China bound

Gotta get out of Vietnam!

After working in Vietnam for around a month, running trips in the Northwest, I was looking forward to getting out. Vietnam is an amazing country and there are some endearing qualities in the locals, but there are also some rather frustrating qualities, being that around 40% of all transactions will somehow involve the local trying to inflate the price, or outright rip you off. The other 60% of transactions are perfectly honest and straightforward and go a long way towards repairing one’s perception of the country, but it is just such a task to have to constantly be on your toes and question prices on everything.

As a breather, a group of us including, friend, acquaintance and fellow tour leader decided to head to Halong Bay and then Quan Lan Island. These are two very contrasting experiences, because the first is done as part of a very well practiced, all inclusive two day tour. The second is an independent four hour ferry journey out to a very quiet little island where we stay in basic wooden shacks on the beach with our host who speaks about five words of English. They are both very relaxing experiences though and by the time we return to Hanoi we are well rested and ready to start the next section of our respective adventures. Ben is heading home to the UK for a couple of weeks before starting with his new employer GAP travel on a six months SE Asia contract. Sarah is exploring the coast of Vietnam before coming back up north and heading to China. Miss Guion and I are heading for China overland. We are catching an overnight train to Lao Cai and then going over the boarder to Yunnan province in China.

After bidding farewell to Sarah and Ben, we head for the train station. Things are running smoothly, the taxi driver even put his meter on without an argument and took us exactly where we wanted to go (a rarity). We arrive at the station with twenty minutes to go before the train leaves. We ask the man at the front of the station where to go and he motions us through the main entrance. The ticket checking lady motions us to board the train on platform one. It is only when we are getting our beds ready that things start to look a bit strange. There are another two people claiming to belong to the bunks that we are preparing and the train conductor tends to agree with them. We have boarded the wrong train and as we are scampering across to platform five, our train is leaving without us. So we now need to spend another day in Hanoi which is not really to our liking.

The following night, all goes to plan, we get on the right train and we arrive in Lao Cai earlier than expected. We consume a very average breakfasts at one of the tour sales offices posing as a café and then get a taxi for the boarder. I say to the taxi driver “Hekou please, China border” He says “OK…how much?” Miss Guion says, “put your bloody meter on” he says “OK” and then proceeds to take us about eight kilometers in the wrong direction!!! When we start circling a small town that is obviously nowhere near China, I start swearing at him and telling him to turn the meter off and take us to the border. All of a sudden, it turns out the little bludger can’t speak a word of English, despite making pleasant conversation while he took us for a ride into the arse end of nowhere. So we get out and grab our luggage. The little rip-off merchant starts to get aggressive and demands the money on the meter. He gets two local blokes that have been standing on the side of the road in on the act. He presumably tells them that these foreigners asked to come here (to the arse-end of nowhere) and now they don’t want to pay the fare. So before we get to blows, I pay the money and we get two perfectly honest moto guys to take us to the boarder. At the border, there is just one more problem. They have never seen my APEC card which substitutes as a Visa for various countries. A stern bloke in a messy green uniform barks “you wait there” and directs me to a hard, broken plastic char. After half an hour he comes back and says “OK, you go”. So we are out of bloody Vietnam! Not a minute too soon. We expect that things in China may be difficult, due to language barriers, but surely they can’t be as exhaustingly, commercially-dishonest as the Vietnamese.

When we arrive at the China side there is a lane marked “officials, diplomats and APEC members”. This is nice. I walk over to the counter and a small clean cut man in a neatly pressed communist-uniform hurries over to me. He salutes me and welcomes me to the Peoples Republic of China. He takes me to a small office with comfortable furniture and offers me a cup of tea while I wait. He apologises and says that they do not see many APEC cards here so would I mind waiting while they check the regulations? Not at all when he puts it like that. While his co-worker checks the regulations, he keeps me company and makes small talk about my country, his country and the weather. When all is done he walks me through to the exit and bids me good luck in my travels. I give myself a pinch to make sure that I am not dreaming and then I walk over to meet Miss Guion. As we are discussing our next move, there occurs, a horrible guttural sound, that sounds like something between an angle grinder, a pig in pain and nails on a blackboard. We look over in horror, thinking that somebody is dying right next to us, only to see a fairly well dressed man spit a huge lump of snot and mucus onto the footpath. Ahhh… we are in China!

We are in shock and disbelief. Hekou is like a showroom. The streets are clean and wide and nobody is sounding there horn every three seconds. Everything is neat and ordered. We go to the bus station and through my few words of Mandarin and some excellent miming, we obtain a bus ticket to Kunming. The ticket says 10.50, so we have an hour and ten minutes to wait for departure on this ten hour bus ride, or so we think. It turns out that China is an hour ahead of Vietnam. The whole country is. This is quite curious when you think about the breadth of the country. In the Western provinces it stays light until a surreal hour in the evening, while the East coast can enjoy a fairly normal daylight span.

After about eight hours driving we arrive at a food stop and consume a delicious meal for about a dollar. The food in China is superb. These people seem to live for it, just like those in my adopted country of residence, Thailand. Everything has to have balance though and in this instance the balance is the toilet. I had forgotten exactly how bad Chinese toilets are. They are the worst in any place that I have been. The places that you would expect to have lovely clean toilets have pretty bad, smelly rooms with filthy bowls that are hardly ever cleaned. Bus stations and roadside stops are beyond comprehension. I have been in the company of people that have vomited at the sight of these toilets. They are truly unimaginable to those that have not traveled in China or in the number one toilet hell, India.


The toilets are a small price to pay for the otherwise wonderful travel experience that is China. We arrive to Kunming late in the evening. Kunming is a huge metropolis in comparison to the ramshackle cities of Vietnam. A very polite mini-van driver takes us to our hotel and we sleep the sleep of contented travelers, in the knowledge that we will soon awaken to a huge buffet breakfast, including Bao-tsa, the steamed bun with various fillings that can be found all over China. There is Bao-tsa with red been filling, Bao-tsa with green veg and tofu and Bao-tsa with any kind of meat you might desire. Miss Guion and myself are of the veg-aquarian faith and for this reason desire no meat or “Wor che su da”, a phrase that works well for us across the country.

Night buses ( a Chinese specialty)

Kunming, whilst impressive, is a little on the boring side. It’s big and has lots of people and there is heaps of shopping (especially for mobile phones), but asides from this not a lot to do, and a fair bit colder than we have been used to, so not entirely a bad thing that we are on a sleeper bus to Lijiang that night.

I’ve seen sleeper buses before. Some look new and spacious and flashy and some look old, claustrophobic and dirty. We were lucky to get a new one, but the spacious and flashy bit was a false impression. A sleeper bus is basically a single decker bus, with very thin bunk beds down each side (two high) and a row down the middle (also two high), then there are four more placed over the walkway which means that you can’t actually walk from the front of the bus to the rear of the bus without bending down to look at your knees and for me, I had to basically crawl. At the back there are five beds in a row across the back with a second level at the same height as the rest of the bunks. This is where the driver places us which is not such a bad thing as I can stretch my legs into the aisle. The man next to me speaks a little English and says he is Tibetan, but has lived in Lijiang district since he was a child. He also explains that he will try not to spoon with me, although not in so many words. I have never before slept in such a confined space. It was quite easy to sleep though. We seemed to stop for extended periods of time at toilet stops and roadhouses, but this was fine, we just kept dozing. We were due to arrive at 7am. When we pulled into yet another stop at 5.45am, Miss Guion got up to go to the toilet and reported that it was quite clean. We went back to sleep and awoke about an hour later in daylight. We appeared to be in the same place, but there was nobody else on the bus and Miss Guion, myself and the Tibetan man were happily snoozing up the back. There were a lot more buses around us and to in truth, it looked very much like a bus station. I got out and found a young guy cleaning a bus. I pointed to the ground and asked “Lijiang ma?” to which he looked at me strangely and nodded (as if to say, yeah… duh). So we had slept on for an hour on a stationary bus that had already reached our destination. But so had the local, so we figured it wasn’t so bad.

At the time I told Miss Guion that I would not go on another sleeper bus (I relented soon after). In hindsight though, it really wasn’t that bad. It was quite cozy really. The only problem being the contrast. If I was lying on my left hand side when I opened my eyes, I would see the attractive and altogether very pleasant face of Miss Guion (or at least the back of her well groomed head), but if I was lying on the other side when my eyes opened, a weathered, brown, whiskery face with a set of yellow chompers greeted me.

Lijiang – Old town and place of many sports shops

Our arrival into Lijiang was a bit surreal. We took a taxi and used our Lonely Planet map to show the driver where we wanted to go. We pointed to the inset section called “old town” and he nodded and took us to where the inset was placed over the normal map. We were a tad confused. There were old buildings and it was a town, but we had heard that it was a hugely populated tourist destination. There weren’t any tourists or tourist facilities as far as we could see. So while we tried to get our head around this, we stopped into a small eatery and feasted on vegetable dumplings and noodle soup. This delicious and wholesome meal came to a grand total of twenty one Yuan ($3USD). The food really is one of the best parts of traveling in China. Every town or province has a specialty and despite a strong emphasis on meat, there is always something for the vegetarians or veg-aquarians.

On a full stomach we had a lot more luck in our search for the old town and we certainly found the missing tourists. Hundreds, bordering on thousands of Chinese tourists converge on the old town and particularly the old town square every day to see demonstrations of Naxi dance and ritual. The Naxi are a minority people that are indigenous to the North and Western areas of Yunnan, which was originally part of Tibet. They wear colorful clothes and have some strange marital practices, where the male remains at his mother’s residence after marriage and all land ownership is in the hands of the women. Some women even take multiple husbands. I’m sure the commies have put an end to this or at least tried.

We checked into the Old Square Inn as recommended by my mate Eric. All the guesthouses here are very similar, with a strong trait being the paper thin walls. By this stage the volume that the Chinese feel the need to communicate at had started to grate on me. Even when completely unnecessary, they scream at each other... especially when they are talking on the phone. This combined with the clearing of the throat and nasal passages is enough to drive me insane.

We awake the next morning to go for a run. A small staff member greets us and informs us that the hotel is full today and could we please move to another hotel. Well… not really we say. Thinking that they have stuffed up their bookings and are trying to shift us in favor of a group, I immediately say ‘no we will not move.’ We go on our run and then come back for a shower. After our showers, we are sitting there reading and we notice that there is a lot of banging and crashing and shouting. Eventually I go to investigate. I find the hotel furniture being walked out into the town square. There are people taking everything out of the building and when I go to reception, the counter has been taken away. At this point, I realize that the hotel is being closed down. So I find the teary receptionist and extract my refund and we then high-tail it to another hotel down the road.

Tiger Leaping gorge and Hello baghorse

I have heard of Tiger Leaping Gorge for almost as long as I have taken an interest in China. Whenever I talk to a Chinese person about traveling in their home country, they tell me that Yunnan is the most beautiful province and that the gorge is the most important of sights there.

We were planning to take three days to walk the length of the gorge, from Qiaotou to the end. There are guesthouses along the way that we would be able to stay at and we left most of our luggage in Lijiang, so we weren’t carrying a lot with us.

The walk starts out in a fairly obscure spot which was marked on this occasion by a mule, standing in the shade, next to a large pile of his own shit. This caused me to observe this animal that has always puzzled me. I mean, it is a sterile animal, so why bother breeding it? And if the almighty one (or ones) did not intend to let this silly looking creature reproduce, then why let it get this far in the first place? While I ponder this, we start to round the bend and are met by an amazing view of the mighty Jinsha river, towered by a sheer cliff face and snow capped mountains. I am sure there are no words that can explain the sight adequately and this was only the start! As we climbed and climbed to the point where we were almost level with the mountains, the view became what can only be described as aw-inspiring. Indeed when we arrived at our stop for the night and found a good place on a balcony to take in the view, I did so in considerable awe. It is one of the sights that I will preserve in my memory for the rest of my life and when I am in need of some inspiration, I can think of this image and remember that if I stick out whatever is troubling me at the time, then I may have the opportunity to view something as amazing as this again.

At the Tea Horse which was our stop for the evening, we met Kerra and Nate, two Americans who were working for China Climb, a company based in Yangshou who run school rock-climbing trips. They were using the research of a trip as an excuse for a holiday and their company was appreciated. I think… I hope that I am a reasonable judge of character and I like to think that I know good people when I meet them, and these seemed to me to be good people. It is an obvious stereo-type to apply, that Americans are all loud, obnoxious and incensitive to other cultures. I can safely say though, that the Americans that travel (or at least the ones that I have met) are really cool people I think it’s the cool part of the population that travels, and they all seem to be from Washington State. We would run into Nate and Kerra in Lijiang and later in Yangshou also.

The following day, we continued on our way at an early hour and enjoyed breakfast at another guesthouse along the way. Here, I saw my first real live Yak. A huge, hairy creature, much more impressive than the silly looking mules that we kept seeing on the track.

The mules would be led by men who were hoping to carry either tourists or their luggage for a fee. Their approach was quite annoying. They would follow about three meters behind a tired looking walker as if willing them to give up and relent to “Hello baghorse” You see this is all they say. As you walk past one of them, they point to the animal and say “hello baghorse”. So after a while, I would try to beat them to it and wave to the animal while saying “hello baghorse!”

We had planned to take the high and less trodden track over the top and to our next stop of Sean’s guesthouse in Walnut grove. Unfortunately we couldn’t find it, so we decided to walk or climb down to the river itself. This involved a treacherous descent down something that the locals actually had the nerve to call a ladder. It was actually just a track, worn into the side of the cliff with steel cables, poorly anchored to trees and posts and things. My knees started to give me grief as I was possibly still a little tender from my recent accident in a Vietnamese truck. By the time we got the bottom I was grumpy and sore and probably didn’t fully appreciate the river, but it was quite impressive to see this huge volume of water, rushing through the narrow gorge, sending a cloud of spray up as it went.

We stayed at Sean’s guesthouse as recommended by lonely planet, which gave further weight to a theory that once a place is listed in the LP, they can trade on name and no longer need to attempt good service. The Tea Horse from the previous night and our breakfast stop at halfway house was far more impressive.

The path forward seemed to be cut from the best information we could obtain, so we called it a day short and headed back to Lijiang. We walked down to the road and hired a micro van. It was then that we realized that the majority of tourists came to visit the gorge in huge tourist buses and arrived at a visitors centre. There must have been twenty buses there when we where there and they kept coming as we were driving out. This gives a further appreciation for the amazing experience that was the hike.

So back to Lijiang, and then a sleeper bus back to Kunming, to start the next part of our journey to Guanxi province. This time we are three on the sleeper bus. I now have a small toy Yak that Miss Guion bought for me. He does not need a bed of his own though, so he is easy travel company.

Back to Yangshou and Hello Bamboo!

I had been to Yangshou three years or so ago, when I did my first charity bike ride through Guanxi province. On that occasion we rode into Yangshou in extremely heavy rain, but were able to enjoy sunny weather while we were there. Coincidentally, as Miss Guion and I landed at Guilin Airport, it was raining heavily and continued to do so all the way to Yangshou on the two hour bus ride. When we met up with Eric, he said that it had been raining solidly for the last few days. It just kept coming he said. Thankfully it ceased the following day and gave way to amazing warm, sunny weather.

It was around this time that the National holiday started, during which the media estimated that 150 million Chinese were traveling across the country. It certainly seemed as though they were all headed for Yangshou. This small town has already been hugely expanded by an all-round increase in tourism, but the massive influx of people was unbelievable. Rooms that had cost 100Y before the holiday were now being let out at 300Y and tickets were impossible to come by according to travel agents.

We enjoyed Yangshou despite the impending chaos and took a bike ride up the Yu river to visit some old bridges and take in the small villages along the river. This is where we met “Hello Banboo!” This is a favourite of the Chinese tourists. They ride up the river by bike, then they sit on a plastic seat, fastened to a bamboo barge and float back down the river. It looks very boring and over-done so we would choose to ride back to town when we were done. This didn’t stop them trying though. I think we must have encountered fifty hello bamboo that day.

Miss Guion took advantage of Dr Lilly’s acupuncture and hot cupping treatments to help her to recover from the various health imperfections that had been annoying her for the duration of our trip.

After a few days in Yanghou, we took a sleeper train to Shanghai. Our legendary Yangshou travel agent Uncle Sam sorted us out for this rare ticket and we were on our way.

Shanghai and Hello Watch!

Chinese trains are nothing short of fantastic! Clean and comfortable, there are no bad points. Before catching the train, I went and bought a heap of food to sustain us for the twenty two hour journey.

At Guilin station, we waited in a huge waiting hall with a section of the hall assigned to each train. In the minutes leading up to the train, everyone surges towards the doors and the minute the train arrives, they charge out towards the train. This is very much a Chinese thing to do. There is no such thing as a queue in China. Be it a line up for immigration at the airport, a line for a food stall or the aforementioned train queue. They just jump in and push and jostle. All lines seem to grow from the front in China.

Shanghai! It is a place that I have been waiting in anticipation to visit since I heard my cousin Walter talk about it. He said it was the fastest growing city in the world and you could feel it. The density of people is the first thing you notice, followed by the brake neck pace of construction and the number of flashy cars and flashy shops. It is just humming with growth. If you stand in the middle of the street at first light when there is less traffic, I think you can actually feel the city humming with growth and progress.

Shanghai has the best food. There is food everywhere and there are no shortage of vegetarian options. It’s cheap and it’s good. There are places with pre-prepared dishes that you choose. Miss Guion calls these choose your own adventure restaurants. There are seafood restaurants and entire streets that are just feeding frenzies. One night we eat at a small restaurant in one of these streets where you choose the ingredients and they cook them in a broth. I could go on forever about the food, but I think my taste buds remember it best.

The skyline of this huge metropolis is like something that you only see in science fiction movies. Screens that take up the entire side of a sixty storey building and the giant pearl TV tower which stands out above everything.

When I run along the bund I forget that I am running, because I am so occupied, trying to remember each of the buildings that make up the skyline. I will remember this city for it’s food, it’s skyline and the annoying little men who run after you saying, “hello watch, hello watch!!!” They are more harmless than “hello hashish” though.

There are so many things about Shanghai that I found amazing and it is without doubt the most impressive city that I have visited, but it is also the place that I say goodbye to Miss Guion and head back south to Bangkok. We were having trouble getting tickets to Beijing as planned, so I had decided to head back to Bangkok from Shanghai. After a ride on the amazing Maglev train to the airport, Miss Guion fairwelled me onto my flight. She will now continue on to Europe by the Trans Siberian Express.

As the plane takes off from Shanghai, one of the Chinese passengers stands up and tries to open the overhead locker. The flight attendant does her best to crash tackle him and place him back in his seat. There are throat clearing noises, incessant yelling and general loudness from the Chinese passengers the whole flight and just before the plane lands in Bangkok, a lady gets out of her seat and opens the overhead locker. I think to myself that I am ready to get away from the Chinese for a while. You see, any country can give you the shits and exhaust you when you spend a while there. Weather it’s the scamming attitude of the Viets, the laziness of the Lao people or the perpetual impatience and loudness of the Chinese, they will all get to you eventually. A damn good reason to keep moving around. I wonder what shits people about Australians?