From China to Vietnam

After all the fun we had in Yunnan province we felt a bit sad to leave China but we knew it was time to move on and head south. For one thing, the weather in Yunnan started to get a bit chilly and we thought that the beaches of Vietnam sounded quite tempting.

To get to Vietnam we took a 10-hour bus ride from Kunming to the border. At the border we had to leave the bus and cross the border on foot. This wasn't quite as easy as it sounds; our bus dropped us off at the bus station in the border town of Hekou in the darkness and nobody could speak enough English to tell us which way the border was. In the end I took my passport out and they seemed to get the idea. We walked in the direction we were sent and came to a barrier. Over the barrier we could see a road leading to Vietnam but short of jumping the barrier we could see no way in. Finally a friendly (no irony here) Chinese border guard came to our assistance and directed us to a small dark alley where the entrance to the chinese customs was found

The procedure on the Chinese side was pretty straightforward; the borderguard took our passports and asked why we didn't have Vietnamese visas, I opened the page of my passport where the visa was and she was happy, then she studied my passport for a while and asked me where I'm from, I told her Finland and she pretended to know that it's a country. Then we were off to get our passports stamped and stared at at another desk and motioned to go to Vietnam. As we had no idea which exit to take we asked another border guard where Vietnam is, she looked at us a bit funny and said 'you go over the bridge'.

We managed our way across the bridge and reached Lao Cai, the Vietnamese side of the border. There three different people stared and stamped our passports without a word, then pointed at a piece of paper we were supposed to fill in with no pens, reluctantly gave us one pen to share and finally stamped the piece of paper and made a point of not welcoming us to Vietnam

As we left the building there were a number of shifty looking 'taxi drivers' offering to take us to places we didn't know. After a bit of bartering we took one of them up on his offer to drive us to Sapa, a little town in the mountains about an hour's drive away from Lao Cai. We probably paid far more then was the going rate for this journey but we got to Sapa just in time for dinner and booked ourselves into a fairly nice hotel



Sapa is quite an interesting place after China. The town has a very European style of architecture and they sell lovely hard crusted rolls (both thanks to the French colonialists, I guess). After the tranquility of the mountain towns of China, Sapa is a bit hectic, everyone and their grandmother is trying to sell you stuff. In fact, they are selling such random stuff that their most common sales pitch is 'you, buy something'.



Sapa is a beautiful place though, and if you can ignore the hawkers and the millions of mopeds it is a nice place to spend a couple of days. We have done a couple of half-day walks in the area and the scenery is pretty wonderful. Last night we also splashed out and spent 30 euros on a meal and a bottle of red wine (the first time we had any wine since Finland!), which was a nice change from local food and weak lager



Tonight we are going to catch our first Vietnamese night train to Hanoi. We are travelling in relative luxury compared to Chinese trains since we are in a compartment of only four people. What that is like in reality remains to be seen...

Around Yunnan province

Hi again! Quite a lot has happened since we last wrote. Our first stop in Yunnan province was Kunming. It's not a particularly interesting city and to be honest we weren't really inspired to explore it much since because of the constant torrential rain, but anyway we needed to go to Kunming to apply for our visas for Vietnam, and because Kunming is the main transport hub for the rest of the province. From there we moved on to a small town called Dali but since the weather showed no sign of improving there we pushed on to the northwest since we knew we'd have to come back the same way later. So, we went to Shangri-La. It's a really beautiful Tibetan village surrounded by the snowcapped mountains of the Himalayas and close to the Tibetan border.



If you're not going to Tibet (and we're not) then this is apparently the next best thing. It's a beautiful place and the people were really friendly. The only small problem was that night times were freezing; we were wearing gloves and sleeping with electric blankets which was a bit of a shock to the system after the 30 degrees heat of Yangshuo just the previous week! After two days in Shangri-La we moved on to Tiger Leaping Gorge which was one of the things on our "must do" list for China. We weren't dissappointed!



Tiger Leaping Gorge is a 2-day trek in the mountains. We walked with 2 others; Nancy from Canada, who we've been travelling with since Kunming, and Neil from Australia, who we met in a bar in Shangri-La. It's hard to describe how beautiful this place is. Neither words nor photos do it justice. It's simply stunning; every way you turn there is a view, be it a waterfall, a snowcapped mountain or a valley of pine trees.



And to top it off, after a week of cold and rain we were blessed with glorious sunshine once again. The trek was the best part of the trip so far and possibly the most amazing scenery I've ever seen. At the end of the trek nobody was in any hurry to leave the gorge so we stayed a night at a hostel at the end of the route, rested our aching legs and treated ourselves to a few beers!

The next day we moved on to the town of Lijiang. It's a nice town but it's somehow spoilt by the hordes of tourists passing through (yes, I realise we are tourists ourselves, but still...). Also, after the beauty of Tiger Leaping Gorge, I think any place was going to be a disappointment. We went to see an orchestra playing local Naxi music. Unfortunately that was disappointing too; the musicians' beards were more impressive than their music!



After that, we went back to Dali which is where we are now. There's not a great deal to do here but it has a pretty old town and the hostel we are staying at is a wonderful place to just sit back and chill for a while; I think we were really ready for that! And besides, there was heavy flooding in Vietnam last week so it's probably best to wait for them to clear up a bit before we move on.

November 6th was Mikko's birthday, before we left to go hiking for the day I asked Dave and Song from the hostel if they could arrange a birthday cake in the evening. They came back with the most beautiful cake I've ever seen with all kinds of exotic fruits on top.



Mikko was surprised and happy, and after a while very full of cake. We also had the best company that night; the hostel staff, Neil, Nancy and also Max, a guy we met earlier on our tour in Mongolia who suddenly showed up at the hostel, so it was nice catching up with him again and exchanging travelling tales.
Mikko had plenty of Tsingtao's bought for him throughout the evening and a great night was had by all. Needless to say, we didn't do much the following day!

Top 10 - Weird China

China has been quite an experience. Here are our Top 10 oddities so far:

#10 - Recycling. There are recycling bins everywhere, but the system still needs a little developing.



#9 - Audiences. What ever happens, where ever it happens, and when ever it happens, there's always an audience.



#8 - The police. It takes a real tough cop to look hard in one these golf carts.



#7 - Beer Pong. The true king of games. Throw a pingpong ball into your opponents beer glass and make them drink it (just the beer, not the ball).



#6 - Outdoor haircuts. Cheap and cheerful, but no mirrors anywhere in sight.



#5 - Trains. Travel in Chinese trains can be a real experience. Especially in night trains, if you get the top bunk.



#4 - T-shirts. You can have your favourite psycopath (Hitler, Bin Laden, Ballack, etc.) printed on your t-shirt.



#3 - Condom dress. If t-shirts aren't your thing, there's always the dress made entirely of condoms.



#2 - Advertising. Recognise the bearded fellow in this restaurant's banner?



#1 - Toilets. A clear winner. A trip to the toilet in China is never a boring one. The picture below is the ladies' in Dali, Yunnan.

Yangshuo

After visiting the big cities of Xi'an and Guilin we were looking forward to moving on to Yangshuo, a small town (at least by Chinese scale) in southern China.



I was expecting a sleepy little village, but as it turned out about a million other tourists had had the same idea before us and we found ourselves in a Chinese equivalent of Torremolinos; the main street had shops selling everything from fake watches to t-shirts with "I'm Mental" printed on them. And of course there were bars around every corner offering English breakfast.



But even if the town was not very authentically Chinese, at least it was really beautiful; there is a river running through the town and all around are karst peaks rising almost vertically from the ground. The weather was also lovely and warm, so we thought this was a good place to chill out for a few days, and not do any temples or museums.



In Yangshuo we also bumped into Janne and Hilde from Norway, who we had met earlier in Beijing. We all went on a kayak tour on the Li River, which turned out to be a fantastic day. We paddled downstream for about 3 hours and stopped for lunch in a little village on the way.



In the village I got talking to a local woman who wanted to practice her English. She had a little handwritten book of phrases that visitors had taught her. My favourite phrase in the book was "Do you need opium and hookers?" I wondered what she thought that meant, but I didn't have the courage to ask - after all, there's a limit to how much opium and hookers you can get into a kayak.



After kayaking we happened to notice a sign "English teachers wanted" in Yangshuo. We thought that this might be a fun thing to do for a few weeks and went in and asked about the job possibilities. They seemed pretty interested in our services and we got ourselves an interview for the next day; they wanted us to teach a class and see how that went. So, there we were the next morning, standing in front of a class of Chinese students doing our best to get them focused on learning English and not on the fact that we are not married (this seemed unthinkable to them). We ended up teaching two classes, and we had a lot of fun doing it. The students were really nice and curious about us and where we came from. In the end we didn't stay on as teachers because the school was only able to offer us part-time positions, but we had a great time nevertheless.



The next day we went back to being tourists again. We rented bicycles and drove to another river nearby. There we got our bikes on a bamboo raft and sailed down the stream for a couple of hours. After the rafting we picked up our bikes and headed off to Moon Hill and the Water Cave.



Moon Hill is a semicircular hill that you can climb in about an hour. The day was very hot so the climb seemed pretty long but once we got on top of the moon the view was worth the sweat and tears.



The Water Cave was also a great experience. You take a boat to enter the cave through a small hole in a hill, but once you are inside you can get off the boat and walk around. The place was absolutely huge, I've never seen a cave that size, there were enormous stalagtites and stalagmites everywhere and little streams and pools here and there. We even got to go swimming in one of the pools, which was nicely refreshing after climbing the Moon Hill.



There would have been even more to do in Yangshuo but we felt that it was time to move on and head to the west. We are now back in Guilin, trying to find the best way to travel to Kunming, Lijiang and Dali in Yunnan province of China. But that's another story...

Going South

From Pingyao we moved on to Xi'an, it's another big city famed for it's 'army' of terracotta warriors, built some 2000 years ago, apparently to guard the tomb of a dead emperor. So we went to check that out, it was a very impressive sight. Like with the Great Wall in Beijing, I'm fascinated by the scale on which the Chinese build things and the great effort involved, and I often find myself asking what was the point, and was it ever really worth the huge effort?! But they are really spectacular sights, so I'm not complaining, and we're definitely enjoying!!



Besides the warriors, Xi'an has some nice old city walls that you can hike or bike around, and a picturesque muslim quarter; it was nice to browse the shops and eateries there. There are also plenty of temples but we skipped most of them, having had a bit of an overdose of temples in the past week. Oh, we also got another massage! No scars or bruises this time; our faith in Chinese medicine has been restored :-)



Then on from Xi'an we faced a 27 hour train journey to Guilin. Due to the long time we would be spending in the train, we tried to get soft sleeper tickets (equivalent of 1st class) but they had sold out, so we went for the next best thing and they had sold out too. So, we had to settle for a simple seat reservation. At 220 yuan (about 20 euros) for a 27 hour ride we figured we had a bargain and we could put up with anything that 3rd class travel had to throw at us. Well, it was certainly an experience, I wouldn't necessarily want to repeat it but it was far more interesting and entertaining than travelling in 1st or 2nd class. The train was jam-packed full of people, we were the only tall white ones so of course we caused quite a stir! Some people had reserved seats (like us), but some didn't, so they either squeezed themselves onto the side of someone else's seat, or they slept on the filthy floor, or in one case, in the sink! (I wish I'd taken a picture, but it was 3a.m. and I wasn't exactly thinking straight...)



I've developed a huge admiration for the way the Chinese behave; everyone in the train seemed more than willing to sqeeze themselves into the tiniest spaces so that a complete stranger could have a bit of their seat. I didn't give up mine but I had one sleeping baby after another dumped on my lap so that they could get a bit of rest! Another thing I really admire is that they are always happy and smiling, and never seem to complain about anything. At one point I was getting really annoyed by one girl sitting opposite to me who never stopped talking and laughing, it was 6 a.m. and the whole carriage could hear her. But rather then coming and telling her to shut up, the other passengers were coming over to our seats to listen to her stories, we had a huge crowd and everyone (well, everyone except the two grumpy white tourists!) joined in the conversation. I really admire their positivity, and I made a mental note to myself to try and be more tolerant of people in the future... let's see how long that lasts!

Throughout the day, as we travelled further south, the scenery outside became more hilly and interesting, and kept us entertained. Still, when we pulled into Guilin I think we were more than happy to get out and stretch our legs, get some fresh air and have a good wash! :-)

The next day we explored Guilin. It's really nice and warm here (about 26 degrees) and it's much less hectic and more scenic than the previous cities. We climbed one of the karst peaks in the city centre for some nice views of the city, had a walk along the Li River and visited the Reed Flute Cave, Guilin's main attraction. It's the biggest cave I've ever seen, with some really impressive stalactite and stalagmite formations all lit up with eerie fluorescent lights.





Then it was time to leave Guilin and move on to Yangshuo. It's an hour and a half bus ride away, and it's supposed to be even more beautiful. We'll keep you posted!

By the way, we added some more pictures in the Mongolia Gobi desert blog. Thanks to Scott Appleby for taking and sending us the pics. It's probably a blessing that we had no camera in Mongolia because these photos are better than anything we could have taken!

Also, I'm a few days late, but HAPPY BIRTHDAY to my Grandma, Barbara Porter, who's an avid reader of our travel diary. She's just turned 85 years old. Congratulations, Grandma! xxx

From Beijing to Pingyao

All good things must come to an end, it was time for us to leave Beijing. The fact that our next stop was Datong, one of China's ugliest and most polluted cities, didn't make us too excited about leaving. But we were not going to stay in Datong longer than was absolutely necessary.

We took a night train from Beijing to Datong, which was quite an experience. We got "hard sleeper" tickets, which meant three storey bunk-beds in an open carriage (as opposed to "soft sleepers" where you get a cabin with four sharing. Luckily we had the bottom bunks, and didn't have to climb to the hat-shelf-like top bunks. The fact that the Chinese smoke everywhere (and constantly) made breathing a bit hard, but otherwise we managed a decent night's sleep.

We arrived in Datong at dawn, and were immediately caught by the tour organisers. This fit nicely into our plan because we wanted to visit the Hanging Monastery and the Yungang Caves, and then take the night train to Pingyao, without staying in Datong for the night.

After a booking our tour and train tickets (and a nice breakfast in a nearby hotel) we were on our way to the Hanging Monastery. Well, to be honest the monastery doesn't really hang. It is actually propped up on a hillside with wooden poles. But the effect is pretty impressive, though. You can very easily imagine the whole thing collapsing at any minute.



As monasteries go (and by now we've seen a fair few already) this was a good one. It does seem that you find monasteries in the strangest places around here: in the middle of a desert, behind a rock that doesn't quite look like a turtle, or halfway up a steep hill. Having said that, I don't remember seeing any monasteries back home, maybe those ones are even better hidden?

The next stop was the Yungang Caves. These were the first caves we have seen so far, and it was a strong start. There are loads of caves in different shapes and sizes, some with Buddhas still inside, others looted.



After the caves we had to face Datong. As expected, it was not a highpoint of our trip. To be fair we only explored a couple of blocks of the city since Julie's digestive system had been somewhat boosted by spicy Chinese food, and we had to remain within a sprinting distance from the only decent toilets in the city.

After a long day we finally boarded on our train to Pingyao. This time we were in a hard sleeper with a middle and a top bunk, but by now this wasn't too bad; we were tired and beyond caring.

We are now in Pingyao, a lovely little town with an ancient city wall around it. There isn't so much to do, but just walking along the narrow streets and looking at the restaurants and shops is good fun.



We also seem to be heading deeper into the country and as there are less and less foreigners around we seem to have become tourist attractions ourselves. It is now impossible to go anywhere without the Chinese tourist groups shouting "Hello!" at you and snapping pictures. It's all good fun, though!

Tonight we are heading to Xi'an on another night train. This time we are in a hard sleeper carriage with two top bunk tickets. Oh well...

Photos from Beijing

I'm not quite sure what to write about Beijing, so I'll share some photos with you instead.

Oh, and I added some of Andy's photos from Mongolia in the post "Around Mongolia".

We made it to Beijing!

Yes, we made it! It's a fantastic place, too. Beijing seems to have everything: it's clean, people are friendly, it's modern and things work, it seems really safe, and yet it's still by far the cheapest place we've been to so far. The weather is also fantastic here at the moment (around 25 degrees) which is really nice after the freezing nights camping in Mongolia. And the food is a hundred times better, too!





We arrived here two days before China's National Day (1st October) when the whole nation takes a week of holiday. Plenty of people told us it's a crazy time to be travelling in China but we figured that if we had managed to book transport into China and accommodation in Beijing then it couldn't be too bad. It turns out (of course!) that they were right and we were wrong; it is absolute chaos around any tourist attraction (we tried to get to Tiananmen Square to see if there was anything happening on the 1st, but couldn't get near enough to tell!). But it's so nice here that we really don't mind taking it easy for a week and waiting for the tourist madness to die down a bit.



On our first day we went shopping and managed to find ourselves a new camera at quite a bargain price. After selling us the new one they told us they could mend the old one for around 50 euros, and true to their word, they did. So now we have two cameras! But the new one seems much better than the old one, so no harm done.



Yesterday, after our failed attempt to get to Tiananmen Square we spent some time in a nearby park (Beihai Park) and then went for a walk around the hutongs (narrow alleyways around the older traditional residential areas). There we found a massage place, and decided to go for it as we were quite tired from all the walking. We both took a half an hour back massage, and although it hurt like hell, I think that part of the experience was quite beneficial. But, stupid tourists that we are, we don't know when to stop. So when they offered us some traditional Chinese medicine, we thought "why not?" Famous last words...! Our backs were scraped with something which felt like a fine toothed comb until we were almost bleeding, and then rubbed with some kind of oitment. I stopped at this point but Mikko went one step further. They offered him the "cupping" treatment, which is apparently supposed to straighten your spine. At this point I'd like to say a special thank-you to my Mum and Dad for blessing me with a straight spine! So, they burn something inside glass cups so that it creates a vacuum and the cups stick to your skin and suck your skin inside the cups. Im still not sure how it's supposed to straighten the spine though, and the masseur "doctor" didn't have the English skills to explain. It wasn't very pretty to watch, but according to Mikko, it was not as painful as the scraping thing we both suffered. One day (and one sleepless night) later, we are still bruised, and feeling quite foolish! :-)



Today, we've had a more lazy day. We went to an impressive Lama temple and did some more walking around, trying to avoid any of the major tourist hotspots, and any centres of Chinese medicine, and stopping off regularly to refresh ourselves with a local Tsingtao beer. We're psyching ourselves up to getting up early tomorrow to check out the Summer palace. But another day of lazyness would suit me fine too!