haonowshaokao

While I was in Beijing I took a day-trip to see the Great Wall. Here are the photos.

In places it was more of a climb than a walk.

photos continue

After more than a month travelling in China, I got to Beijing on Saturday, a week later than planned. An astonishingly quick 13-hour sleeper train took me from the t-shirt weather of Shanghai to the biting cold of the north-east. There’s barely a cloud in the sky up here, but the wind is really something else.
This is my last stop before I start heading off on the trans-Siberian, so a lot of my time has been taken up with buying tickets and supplies, as well as dealing with the Mongolian embassy. There were a few days to go sightseeing, but most of the tourist attractions are closed for renovation in preparation for the olympics next year, so I just spent a day in the Forbidden City and another one on the Great Wall.
The Forbidden City was stunning, despite much of it being covered in scaffolding and the whole place closing unexpectedly at 3.30 when I’d only seen half of it. The sheer scale of it is the main thing – genuinely city-sized. I really have to come back when they’ve finished the repairs and see the place again.

photos

I had to wait a week to pick up my passport from the Russians, and with little to do in Shanghai and a weirdo room-mate I thought it would be better to see some of the famous places nearby.
My first stop was to Hangzhou and West Lake, China’s most famous tourist attraction (at least as far as the Chinese are concerned). My first impressions were not great. After arriving I stood in the drizzle trying to hail a taxi for half an hour. At least a few hundred empty ones sailed by before somebody told me you were only allowed to get one 200m down an unsignposted underground tunnel.
West Lake itself was fairly nice, though it seemed a good portion of the Chinese population were visiting at the same time and at points you couldn’t move for people. I dread to think what the high season is like. There was more drizzle and light fog too, so all in all I probably didn’t get the best out of it. After two days I spent another half hour hailing a taxi, took it to the station and boarded a train to Suzhou.
Suzhou is the “Venice Of The East” because it has lots of canals. Then again, so does Birmingham. To be fair though, Suzhou was very nice indeed. There were no hoards of people, just gardens, temples and pagodas. The gardens in particular were worth visiting – a very welcome change from the pace of Shanghai. My favorite was the “Master Of Nets Garden” – I could’ve spent a whole day just sitting there. To end the day I climbed up the “tallest pagoda south of the Yangtze.” The view from the top wasn’t bad.

many photos

I was never supposed to be in Shanghai. From Xi’an the plan was to head for Beijing, stopping in somewhere called Pingyao on the way. This all changed when I found that the Russian embassy in Beijing doesn’t like issuing visas to non-chinese people, and two days later I found myself taking a sleeper train down here to find the apparently more lax Russian consulate.
Shanghai is famous in China for being immense, sprawling and ultra-modern. The people are famous for being unfriendly. As far as I can see the first of these ideas is correct and the second a bit of an unfair generalization. Most people I’ve met are as friendly as any in China, unsurprising as hardly anyone I’ve met is really from Shanghai.
The best thing about the city is the, for want of a better word, civilisation. Cars stop at traffic lights, bad drivers get stopped, people queue for tickets in the subway station… If you don’t find any of these things remarkable then you’ve never lived in China. On the other hand there are worse annoyances than elsewhere. In my one hour on The Bund I almost got taken away by some student girls (who I decided had some kind of scam in mind, not sure what), had a very stupid shoeshine man squirt show polish on my suede shoes and got into a serious argument with a postcard-selling woman. Away from the small tourist area the only problem is how expensive everything is.
After a painless appointment at the consulate my first couple of days were only marred by life at the hostel. The place was nice enough, but I had the misfortune of being put in a room with one of the weird middle-aged English twats you come across in Asia. The first warning sign was his choice of reading material – a Jeremy Clarkson book left on the bedside table in the unoccupied room. When I met him the first evening he was on the phone arranging a date with a Chinese girl and talking self-importantly about star signs. He sounded like he was about to marry the girl, but when he put the phone down he told me he was engaged to a girl in Japan and after a bit of fluff while he was here. At 4am the next moring he shook me awake to tell me I was snoring. I hate sleeping in a room with someone who’s snoring myself, but the way he woke me scared me in a way I can’t easily explain. I could see underneath the smooth ladies man he had some serious anger in him that I didn’t want to stick around to see.
The next night I moved rooms. Then, with the best part of a week to go before I could pick up my passport, I went to visit some other places around the local area. When I got back he was gone, and a selection of better people had arrived, most of them Swedish.
These last two days I’ve picked up my passport, hung around at the hostel drinking beer, and yesterday spent the best part of the day searching for the artificial English city that’s being created on the outskirts. (There’s an article about it here) It took three hours, one tube train and four buses to find it, and it probably wasn’t worth it. Maybe in a few years there will be something to see, but right now it’s just a fairly nice half-built university city. After another three hours, two tube trains and two buses I got back for more barbecue and beers.
So, in about an hour I’m off to Beijing.

photos

I was in Xi’an for a few days, a place known best these days for the army of terracotta warriors unearthed there thirty years ago. The first day we went to see them. I’d been told by an Irish guy in Yangshuo not to go, but I’m glad I did. The presentation may lack something – you are too far away from the warriors and most are hidden away – but if you know something about the history of the area then that’s enough. What you can see is less than 1 percent of an immense underground tomb-city created in 200bc, possibly the most incredible creation of humanity until the 20th century, and built by the Hitler of bronze-age China.
The rest of Xi’an (the ‘ is to show it has two sylables) is worth seeing too. It was the capital city for over a thousand years, and somehow has managed to survive the last hundred years fairly intact, something that can’t be said about most of the country. It was just good to see somewhere that doesn’t look like a standard modern city for a change.
The best part, as usual, was meeting new people each night at the hostel and going next-door to “Bar Street”. We seemed to be almost the only customers, though that didn’t stop the inevitable drinking contest with the owner and subsequent karaoke. An Australian heavy metal guy had a very drunk non-english-speaking barman trying to get off with him for at least two hours. I don’t know why he didn’t just leave. I ended up with the owner’s wife, not a boast as she was an old barfly, possibly the wrong side of 40. Luckily the sun came up and saved us both.
I made myself sick with all the drinking, but still managed to appreciate the Muslim Quarter on the last day, especially the Great Mosque. And the food. Always the food.

photos under the click

Ever since I arrived in China 1 year, 1 month and 8 days ago it’s been my plan to take a boat down the Yangtze to see the Three Gorges. If you haven’t heard about these then here’s the story. The Chinese government have built a dam on the Yangtze that is filling up right now. When it’s full, in 2009, the reservoir will back up the Yangtze for 375 miles, and one of the things to be partially covered is the Three Gorges, and they aren’t going to be visible again until the dam is removed, hopefully at some distant point in the future (the alternative being it collapsing and killing about 4 million people).
While the river is still flowing the three-day boat trip I took will presumably remain insanely popular. Most of the tourists who visit Chongqing, a city of 30 million people, do so just to leave it this way. Chongqing isn’t a particularly interesting city, despite its immense size. Much of it seems to be half-built, and a thick smog hangs in the endless valleys. I gave it a day, but ended up spending most of it in an internet cafe.
The cruise itself took place on a pretty scraggy old tour boat. There were about 400 people on-bard, but apart from a few Germans who blanked me completely and an American-Australian couple I met on the last day, I was the only English-speaker. This wasn’t so bad as I got to practice my Chinese a great deal. I shared my cabin with a mother and daughter from Gansu and an old man from parts unknown. They all constituted good practice except the old man who was completely indecypherable.
A large portion of the three days was taken up with stopping at the identikit Chinese tourist traps that line the river. The only really notable one was the “Ghost City” – a strange series of temples and castles with horrific scenes of hell inside. In the last building of the set they abandoned the pretense of being a buddhist site entirely and had a ghost train. It was fairly fun, but would have been better not at 8am.
On the second day, after passing the first gorge, we got onto a smaller boat and saw the “Little Three Gorges”, which turned out to be more impressive than the big versions. Then we disembarked and got onto even smaller boats to see the “Mini Three Gorges”, which was perhaps stretching the idea too far. That night the boat docked in a town called Wuhan – a dismal little place, not interesting enough to be seedy, just dirty, boring and slightly dangerous-looking.
We sailed through the second Gorge while I was asleep, which was a little annoying, but the third Gorge more than made up for it. The top deck – the only decent place to see anything – was reserved for 1st class passengers, but the American-Australian couple gave me a pass they’d pinched so I could see it properly.
Then, suddenly, we had to stop, as the boat was unable to progress through the largest dam in the world.

pictures under the link

I was in Chengdu a good five days ago now, but updating this is getting harder and harder as Livejournal is now blocked and Photobucket might as well be, it’s so slow. Thankfully the Russians don’t feel the need to block websites yet so everything will get a lot easier in a couple of weeks.
So, about a week ago I just about got the sleeper bus from Guilin to Chengdu. The connecting bus from Yangshuo blew a tire halfway down the expressway and pulled into a garage for repairs. It got going again, but not quickly enough, and I had to jump into a taxi which got me there just as the sleeper bus was pulling out.
Sleeper buses are a funny thing – I’ve never seen them in Europe, but we really could do with them. Instead of sleeping flat you are angled at about 20 degrees so that your legs are in a compartment under the person in front. It was surprisingly easy to sleep until the guy in the next bed started snoring like a pot-bellied pig. The main road turned into a potholed dirt-track soon after, and the bus shook so much that everyone woke up, except the snorer. Ten minutes after that the bus came to a halt, the driver woke him and it turned out he was the other driver. Talk about being in the wrong job.
After 22 hours we got to Chengdu, and I found the hostel without any major problems. It was a nice enough place, down an alley off the city centre, which I went to explore soon after. There was a large soviet-style main square, with elaborate water displays and an over-sized Mao statue, so I hung around there for a few minutes, then went to the “People’s Park”.
I’ve been to many parks in my time, and this must count as one of the strangest. Everyone seemed to be involved in one activity or another, all of them outside what I’d class as normal park behaviour. Old men were flying kites on immense spools, the kites so far away they appeared as miniscule dots in the sky. Children were boating around the circular river that surrounded the place, trying to catch tadpoles with little nets. Some old men were sitting on fold-up chairs watching karaoke dvds on a portable tv, while others read the newspaper, which had been fixed page-by-page in a long line of transparent display cases. Strangest of all there were at least a hundred people participating in an open-air ballroom dancing lesson. It was definitely worth the 8 kwai entry.
On the second day I thought I should probably go and see the panda breeding centre. It was a worthwhile enough trip – the year-old pandas were surprisingly active, the film surprisngly graphic, and the stuffed animals in the museum the worst I’ve ever seen. In the afternoon I went with a French girl I met to see the Zen Buddhist temple, which was fairly cool. We saw a monk get absolutely furious for no obvious reason. I thought they were supposed to be calm all the time, but apparently that’s a myth. Shame I didn’t get a photo. These are the ones I did get, though –

click for pics

The other day, or now I think about it four days back, I got up way too early for someone on holiday to take a minibus to the Dragon’s Bacbone Rice Terraces in Longsheng. The journey was long but uneventful, and the pictures say it all really, so here they are.

First we were taken to a terrible restaurant. I had some MSG Chicken and talked to an easily excitable Japanese couple. When we’d finished some of the local women from the Yao minority came along to sing and dance. It was a bit staged, but at least they’ve got impressive hair.

When that was over we walked up the rice terraces, which were, well, judge for yourself.

everything else under the link