a go at cooking it again.


Sorry but you're still not up to date.
We've got to go and catch our train to Hong Kong now.

5 great things to do in Shanghai

Sorry about the lack of picture for this blog, I am having a complete nightmare as far as interenet connections and passwords go and have hopefully clicked on the correct Chinese part of the blog website to figure out how to add a blog without photo!
Our 2nd train journey was far better than the 1st, we were in a compartment with people that we knew so slept a lot better and so it all went far quicker.

Great thing #1: Visit the Bund: The buildings on the far side of the river have only popped up in the last 20 years, it unbelievable to think that there were'nt high rise building until then. But now Shanghai is sinking because there are too many of them! The tallest building is the JingMao tower, but the coolest is probably the Pearl Tower because of it's weird spheres.

Great thing #2: Walk along the Nanjing Road: Hmm, actually that wasn't exactly great, but well worth a look. A lot of shops!! Plus someone every few meters saying "GucciPrada watchbagdvd" we became quite accomplished at saying no thankyou and giving them a stern look!

Great thing #3: Visit the Old City: This was definitley the best thing that we did in Shanghai. Our guide had reccomended that we visit the Yu Gardens, which we did but they weren't really what we were wanting - lots of big tourists groups led by a guide with a flag so we looked at someone's Lonely Planet and realised we were close to the old city. We didn't really know what to expect. It was how most Chinese live. Working and living out of one room. Preparing their lunch on the street. Washing hanging from the outside of building. Buildings that people live in next to ones that have fallen down.
All of this with a back drop of skyscrapers.
It was a good insight into the real Shanghai, we occassionally felt like we were intruding but I think that we were as interesting to them as they were to us.

Great thing #4: Have a beer on the roof top garden at the Peace Hotel: This felt a bit weird after we had been walking around such a poor area of Shanghai. But we were hot, thirsty and wanted to see the views. It was fantastic - looking out across the Bund. Definitely how the other half live though (50 yuan for our beers rather than the 5 we often pay) and it was full of westerners. Very relaxing though.

Great thing #5: Have a beer on a street corner(so great we did it twice!): We successfully managed to find a Chinese style restaurant that had an English menu and had a tasty lunch. After which we quite fancied another beer (we're not alcoholics honest) but there weren't any bars really - only one but they wanted 25 yuan for a beer! We found a little refreshments stand that sold cold beer so we bought one each and sat on this stone bench and watched the world go by. It was amazing. The hundreds of bikes riding fast and all missing each other were fascinating to watch. We watched them and they watched us, it was great!


The worst thing to do in Shanghai: Go to the JingMao tower: Chris & I have a new travelling rule - don't go to places that are high & expensive because it will be disapointing!
We wanted to go to the JingMao tower because it's the tallest building in Shanghai and they have an a bar on the 87th floor from which to see the views. We turned up nice and early on the first night we were there but they have a dress code - no sandals for men. So because Chris had his sandals on we couldn't go in . Scruffy trainers ok, smart sandals not ok!
We tried again the following night but had been to dinner before hand and it was much later when we arrived so had to wait in the bar on the 54th floor until a table became free upstairs.

It was hideous. Just full of overly made up wives of stuffed shirst! We were very unimpresesd especially after being in the old city for a lot of the day.
To top of a bad experience when a table finally came free upstairs it was too late - just as we got there the light on the buildings went off!!

Never mind though - we rectified the situation by getting beer from the supermarket next to our hotel and sat on the steps!

The following day we mostly got supplies for our mammoth 27 hour train journey into the countryside!

Hopefully we'll be able to put some more photos up soon. Currently in the beautiful countryside and going ot a cookery school this afternoon.

Terracotta Warriors

IMGP0711
Originally uploaded by theslaad.

Sorry we've been a bit quiet recently, but when there's a whole load of China to see, we don't really want to be sitting in front of a computer too much.. But we're seizing our opportunity today and will hopefully get you up to date with all our shenanigans!


We took a PUBLIC bus for about an hour and a half out of Xi'an to see the Terracotta Warriors. The bus was so bumpy and smelly and the driver beeped the loud horn incessantly! Horns are used here like in Sri Lanka - to say "hello", to say "get out of the way", "I'm overtaking", "I've overtaken you", etc, etc. Very irritating!
But we arrived safe & sound.
We watched a film when we got there in this weird 360 cinema. So we can tell you that the Warriors we made by loads of craftsmen for the Emperor who was responsible for unifying China (a long time ago). He wanted them for his tomb so that he would be protected when he died. It took the craftsmen 40 years to make them all, and the revolting peasants a day to destroy them!
In 1974 a farmer was drilling a well and found a warrior head! (In the gift shop they've got an old guy smoking a pipe who'll sign your book - he may or may not be the farmer who found the warriors!).
There was only one warrior whole when they uncovered them, all the others have been painstakingly reconstructed in the pits. There are 3 pits that you can look at. The first pit was the best one, with thousands of warriors. It was amazing. The other pits we're less impressive but still cool.
They know that there are lots of other pits surrounding the burial mound but they don't want to uncover them until they have the technology to prevent the paint from evaporating straight away. Also they think that there are mercury rivers running through the tomb.

Overall, well worth the hairy bus ride! Back to Xi'an for our 2nd overnight train.

Xi'an

IMGP0668
Originally uploaded by theslaad.

After the train ride we had breakfast in a local youth hostel. A little break from the Chinese food for some cooked breakfast. Quite nice! We are enjoying the local food but it is getting slightly monotonous, so having something a bit English was a welcome change.

We prefer Xi'an to Beijing. It's still a big city (6 million people) but it seems far more spread out, with wider pavements and slightly less traffic. It seems a bit more developed whilst keeping a lot of the traditional Chinese stuff which seemed missing from Beijing.
Qi'min took us for a walk around part of the city and we ended up in the Muslim quarter.
There were loads of stalls selling all sorts of different things - shadow puppets, little red books, tat, paintings, cricket cages etc. Rosie bought a cool antique Mahjong set - we were very tempted but our rucksacs are too full already!
It was a great place to spend a couple of hours exploring.

The city has a Bell Tower & Drum Tower which used to be used for telling the time. We had a look at the Bell tower - great views across the city.

In the evening Qi'min took most of us to a traditional Xi'an hot pot restaurant (Some people chickened out - something about hygeine, I don't know). It was a bit like fondue, with a boiling pot of stock in the middle of the table. Everyone goes and chooses their sticks to dip in - meat, fish, different sorts of veggies. You plunge it in for a few seconds and then dip it into your bowl of seasame/peanut/oily stuff. Quite fun & tasty. They count your sticks at the end to see how much you owe - very cheap at around 7p for 5 sticks.

After that we had a whole bunch of beers in their bar street and then went to a Karaoke club...

Wow - very weird, It was like being in a posh hotel. Lots of suited polite waiters to show you to the ladies and carry your basket of beer. It was spread over several floors, with lots of different sized private rooms. You pay by the hour and just occupy the room, singing bad songs (Kylie & Jason featured at some stage, as did Black Sabbath).
We had great fun, gettign back to our hotel at about 3am!

Tommorrow we are taking a bus to see the Terracotta warriors and then come back into Xi'an to get our next overnight train to Shanghai.

Hope everyone is ok xx

Sleeper train to Xi'an

IMGP0656
Originally uploaded by theslaad.

This was our first real travelling part of our travelling in China.
As you can see from the photo the carriage is open plan with sets of 6 bunks. The only one that you can sit on is the bottom one, plus there are chairs along the edge. Chris & I mostly sat at the edge so that we could play poker with some other people who were next door to us.
Playing poker on the train, using pistachio shells for chips, helped to make the 16 hours to Xi'an go quite fast.
Sleeping on the train was tricky, but we know what to expect when we travel to Shanghai in a couple of days.

We've arrived in Xi'n now and will blog again about that soon.

PS. The girl in the photo is our guide, Qiming.

Great Wall

IMGP0634
Originally uploaded by theslaad.

Got up very early to travel to a remote section of the Great Wall. We were all really looking forward to being off the tourist track so that we could fully appreciate the Wall without being bugged by touts.
Little did we realise just how off the beaten track we would be...

In order to get up to the wall we had a steep climb up some slightly crumbling steps - a very knackering start! But the views were amazing - wall as far as you could see. The first third of our walk took us along the wall, lots of climbing up slopes and then coming down the other side, with nice shady towers every so often to rest our weary legs and take photos of the fantastic views. We were the only people up there!!

After lunch we embarked on the next stage of our walk. Earlier when we had asked how long the walk was, Qiming our guide told us that it was around 15km but that it would only be 8km because we would take some short cuts. We had been a bit confused becaused it seemed that once you're on the wall there was no way to go except along it.
We were wrong!

It's quite worrying when the local guide you're with says 'Be careful, it's steep and slippery here.' - it was. We made our way down into the valley by very tentatively and sometimes a bit too quickly walking down the scree covered slopes. This was particularly hairy at times (Jen has the scrape on her arm to prove it) and made us think that all the hard climbing along the wall earlier had been a doddle!
Once in to the valley we walked along quite pleasant flat farmland, meeting one possibly mad farmer hermit on the way!

Unfortunately, once you're down, you have to go back up again! And so came the next dangerous installment of our Great Wall walk! Sometimes walking along bits of rock that were only a foot width wide we made our way back up to where it was possible to get back onto the wall.
We walked along another small section of the wall which was in complete disrepair before we came to the part that has been reconstructed for tourists. It was flat and smooth, and your could fit more than one person side by side! Amazing!

The Great Wall was an stunning place to visit, especially when your group of 12 are the only tourists around for miles and all that you can see is wall and vegetation! In the end we'd walked about 10Ks in about 5 hours. It was a treacherous route to take, but well worth it!!

We're in China

IMGP0563.JPG
Originally uploaded by theslaad.

We successfully caught our flight from Heathrow, had an uneventful and mostly pleasant flight and we arrived in Beijing early in the morning. We almost fell into the taxi trap!! There are lots of guys hanging around the arrivals lounge saying "taxi? taxi?" so we asked how much - 450 yuan he said. Luckily in our guide book it said the taxi should only be 100 yuan, so we gave him a wide berth and hopped into a legitimate taxi outside.
Our hotel, like the rest of Beijing, is under renovation at the moment so it all looked a bt dodgy when we arrived, but our room is fine so never mind.
We are in a group of 12 for our trip and we're really pleased because everyone is really nice. They are all quite like minded people, some even gave up their jobs to come travelling like us!
We all went for dinner with our guide on the first night. A great meal for just 2 pounds each, including beer!

So our first full day in Beijing was pretty busy. We took the subway to the Forbidden City, the entrance to which is in Tianamen Square. The square was packed with tourists - mostly Chinese who thought that we were quite interesting. Chris & I and Kate from our group had to pose whilst a group of 5 different guys had their photo taken with us. We are strange white westerners to the country folk.

The Forbidden City was cool. Loads and loads of buildings that the Emperors used to use for various purposes including housing their 3000 concubines. It was stunning, just when you thought you were at the end, there was another courtyard and more buildings!
We went for lunch, again very nice. We think a Beijing speciality is spicy chicken and cashwes - very tasty!

In the afternoon we went to the Temple of Heaven park. It was a beautiful place filled with people playing cards, singing and dancing( check out the photo of the pink ladies!) Later we walked to the Pearl market. It's a huge indoor market with hundered of chinese men & women trying to get you to buy things! It was all a bit stressful for Jen so we went home for a snooze!

We went to see a cool Kung-Fu show in the evening. It was quite specatular!

Today we took a boat along the canal to the Summer Palace. We were without guide, but with a Chris who was armed with a map and compass so we managed to find the quite out of the way boats that took up a single line in someones guide book.
The Summer Palace was quite like the Forbidden City in that it was a huge and sprawling place with lots of different areas and lots of little (or not so little) buildings.
We walked along the lake - it all looked very typically Chinese with pagodas and weeping willow trees.

It was at the Summer palace that our first bad thing happened (not too bad though!). Our lunch was horrendous!! It was a set menu and involved lots of strange cold dishes and some strange hot dishes, all of which were pretty revolting.

So now we're sat in a youth hostel internet cafe, struggling with the Chinese characters on this computer and the extremeley duff keyboard!
We've uploaded a few photos and will put some more on when we can find a better connection - probably in Shanghai.

We're off to the Great Wall tomorrow for two days.

PS - Jen doesn't like squatting!

Leaving present

IMGP0544
Originally uploaded by theslaad.

Our families have been conspiring recently, but we don't mind too much because we were given this great travel flag this evening!
It will come in very handy to converse with the locals - we will need to know how to find llamas in Peru for sure!!

We'll see if we can get any locals to sign it to prove we've actually been abroad and not just hiding in Swaffham.

Ready to go

IMGP0400
Originally uploaded by theslaad.

The rucksacks are packed.

This represents our sole belongings for the next 8-12 months.

On the plus side, Jen let me buy a Nintendo DS Lite! Yay!

Only a week to Go!!!