Yunnan province: treks, buses, minibuses and other adventures

So I finally wrapped up our last experiences in China while we recover from an endless food poisoning that mixed with flu in India.

Lijiang

So from Lugu Hu we traveled to Lijiang in Yunnan province. Our friends Juan and Rebeca had booked accommodation in a hostel in Lijiang for the four of us and we were supposed to arrive there together. But we didn't. Their bus tickets were over-sold and even though the guy from the station managed to get them inside a tour bus that drove to Lijiang, we arrived in different parts of the city.

The cute rather small old city of Lijiang I knew from my previous trip seven years ago grew becoming a monster. More and more traditional buildings were built to accommodate growing masses of Chinese tourists. But of course, it wasn’t enough and walking through the crowded rambling streets of the old city with our backpacks was an excruciating task. Lijiang old city is divided in different areas with street names that repeat; and we got deeper and deeper on the wrong street with the correct name, tumbling people, listening to the different karaoke music and soloist voices from the pubs around overlapping. After one hour walking, around 8pm, we arrived to the right number of the wrong street and we were pretty desperate. By then we got a message from Juan and Rebeca with the hostel phone number and we entered to the first karaoke and begged to call the hostel. Eventually a guy from the hostel picked up us, and we walked for half an hour until we arrived there and finally met Juan and Rebeca for dinner.

That’s the whole extent of my second visit to Lijiang: on the following morning the four of us took actually the same bus up to Shangri-la (at 3200 m height).

Shangri-la (originally Zhongdian)

Chasing some of the tourism of the prosperous Lijiang (and Old Dali), officials declared the Tibetan city previously known as Zhongdian, the location of the fictional place Shangri-la (described in the novel Lost Horizon by James Hilton).  It may be the case that the writer took inspiration from the writings of explorers who visited the Deqen prefecture (where Zhongdian is located), but several places in China, Tibet and even Bhutan also claim to be the real Shangri-la. But, anyway, here they went far enough to associate the city previously-known-as-Zhongdian with the fictional Shangri-la, an idyllic permanently happy land isolated from the outside world. The name of the city was changed.

And it worked. Besides, the Tibetan city became also a Western outpost: lots of expats, international initiatives to promote local handcrafts or to develop the area, and good Western food including real pizzas, pasta, yummy yak hamburgers, yak steaks, real salads. There is even a cheese shop! With excellent yak cheese! As much as we love Chinese food, it was a nice break. (And this last week in India we were craving those hamburgers!)

Even before we were close to Shangri-la we heard about Marco, an Italian guy that moved there and opened an Italian restaurant. We, of course, went there for our first meal and ordered some pizza and salad. As soon as Marco takes our order, he starts rambling in Italianspanish about fake Tibetan monks, tourists kidnapped by the Chinese army and how his restaurant isn’t in the Lonely Planet guide because he isn’t an evangelist. And then he starts to tell the history of his life: seven years ago, he married a Chinese Naxi woman, who now works with him, and opened the place. In the flow of the unclear Italianspanish that doesn’t stop, I hear something about him being a nurse. And then I remember!! I met him seven years ago in another Tibetan town called Xiahe. We even shared the room! By that time he was an eccentric 40 years old (single) backpacker, but as crazy as now, he was trying to teach English to the Tibetans to help them moving to India.

We stayed in Shangri-la some days, we wanted to do a trek “near” in Yubeng, but the weather wasn’t good and then Iohi caught the flu so we waited, hanging around with the couple we met before. They were volunteering in a school teaching English to the kids, and Iohi also eventually joined them.

Rebeca and Juan teaching English (Iohi was of course taking the pic)

Finally, we headed to our trek, and we even got an authentic Spanish chorizo colorado from Arturo who was leaving China. Thank you Arturo! We ate it with the parmesan yak cheese in toasted Tibetan bread during our trek!

Getting to Yubeng

So this is how you get to the “near” trek. You take a bus to Deqin, which takes from 6 hours to any uncertain amount of time depending on the conditions of the roads and on your luck. Then you take a minibus to Felai Si which takes around 1 hour. In Felai Si, there’s nothing but a nice view, so you sleep there and you take a jeep on the morning that takes another hour to Xidang. And then you can start. Piece of cake. Should I add that is a mountainous way and there are landslides and flooding all the time?

So fearing crowded minibuses we took the 7:40am bus and after 2 hours it stopped. We were three hours there until we understood that the bus was going to continue going only at 8 or 9 pm (yes pm) when the road was going to be cleared.

The first bus on our way to Yubeng

So yet again we left the bus and, with two Chinese couples, we took a minibus which was able to go on alternative narrow and muddy roads, where we got stuck every now and then.

Then at 9pm, when we were only a couple of hours from our destination, the axis of our car broke in the middle of nothing, and we had to move again, this time to jeep crammed with Tibetan monks. We arranged a price to Felai Si, but when we arrived in Deqin, the nice driver wanted to drop us unless we paid more.

So we paid more and then we arrived to the lousiest hostel belonging to the Youth Hostel association.

The following day it rained a lot, so we didn’t start the trek. It was so cloudy that we even didn’t see that we were surrounded by snowy peaks.

Yubeng trek (under the Meili Snow Mountain)

On the next morning we had an amazingly nice day and the snowy peaks were everywhere!

We arrived in Xidang on the morning and we started to walk up the muddy trail. Five hours later we got to the peak and we started to walk down to Upper Yubeng, the upper part of the town (at 3150 m).

Both Yubengs, upper and lower, are places which seemed to be taken from a painting. Surrounded by mountains, these small Tibetan villages with wooden and mud houses lack cars and seem completely unreal. 

In Upper Yubeng we had dinner twice on an open terrace from where the rainbow was present every afternoon.

We walked all day from there to a glacier over a half frozen lake. We drank there the best water we had ever tasted, straight from the ice in the mountains to a waterfall.

Then we moved to Lower Yubeng (which was slightly lower than the other Yubeng at 3050 m), as beautiful as Upper Yubeng, where we stayed in a room with view to the woods and a stream of water. We saw yaks and mules through our balcony and we used the first day to recover ourselves.

Our view

The next day we walked to waterfalls where we drank exquisite cold water again (yes, water can be exquisite) and on the following day we left.

I'm the blue dot

The way back from Yubeng

We took another path with two Israeli girls. It was a shorter path and without going up. For a couple of hours we walked following a river between small villages. Then we walked in a single line on a narrow trail which had a stream of water on the left near a rock wall and a very high cliff on the right. We even had to put the feet in the water when the trail was narrower and muddy or grab from the wall! The view was amazing and was scaring as hell! 

This was before it gets scary (and then we didn't take pics!)

After walking another couple of hours we reached the point where we should have easily found minibuses to Felai Si. But there weren’t.

We ended up in a construction site where we called everyone working in all the hostels around using the phone of one of the workers. It seemed that there were problems with the road again and we waited halves of hour for five hours for the minibus that didn’t arrive.

Then we caught a minibus that was going down to our direction and we cancelled the last minibus we called. But we didn’t realize until late that he was supposed to pick up a group of six Chinese that were below us. They weren’t happy to be crammed and travel with us but the driver was (he really robbed us with the price). So we contemplated again an endless Chinese quarrel until we begged the only English speaker to let us go with them to Felai Si.

We arrived to the same lousy hostel, but this time even lousier, the electricity was cut. Anyway, it was worth while; I guess that all the effort that implies arriving there makes Yubeng a rather clean, quiet and beautiful place. And we stayed there four nights, because we had already plane tickets from Kunming, but we could easily have stayed much more time, just sitting there on the nature.

We went back on the following morning to Shangri-la anyway, and we met again our friends. From Shangrila to Kunming, we suffered again with the transportation.

We thought the problem was the unreliable minibuses, but official buses were also uncomfortable and got stuck. We thought the problem was also being far from the big cities but the sleeper bus we took to Kunming, capital of Yunnan province wasn’t a joy either. It was roughly like sleeping with thirty more smelly guys in the same moving bed. Twelve hours later we arrived in Kunming.

Kunming

In Kunming we enjoyed our last days in China, a rather big but quite city with the perfect weather: it’s at an almost-tropical latitude but with a 2000 m altitude. We mainly got ready for our next destination, India, and of course we acted in a movie.

All the pictures are in Iohi's picasa.

Spicy Sichuan province

From Kanding to Moxi

So I was saying before that we decided to go to Chengdu through Moxi. In our hotel, we were offered to join an excursion to Moxi for roughly the same price than a minibus ticket. So we joined a group of young people from all over China.

The trip started with soup for breakfast that we politely declined, so the guide (which was also the owner of the hostel) got immediately everyone out and led us to take hot soy milk with fried dough instead, which Iohi even liked.

This guy really knew very special places to see on the way to Moxi: there were no Chinese tourists in July! (which was amazing), and the places were clean (astounding as well) and in every place we ate something different.

We went to hot springs where we boiled eggs in 90 C degrees water and warmed up our legs –but that water wasn’t 90 degrees... And our guide had some laughs asking me and Iohi to pick up the cooked eggs with two wooden sticks from the hot water. At this point we felt to have completely mastered the chopsticks, but the task wasn’t easy at all! Then we were driven to a field from where we reached a beautiful lake that I assume it was the cleanest place in whole China. And there we sat and had yak yogurt.

Possibly the cleanest lake in China

Later we drove over 3800m and we saw the snowy peaks of the Gongga mountains all around us before we reached the Yanzi Gou red stones, rocks covered by some kind of red microorganism. Before we arrived in our final destination, we stopped to eat cold noodles with a super spicy sauce prepared on the moment and served with bread to extinguish the fire. We ate the noodles with some real bamboo sticks that he had cut to use as chopsticks!

Spicy cold noodles

And then we finally got to Moxi that surprisingly was hardly the highlight of the excursion. They were kind of building the town when we got there! Virtually every person of the city was repairing either the facades or the streets. Even it seemed that the main attraction that day was to see how they pour asphalt on the main road.

We originally wanted to see there a national park where you can walk over a glacier, but the place didn’t make a good impression on us. Having bad experience with national parks we decided to skip it and we just traveled to Chengdu, capital of the spicy Sichuan province.

Chengdu, warning hot!            

We finally arrived in Chengdu and I have to say that it was hot, very hot. We were finally on the sea level, and we had a too warm reunion with the summer we were avoiding for the last weeks. We also met again the high season, everything was crowded. Even the hostels were pretty much full of Western people.

In Chengdu, we finally stopped asking for shaola (less spicy): it didn’t help, we either received the same (I think that sometimes even spicier) or we get plain food without spices or salt. And of course we got used to the mala, the lethal combination of chili and Sichuan peppercorn that I described in the last post. We discovered that dan dan noodles have to be eaten spicy.

The famous Dan dan noodles

We visited the Jin Li night market and we ate everything we saw there. Well, we didn’t eat rabbit heads, but we did try, some other day, sliced spicy rabbit together with a dish of eggplant on fish sauce and of course, as always, rice.

But we did more stuff than just eating in Chengdu, we also went to tea houses!

After these experiences, we decided that we had to take cooking classes in that city. We found out about the existence of the Chengdu Museum of Sichuan Cuisine, which had a restaurant and cooking classes. It was actually in outer Chengdu, it took us half day just to get there, we first went to the wrong bus station, and then we had to take 3 different intermediate distance buses. We arrived there starving, so we first enter to a kind of fancy restaurant inside the museum and the food was … not special at all, only expensive. In any place on the streets of Chengdu you could have something better for half the price. The kitchen was a big industrial place and the cooks looked sad and bored. The lessons consisted of learning how to prepare one dish, and it was kind of expensive. We didn’t want to have cooking lessons there, even the food wasn’t that good and the actual museum… was also only one room.

Leshan and Emei Shan

From Chengdu, we did two side trips before coming back to take the train. We went to Leshan and from there to Emei Shan.

Leshan has an amazing park from where you can contemplate both the Grand Buddha, a 71 meters high buddy, and also millions of Chinese people contemplating the Buddha. The Buddha, which is the largest one in the world, is quite impressive but the whole park has many different Buddhist carvings and it’s pretty interesting, and importantly it’s big enough to dilute the quantity of Chinese tourists.

From Leshan we traveled to Emei Shan, yet again a sacred Buddhist mountain (this time not only Tibetan). Climbing Mount Emei is a pilgrimage that Buddhists have done for a long time and in the last decade became very popular among tourists.

You can climb up to the top and down in from 3 days to a couple of hours and it depends not really on your stamina but on how many of the available transportations you take: there are several buses that can get you to upper places and several cable cars.

We realized there that the foot climbing path is actually stairs. So the adventurous hiking trek is basically a huge stairway with expensive tea houses and snack shops on the sides.

We “did” Emei Shan in 4 hours. We obviously didn’t get to the top but we couldn’t stand more time the light but persistent rain that didn’t allow us to see any landscape but stairs and especially we couldn’t bear the crowds of Chinese tourists.

The only memorable part of the “trek” was the fine specimens of Chinglish. There were signs asking for “One step closer to civilization” over the urinals in the male toilet, and “Don’t joke the monkeys” in areas where the monkeys can behave aggressively.

The best of Emei Shan: the signs

Back to Chengdu

Back in Chengdu we decided to eat in the most prestigious restaurant in the city, Ginko. This was our failed logic: if the food everywhere is so incredible tasty, in a prestigious restaurant should be super incredible tasty! But, surprisingly or not, the only incredible thing was the bill.

We ate the famous tea-smoked duck, which wasn’t so different from the Beijing duck for our Western palatals; a dish of Kung Pao chicken, which wasn’t even worth of a picture, and some shrimp which were shrimp.

They did excel in changing our plates five times during the meal, and in keeping my beer apart only to pour me (sometimes) when my glass was empty. From then on, we stuck to the street food…

Xichang – a nice stop over

To get trains out of Chengdu or any other means of transportation came out to be pretty hard. We managed to book a train to Xichang, a nice and small city outside the realm of the guidebooks.

It was a nice experience; we were received by over-friendly volunteer teenagers which gave leaflets (in Chinese of course) about the celebrations they were holding in the city that week. One of them, the only English speaking teenager, felt her moral duty to help us. She not only came with us on the bus, but she also paid (and we fought to pay the tickets!), and walked with us 20 minutes till the hotel. On the meanwhile she practiced also all her English repertoire: from presenting herself to asking where we are from, etc.

The city has a small old area between walls and a nice market, and it’s the home of the Yi_people. By the time we arrived, they had started a series of celebrations that ended with a parade with torches around the city. We were 4 days ahead of the torch parade but we managed to see some kind of rehearsal (but no fire).

Iohi trying an Yi skirt

Lake Lugu

We spent one day in Xichang and then we took a bus to Lugu Hu. Lugu Hu is a quiet lake between mountains on the border between Sichuan and Yunnan provinces. There are several villages around the lake where Mosuo people live. They suppose to be organized in a matriarchal society, but as far as I know, they just don’t get officially married and children are mostly raised by the mother’s family. Their leaders are still men and not women. Anyway, the matriarchal thing serves to publicize the place, and the place is beautiful.

We were in a small village called Wazhiluo, in Wind’s Guesthouse, in front of the lake and with fields of corns, sunflowers and pumpkins everywhere. We planed to stay one or two nights, just to go to other parts of Yunnan province, and we ended up staying 5 nights.

We kept eating amazing food; after all we were still in Sichuan! There were a lot of barbeques and I even ate a frog on the grill! And one occasion we ate in an open kitchen where they served us soup of fresh fish that I choose from a bowl of swimming fish. There, we finally had the chance to see how they prepare real Sichuanese food!

How to prepare a Sichuanese Fish Soup:

You need:

1 handful of Sichuan pepper corn

4 dry red hot pepper

1-1.5 kg Fish

1 small cup of ginger

1 small cup of garlic

4 zucchini

Tons of oil

You do:

1. Clean the fish, leaving the skin and cut it in big pieces.

2. Fry fish with ginger, garlic and Sichuan peppercorn for a couple of minutes in a wok.

3. Add some boiling water just to cover the fish, some salt, stock and the sliced zucchinis.

4. Cover the wok and cook for 20 minutes.

5. Add more boiling water to make it a soup and boil it a couple of minutes more.

6. Serve! (You can add parsley and cilantro at the end; we saw it that way in some other places. You can also replace the zucchini for any other vegetable)

After we walked a lot and we biked almost the whole lake (60 km), and when we decided to just hang out for some more days, we happened to find in our hostel a Spanish-Argentinean couple we met in Mongolia two months before! So we enjoyed the scenery and their company and some days later we traveled together to Lijiang in Yunnan province.

But we didn't ride 60 km in that bike

 More pics in Iohi's picasa.

Traveling illegally in a closed Tibetan area in west Sichuan and our last day in China

We are on our last day in China, actually I’m writing from the Kunming airport at 2 am in the beginning of my 30s birthday waiting the two hours delay to fly the Hump. We are about to do an emblematic flight from the World War II where many planes crashed (but I can already tell that we survive when we finally arrive to India from where I’ll post this).

And today we were transported even further back to the past, when we played as extras in a movie about Yunnan’s bank  Fudian in 1930s. We and a bunch of foreigners, which were offered to work as extras too, were the bad guys, French guys who evilly clapped their hands after a speech that was supposed to celebrate the exploitation of Chinese workers. And the bank somehow saved the workers. But I couldn’t find more information on the internet and I couldn’t get the name of the director. So Chinese friends (or maybe Cheng) can find out more.

But before all that, as I was telling in the last post, on July 11 we were traveling from Qinghai province in China to Serxu in Sichuan province in a brand new 4x4 with a young guy and the lama of the girl we met in Yushu.…

Serxu (or Sershu or Sershul or Dzachuka or Shiqu)

The ride took around 4 hours. During the first hour and a half the lama and the young guy tried to disconnect the alarm that was driving us crazy (until Iohi told them to just press the damn button from the keychain). The rest of the time the lama drank Redbull cans and threw them from the window, well maybe it were only two cans, but we were pretty shocked because we thought that at least Tibetan monks, and even more Tibetan lamas were a little more educated. And of course besides drinking his Redbull we made futile attempts to communicate (in Chinese).

So we arrived at a monastery in Serxu Dzong at 9pm and it was rainy and cold (well, we were still high on the mountains around 4500 m)

The place was amazingly clean and nit (and cheap) and was run by two women who seemed to be in charge of every aspect of the monastery. Everything there was refurbished or it was plainly new. We were so happy to see a clean place after all the dirty holes where we spent the previous week in Qinghai…

On the next morning we understood from a very well-spoken and worldly-wise Chinese young woman that they were preparing the place for huge celebrations in a couple of days and Buddhists from all around the world were expected.  So everything was also fully booked for the next days and even though the place was beautiful we decided just to move on and travel to Ganzi.

Ganzi (or Garze)

We took a minivan with room for seven very small passengers with already six not so small grown-ups and a monk kid, so that we started the drive as eight people. We were crammed like sardines and the fact that most of the passengers (except of the monk kid) smoked, ate chicken feet (yes, chicken feet) and drank alcohol all the way, made it also smell like the inside of a can of sardines.

One hour later, we went through a kind of border control were a police peeked in the van without seeing us. After we passed the control, some people in the van said “something laowai (which were us) something” and then they laughed. We suspected that we weren’t allowed there, but nothing happened, and then we stopped to eat 50 meters from the control (and we were completely paranoid but nothing happened again).

So we continued what it should have been a 7 or maybe an 8 hours ride. However, the dirt road was a big pool of mud because of the non-stopping rain and there was a gigantic truck stuck creating a big traffic jam over a cliff.

This is the situation every time a vehicle is stuck in these parts of China:

MOUNTAIN

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Many many cars à CAR à TRUCK ßMany many cars

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Many many cars àCAR à ß CAR ß Many many cars

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CLIFF

And then Chinese drivers get outside their cars and start shouting and discussing who should pass… for hours.

When this happened, we were stuck several hours, and we had time to recruit a new member for our van who was carrying a huge car battery. Instead of 7 or 8 hours, the drive was 12 hours jumping, feeling like a sardine milkshake. We arrived at the city at 9:00 pm and our first choice for a hotel was full.  So we were led to another place where we got an OK room with bathroom.  And then we understood how come the hotel was filled with mud and pools of water on the floor… there was no running water in all the building! People were carrying water on very shallow bowls from a huge barrel!

Then tired and hungry, we went to eat to a Tibetan restaurant which seemed the only normal place and while eating tasteless momos we saw a nice black rat fleeing from the kitchen… (OK, I know I said in the last post that our luck began to change and this doesn’t seem like that, but just wait).

Anyway, we tried to remain optimistic despite the situation and made a full detailed plan for the next day. The thing is that from the beginning we wanted to stay in a monastery close to Ganzi but it was too late to go when we arrived. So next day Iohi traveled to the monastery (which was 1 hour from the town) to check if there was room for us there, because if it was full I was going to buy bus tickets to leave the town.

And while I was buying some food in the market, the streets got suddenly extremely crowded. Then a sea of policemen and soldiers flooded the same street. There were police and military cars everywhere, and I realized that the town was also filled with a sort of portable police tin houses. Nothing happened, no clash, no shouts, no demonstrations, just lots and lots of people outside.

Police and soldiers were seeing me all time but they didn’t seem to be interested in me, until a very polite policeman dressed as civil approached me. He told me that the place wasn’t safe for me and asked me to leave the town as soon as possible, preferably the same day. I told him I was leaving the next day to Kanding and I went to buy the bus tickets… 5 minutes later, Iohi sent me a text message asking me to join her in the monastery Darjey Gompa. There were other laowais there, and they said it was ok and safe. So after a frenetic text message swap, I returned the tickets and got completely ripped off by the only Tibetan guy who agreed to drive me to Darjey Gompa.

There I met Iohi in a heavenly guesthouse between mountains and rivers and snowy peaks everywhere over the horizon. The foreigners were a bunch (actually half a bunch) of Buddhist Germans who got there following their lama and were doing everything to get the other half of their group to pass the foreigner-proof border. They were thrilled and a bit jealous that we managed to get to this closed sector, without even being sure that we were doing that. In the meanwhile, half of their group was bouncing in the other side of the closed area between Kanding and Ganzi.

So we had an amazing time there in a simple room that felt for us 5-star with a view to the garden and having two Tibetan nuns who cooked for us (and told us off every time for not finishing our meals). Strangely enough, the food they made was Chinese and Chinese breakfast is usually not our cup of tea (by the way, they don’t drink tea on the breakfast either). Most of the breakfast stuff is not sweet or salty or spicy or anything, it’s just plain. A typical example is rice in hot water with no salt or sugar or anything at all. So eventually we got sick of that, we tried to ask for scrambled eggs which we end up doing by ourselves. They were pretty happy with the arrangement until I burnt the wok because I didn’t use enough oil! They did like the scrambled eggs, though….

Our room!

We passed some days either seeing the rain from the window of the nicest room ever or walking around. We also had a natural hot spring close were Tibetans girls washed their cloth and then bath naked! That was when Tibetan guys weren’t washing their motorbikes! The only issue was that the hot spring was across an old wooden bridge which seemed a little too fragile on a fast and furious river, but that didn’t stop us.

The hot spring

And this is the way to the hot spring

We walked a lot across fields waving back hello hello to the locals and we entered to the basic house complexes that were spread around some kilometers from the guesthouse. On one occasion, first we were invited by some monks for tea and sweets; 2 km from there, we were invited again, this time by nuns. They showed us see their plants and insisted that we stayed to have more tea and some bread!

After some days we decided to go back to the town, Ganzi, to take a bus to Kanding. We made our minds to take bus no matter what, swearing that we would never take a minivan in our lives. And of course the buses were full and we took a minivan. And of course the 8 hours drive lasted 13 hours bumping on the mud.

We drove down and down and down between the mountains inside the fog and we finally arrived in Kanding exhausted with migraine and at night…as always. But this time we traveled with a family and no smokers and they even invited us to eat with them during the lunch stop (and didn’t let us pay anything).

Kanding

Kanding is a small city nested in a valley surrounded by impressively huge mountains. It’s funny when you see the city from above that it has no place to grow but up. It’s the middle point between Tibetan and Chinese-Sichuanese culture, with the spirituality of the Tibetan Buddhism and the spiciness of Sichuan. We had there our first experience with Sichuan peppercorn , that mixed with red chili is called málà: "numbing and spicy". It has a very special and nice taste but until we got more or less used we had the strange feeling of not being able to feel our mouths and feel fire in them at the same time.

Kanding

Kanding's spicy food

  And even though we thought the city was open to foreigners it was filled with police, army and blinded trucks with massive guns. It was a little scary but we weren’t kicked out from there this time but in Chengdu we learnt that we could have been. The whole Ganzi prefecture, which includes Kanding, was closed at that time and police kicked out foreigners every time an English speaker policeman was available. As I was telling in previous posts, the police was afraid that the Tibetan demonstrations that started in Aba would spread to the whole prefecture. We had the chance and the luck to travel through that beautiful area only because we arrived from a less usual place, our damn Qinghai.

So we walked around far from the downtown and the army until we met Chris, the American owner of the hostel Zhulim. His hostel seemed really great and we heard later that people go to Kanding only to stay at his place. But it was completely empty, obviously because he’s a main attraction for foreigners but not so much for Chinese people that were the only tourists around. We had a bad coffee but got a lot of good advices like how to get to Yunnan (since almost every short way was closed to foreigners) and advices regarding traveling to Chengdu via Moxi since the main road was being repaired.

And the following day we actually left the forbidden area and we headed to Moxi with a really nice excursion.

Pingyao old city and the Shapotou fiasco

So by the end of June we traveled from Beijing to Pingyao.

Pingyao old city

The old city of Pingyao is one of the few places in China that still keeps their historical look as it was during the Ming and Qing dinasties. The city is pretty nice but it was also pretty crowded with groups of tourists following girls or guys with flags and speakers. The city has plenty of ancient government offices, residences, temples, banks, but in all of them you have a turnstile and someone to check tickets. So if you want to have a glimpse of “ancient life” in China you have to go and buy an overpriced ticket that allows you to enter to all those places in town. It’s not uncommon to pay to see any small thing in China, sometimes you pay at the gate of a place and then you pay again if you want to see something inside that place, and most of the time you pay to see pretty dull stuff. And most of the time, we found the interesting places just wandering around.

Anyway, our dilemma of paying or not paying the ticket to see local sights (except the tower that wasn’t including and the temples outside the old city) was partially solved when I got a used ticket. That meant that the ticket was good only for the sites that weren’t visited (which I had no clue). I had met an English guy who paid the ticket and had enough after entering to a third of the sites and after talking a while he gave me his old ticket.

So we decided to peek at one of the sites using the old ticket and then make our minds regarding buying maybe one or two new tickets. Of course it wasn’t worthwhile to pay the overpriced fee, but we were curious as if some of the sites were good. So we entered one by one and passed the tickets behind the guards’ backs just to see what the sites were and since the tickets were meant to be used only once, we entered to different places.

Most of them were more or less the same, a desk, chairs, sometimes beds… explanations in Chinese and very bad translations (computer translations, probably).In just 2 days, we walked every inch of the city, including biking to Shuanglin temple in the countryside. But our train tickets to Yinchuan, Ningxia  were hard to get and we stayed there three more days.

Among the limited variety of shops in Pingyao, which repeated themselves to the infinite, there were shoe shops that included a shoemaker making the shoes. We didn’t know to which extent this was really craft, or it was just a performance and the shoes were made in an industry. Anyway, Iohi was interested in learning about the shoes, so we asked Robert¹ , the guy from the hostel, if he knew someone who could teach her. He knew a shoemaker that worked in a close village and Robert volunteered to give us bikes (for free!) and come with us and translate. The shoemaker was a really funny guy who knew a couple of words of every language, he took picture with us and all his family and took our postal addresses to send us ehh, well, I don’t have any idea what he wants to send us. Anyway, he explained the whole process, and we saw the only four workers he had and the shoes were really handmade! However, he said that Iohi wouldn’t be able to learn the skills of shoo making so quickly, that’ll take at least 10 days. But she had the chance to know about materials and techniques and get acquainted with their art of shoemaking. And the whole tour ended with me buying a pair of very nice shoes (but very uncomfortable that I threw a week later) and inviting Robert for lunch to his favorite place: Dico’s, a kind of Chinese KFC.

Some days later, we finally got our tickets, but we had to travel to the province capital, Taiyuan, where we spent the afternoon with a bunch of girls who were thrilled to have the chance to speak English…

The Shapotou fiasco

Our idea was to get to Qinghai province, a mountainous area on the north of Tibet, and to travel south getting to the west of Sichuan province, on the east of Tibet. Already in Pingyao, we started to read about the west of Sichuan being closed for foreigners because of demonstrations and Tibetan unrest.

Tibetan populations extend outside the Tibet (Tibetan Autonomous Region), where you need a special permit to enter and some kind of tour, but in fact there are more Tibetans in Qinghai and in Sichuan provinces than in the Tibetan Autonomous Region. According to what I know, a monk in Aba, Sichuan set himself on fire and a series of demonstrations started there and spread to other areas of Sichuan. We decided to head to Qinghai anyway, and to give it a try. Since we wanted to cut the travel, we traveled first to Yinchuan in Ningxia province and wanted to do the only thing that seems to be interesting there, going to Shapotou, some sort of park on the fringes of the Tengger Desert.

The travel to Ningxia was very impressive and we saw from the train an incredible landscape of red desert mixed with very green areas. However, Ningxia’s capital, Yinchuan was very unimpressive, and since one day before the train trip we discovered that the only hostel in Yinchuan didn’t accept foreigners anymore (hotels and hostels in China need a special permit to accept foreigners), we decided to skip the city and travel directly to Shapotou.

It took us around one hour just to find the bus station, and then we took the 3 hours bus to Zhongwei, the nearest city to Shapotou. We arrived around midday, and then we waited other hour until the bus to Shapotou was filled.

We had the fantastic idea to sleep there, (a fantastic idea inspired by the lonely planet guide). We arrived after one hour drive, and we found ourselves in some kind of Dessert Disneyland. It was like the idea of a water park, but with the attractions of the sand dunes. So, who can think of sleeping in a water park? It was the same there, we arrived at the only guesthouse, and they looked at us like we were Martians. I guess the place was booked for groups or something like that, and I think we were the only human beings who thought about going to sleep there by themselves. We were stuck there, we had already paid the expensive ticket to enter to the place and we begged for a place to sleep.

They convinced us to go to the north gate, in the upper part across a gigantic dune, where they claimed there was a hotel. A worker at the place persuaded us to pay for some kind of transport that with his broken English was impossible to understand. Then he guided us to a place were our camels were waiting! We rode the camels with all our bag and we got to the top. There was nothing there, no hotel, no hostel, no guesthouse, nada. We asked everyone around but there was no accommodation there, we couldn’t believe it.

We sat in a kiosk completely shocked, it was around 4 and we didn’t have lunch, but there wasn’t even a restaurant there. And we even missed the last bus to get the hell out of there and continue our journey to Qinghai.

I guess the lady from the kiosk was clever enough to understand the situation (and our faces) even without understanding a word in English. She gave us fruits and candies and didn’t let me buy her water; she filled our bottles with boiled water instead. Finally, she found us a ride with an employees minibus and took us to the train station.

However, we were stuck again, the train was full.

We stayed one night in one cheap hotel without windows (that hotels in Qinghai towns will have made it look as 5 stars later) and we walked through the town answering the repetitive hellouu hellouu. But most of the day we just sat in a café until midnight, when we caught our train to Xining, Qinghai.

More pictures of Ninxia province.

More pictures of Shanxi province.

1. Robert is the English name of the guy, but he was Chinese. Many Chinese people that deal with westerners just pick an English name (or word, I met some woman who called herself Happy)

  

Our first week in China

Now I'm hearing about demonstrations and a train and dead people in China, but I'm uninformed not because of the The Great Firewall but because of the the slow connections of the hostels. I'll post what happened more than a month ago, and I'll try to understand what's going on now...

So Beijing woke up

So Beijing woke up. At 6am the streets started to pack with people, cars, bikes, motorbikes. It took us a while to understand where, in this huge city, we were, but we managed to find the hostel some people in U.B. recommended us. It resulted to be a very nice place in Xicheng district, near the Houhai lake and Nanluoguxiang alley, one of the most young chic streets.

It was one of the nicest areas we saw, there were a few parks around the lakes where Chinese people were doing exercise or playing some sort of badminton, children were running around, women were dancing Chinese folk songs, and a bunch of middle age to old guys were jumping into the lake and swimming.

The post Olympic Beijing is a much modern city than the city I knew 7 years ago. Part of the city has been completely rebuilt. And now you see toilets everywhere, I guess to prevent hordes of tourists from peeing in the alleys during the Olympic Games.

When I was in the city last time -it was one of my last destinations, I remember to be craving for coffee and ice-cream, and having a hard time to find them. Now there are international brands and chains everywhere, and to find coffee and ice-cream is as hard as finding rice. In general lines, the city is meant to be easy to navigate, there are big signs everywhere also in English with street names or pointing tourist spots and the cardinal directions, and the main streets are designed following the exact cardinal points (but this we have to thank to the Ming dynasty, I think).

I heard people complaining that Beijing is not what it was, that it’s now a Chinese Disneyland. I don’t agree, I liked the old Beijing, and I like the new Beijing.

On the downside, many hutongs, the small alleys in the traditional neighborhoods, were replaced by modern buildings, malls, banks. Most of those neighborhoods lacked plumbing, and most people were happy to get compensation and move the hell out of there, but many of those alleys had hundreds of years, and they could also improve the plumbing without demolishing the whole place.  I’m reading a fantastic book about China called Oracle Bones by Peter Hessler. The author is a journalist from US, who lives in Beijing since 1999 and recounts his experiences, as an English teacher and as a journalist. I recommend this book to whoever wants to try to understand something so vast and huge as the Chinese culture. Anyway, the book has a chapter about the hutongs, and tells about the order of demolition of a hutong in 2000 even though the hutong supposed to be an historic relic even  “older than the United States of America”. If the pace of demolition was fast at that time, I can’t imagine what China did with Beijing towards the 2008 to “deserve” the Games, a real plastic surgery.

It’s really a shame that old buildings were destroyed, but at least I think that maybe now, maybe a late though, the city is understanding a little more what makes Beijing special. We saw a lot of construction sites where they were building traditional Chinese buildings, for example, and we were in an area which had the traditional hutongs with a lot of signs that asked to protect the old Beijing.

Anyway, we spent 3 days just waling and biking around. We put certain places as objectives to ourselves, just to ignore them when we found something more interesting on the way. We were like moths distracted by any bright light, but we enjoyed more the distractions than the actual objectives.

Postcards!

 We spend a lot of time just eating, we wanted to try everything everywhere, and we found out that we could split food in three categories: amazing, tasteless and awful. So we fought to get as many of the dishes from the first category, but no matter what the taste is, food almost always surprises you: what seems sweet is salty, what seems hot is cold, what seems strange is something known.

The best soup ever!

Stinking tofu! puahh

By that time, China was warming up for the summer break vacations and many of the tourist spots were already packed with thousands and thousands of Chinese. So we avoided the more or less closed sights, but we did enjoy the classic food market (I guess you’ve seen pictures from any person who traveled to Beijing) and the even more classic Beijing duck, we walked through the silent hutongs and we visited the average 798 art district, but basically we just enjoyed the city. We had the chance to meet our friends from Mongolia for beers in Nanluoguxiang alley and to meet up with our Israeli friend atthe shining Sanlitun bar street in Chaoyang  district.

Biking on the hutongs

And after 4 days in the civilization we decided to make an adventurous side trip.

Great Wall

Just FYI, there isn’t such thing as The Great Wall, there are a lot of Walls built by different dynasties with different materials to protect themselves against different invaders. Now many of the Walls are invaded with tourists and vendors of sweets and Coca Cola and women that chase you while they yell postcards and put them inside your face. So many hostels sell you trips to go to less accessible parts of the Walls, which means less people and less vendors.

We went far with the part of less accessibility, we read in a forum about a part of the Wall called Jiankou Wall which is unexploited and not far from Beijing, but there’s no public transport to that place, and parts of the Wall are literally falling apart, I mean pieces of rock fall while you walk.

We took a bus from Beijing to Huairo, an ugly city which seems as the continuation of the furthest and ugliest part of Beijing. From there we couldn’t find buses that would drive us closer to our destination and we had to take a taxi. So after 1/2 hour bargaining we got to a convenient price and we started going.

The concrete and the buildings gave place gradually to more and more rivers and green and cultivated lands. Suddenly the road started to go up and down on the mountains and we continued going and going for more than 2 hours. And it already seemed too much and the driver started to call and ask people around until he turned around and we drove back one hour to take the right turn. He was so ashamed that he stopped in kiosk to buy as mineral water.

We finally arrived to Zhao's guesthouse at Xizhazi village, the closest village to Jiankou Wall. It was a small village surrounded by mountains and corn fields. The guesthouse was managed by a young family and besides us only a young Chinese couple was staying there.

We only took small backpacks to the village and our plan was roughly to start walking from the nearest part of the Wall on the next morning until we get to a more transited area and take a bus to Beijing from there.

The woman of the family, Zhao's wife, seemed to be in charge of talking with the foreigners and I tried to explain her our plan and ask for a map using simple English words and our magical Chinese phrase book. She answered us back using the translator of her mobile phone; we got a schematic map of the Wall written in Chinese and of the size of a credit card, and we understood that it will take around 7 hours walking until the point where we could take a bus, the part of the wall called Mutianyu. The afternoon we got there we just explored the surroundings and we prepared boiled water for the following day.

We woke up around 6:30 and there was a drizzle which made us start to doubt our plan of 7 hours walking. When we finished breakfast, the day was still very cloudy and humid but the rain stopped and we understood from the Zhao’s wife that there won’t be heavy raining and that it’ll be ok.

So we walked half an hour between the thick vegetation until we got to the Wall. In order to only start our trek, we had to climb a part of the wall which consisted of destroyed stairs (I guess) which become with time a 70 degree floor of rocks sticking out of the surface. I said to Iohi, “Don’t worry this should be the ruined part we heard about”.

 This came out to be one of the easiest parts of the trek along the wall. For 6 hours we walked completely alone, up and down, up and down, we had to climb with legs and hands in many parts, we walked over falling stones, we crawled into holes/doors and we jump from roofs, we walked down on surfaces so stepped that we had to grab from the sides.

Then suddenly we found ourselves in a refurbished area: all the tiles are in their place, there are signs, and refreshment stalls! We got to Mutianyu Wall! We started to see tourists everywhere; we were completely worn out and covered in sweat and around us many Europeans with leather shoes and their new clothes. Around one hour more, we found a cable car –yes, we deserved it. And we went down to an area full of shops, restaurants, and the bus stop to Beijing!

And back to Beijing –some successful negotiations

So we returned to the same hostel and Iohi found out that she forgot her Shoresh (Source) new sandals in the village’s guesthouse. For the next two days she conducted diplomatic negotiations to get her sandals back. She made the hostel workers to call the woman from the village’s guesthouse several times and discussed options that included making a whole day bus trip just to take them. She finally acceded to ship the sandals after a money bank transference, and shortly before we left, we won back the sandals!

Those days we were fed up with the lack of usb in the internet café, we walked around with the camera from internet café to internet café trying to download the pictures without success until we made the drastic decision of just buying a computer. So we went to the famous Zhongguancun District, which has several buildings full of computer and telephone shops. I did the proper research and we decided to buy an Asus so we had to look only for an official Asus vendor. Once we found it and found the computer, we started a new round of successful negotiations this time through Google translator, which ended in the computer I’m using now.

 From Beijing, with the new computer and the Shoresh sandals, we took a sleeper train to Pingyao, a rather touristy place but, anyway, a cute and small old city, in Shanxi province.