Once upon a time in India: From Kutch to Bombay

Kutch district, Gujarat

Again, after traveling all night we arrived too early, but here early was 9am. It was sunny and hot and dusty as only a desert can be. We woke up the workers at two hotels that we checked (and didn't like), we walked through the yet closed market and we finally arrived at the very cozy Shiv hotel. Our attempts to get a breakfast before 11:30 were in vain and we settled for some coffee at the hotel.

Kutch District is almost an island, it's surrounded by the Gulf of Kachchh and the Arabian Sea in south and west, while northern and eastern parts are surrounded by seasonal wetlands, and it was historically pretty cut off from the rest of India. The result is that there are lots of different communities that still keep their traditions: clothes, customs, crafts.

The different tribes that live in small villages around Bhuj and they are famous for their handicrafts, specially leather works, weaving, embroidery and pottery are quite disconnected from each other and from Bhuj so we arranged an autorickshaw tour with the curator of the Aina Mahal (Old Palace) to visit them.

This is when I went native

On the next day our driver picked us up on the morning. He spoke a very basic English but was a cool guy and resulted to be a very enthusiastic photographer; he took us lots of pictures on his own initiative and now and then he would told us Look! Look at that! Take a picture! He drove us to some of the villages, to a dam in the middle of nowhere where we swam, we visited a temple that had people living there and a 106 years old woman. (We didn't dare to take a picture, but our driver had the camera at that time and took one!)

Check the mirrors

But at the end of the day, the tour showed a pretty sad state of affairs at the villages: even though the pieces they do were hand made, most of them looked mass produced. In fact, most of the excruciating tasks that Kutchies perform by hand could be easily done with a machine without loosing much. Most of the traditional techniques that we saw were just people sitting and cutting and sowing and that was pretty much it. And they had too many pieces already done, and then in some places when we arrived Kutchies would start suddenly doing as if they were working.

We spend two days in Bhuj and then we traveled to Mandavi, still in Kutch district. Mandavi is a small port city located where the Rukmavati river meets the Gulf of Kachchh. Both shores of the river are a huge and impressive shipbuilding yard. It's just amazing to see hundreds of men like tiny ants working, hammering, cutting wood, that is, building these huge wooden boats completely by hand.

We stayed at a strange hotel that once was a hospital, but don't think of a white sterile place, it was a comfortable place ran by a very efficient guy who gave us maps and recommendations about the city. We also had the best food of India there: fish and prawns curry, authentic Gujarati thalis, the sweetest pineapples and fresh coconuts. And we finally saw the sea while we relaxed at the exclusive and almost empty beach of Vijay Vilas Palace.

The morning before we left, we caught the dawn at shipbuilding yard and we rode bikes until Iohi had a flat tire. We learned there that every kiosk has a guy who fixes punctures. He took out the inner tube of the tire, checked with water where the puncture was and put a sticker over it. A sailor who almost did not speak English served as translator there and got us some teas. He was thrilled that he had something to do on his day off and invited us very persuasively to eat extremely sweet Indian sweets at his place and then he attached to us as a guide for the rest of the morning.

At midday we traveled back to Bhuj where we finally decide to do some shopping and buy some souvenirs. Unluckily it was Sunday and absolutely everything was closed, we had completely lost the track of the days.

Bhuj to Mumbai

This time we took our last night train with RAC –reservation against cancellation. The booking system in India is quite complex but basically you can have a place, that is a bed, or you can be in wait list until some place is available (or not), or you can have a RAC which is a hybrid state. In each car there is a bed that can be transformed into two seats and the RAC holders have those seats unless there are free places. There are always many cancellations and the times we bought a RAC, it became a regular place before we boarded the train. It wasn't the case this time, and we had a 17 hours ride! And for the first hours it seemed that we were going to spend the 17 hours sitting in too small benches! However, there was a place for an 8 hours span, so we were relieved and we could sleep there.

Mumbai, previously known as Bombay

Mumbai was the only big city in India that we found pleasant for real. It's clean, less noisy, and even though it was hot, there are plenty of trees and shadow, besides, there are lots of good places to eat Indian food and not crappy fake tourist food. The drawbacks are that it was much more expensive than everywhere else: for the accommodation we paid a sum with an extra zero; and also the city is so huge that we had to struggle with taxis to get to the places we wanted.

The Faloodas were actually pretty good

And that was pretty much it, we sneaked in the 5-stars Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, where all the celebrities stay when they are in Mumbay, we wandered at the markets and at the quiet alleys of Kotachiwadi, and we quite enjoyed the food...

And these last weeks at Rajasthan, Gujarat and Mumbai were kind of a happy ending for India... (it's not that the beginning was so terrible but anyway, if you don't know what I mean see the first two posts of India)...

Well, I had a tough time picking pictures, you should definitely check them in Iohi's picasa

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)

  

From Mongolia Countryside to Beijing

We’re already a month in China. Now we’re in Kanding, Sichuan, and we've been for a looong time without internet connection. But for now, I’ll just tell about the last days in Mongolia and how we got to Beijing.

From Hot Springs to White Lake – and a heart attack?

So we quickly flew from the scene of the crime (see the previous post) and we headed to the Hot Springs, where we had a small dose of civilization and we even took a shower (after 8 days!). We only stopped to see the completely dry falls of Orkhon, to push the van when it got stuck in the mud (twice), to wait for petrol provided by the other group’s van and to wait the driver called his wife (several times).

So we arrived at the Hot Springs, we had a relaxed time with beers and hot thermal water and we got drunk playing cards till late.

On the morning we left the ger guesthouse complex and we had some more hours of the only Mongolian tape we had (and of course many stops to call the driver’s wife). Around midday we entered into a small town to buy food -a chance to find another tape!

So we entered to a closed market with no electricity where our guide chose in the almost complete darkness not so rotten vegetables.

And then on the open market that was in the back, she helped us to pick some two new tapes!

We continued our journey by van and when we played the tape, we discovered that the new tapes sounded almost the same as the previous one!

On the afternoon we arrived to the White Lake National Park, which wasn’t nearly as beautiful as the previous places. The national park title only provided a guard at the entrance of the valley, electricity, more rubbish, a couple of restaurants and a sense of fakeness which we didn’t in the previous places we were.

We slept there and next day on the morning we see our cheerful driver with the face contorted with pain. Our guide translates to us that he has pains in the chest but that his friends are coming with some “medicine”.

Teresa, a nurse, assumed that our overweighted heavy drinker driver is having a heart attack. She explained to our guide that he should take a small dose of aspirin and if it helps it means that he’s having a heart attack and he must run to the hospital. But by the time we asked around and managed to find aspirins, the driver’s friends already gave him the “medicine” and he felt better.

Teresa assumed that he was feeling better because he relaxed and moved less. So after explaining again to our guide what to do if he feels bad again, we went for a walk. When we returned, we heard from our guide that he was really thankful for our help and that he took “our medicine” and he OK now

Teresa tried to explain her again that he must go to the hospital, while our guide explained to her that Mongolian people are tough and they don’t need to go to the hospital. Anyway he was back to normality and to drinking for the rest of the trip.

A couple of raining days later, we left the place stopping in an unimpressive crater of a volcano.

Karakorum and Semi Gobi – the way back to the city

After the white lake we started our way back to UB (Ulan Bator), spending one night near Karakorum and the last one in a family ger in the Semi Gobi desert.

We politely refused to sleep near a very artificial ger guesthouse that surrounded a Big Rock (that I forgot the name, but there you should throw stones over it to get rich or something like that). And we passed through very nice small valleys where we tried to persuade the driver to stop. He made up some excuses and we drove until he had reception for the phone. Even though it was near the city, the place was very nice and clean and we found a nice spot between two hills. There were no trees around and we lit a fire the Mongolian way, with shit! While some of us set the tents up, others pick dried yak dung until we had a huge pile of shit. It really worked and we made a huge fire that inspired entrepreneur ideas to some of the guys, namely, start selling shit!

On the morning we entered to Karakorum, the old capital of Mongolia founded by Genghis Khan himself. However, it’s dirty and ugly as most Mongolian cities and the only things remaining from ancient times are some stone turtles at the corners of the city. Besides that, the only sight around is a penis statue and a temple complex.

So after visiting the sights we headed to the north part of the Gobi desert, called the Semi Gobi. The Semi Gobi is the area in Mongolia where steppes and desert are mixed; and grass gives place to sand dunes.

The view was astounding but since it was midday and around 40^o C, I decided to take a nap and by the time I woke up, there was a storm!

We rode camels on the evening when the sky was clear again and the twilight sun faced the moon for a couple of hours. We rode the camels until we got to wet sand dunes that popped in the middle of the grass and then we came back to the gers.

Taken by Duncan

Next morning we took “the group picture” and we headed back to UB, exhausted, dirty and extremely happy.

Crossing the border China– a stupid way

After spending a night in UB, we took a 12 hour night train to Zamyin Uud, a town in the Mongolian side of the Chinese-Mongolian border. I guess there are two ways to cross the border: the wise way and the stupid way. The advantage of the stupid way is that it gave material to write.

There are international trains that go straight from UB to Beijing three times a week and they are all either 2^nd class, 2^nd class plus, or 1^st class. With these trains, you arrive to border in 12 hours, you wait in your comfortable cabin for like 5 hours and then 12 hours later (or so) you get to Beijing, China.

So we did it the stupid way, which supposed to be cheaper and faster. This way, instead taking an international train - which is more expensive only because it crosses the border - you can take a 3^rd class train that brings you to the Mongolian side of the border. Then you cross the border by jeep and take either a bus or another train in the Chinese side.

So we took our train to Zamyin Uud, which was fine at all, and we arrived on the morning to a dusty train station in an area of desert, which resembled to the stations in American westerns (but without the romanticism). We got outside by walking between the rails and passing through a broken part of the fence where we looked for a taxi, that is a jeep.

The actual border is really close, but the entrance is only allowed to vehicles. After bargaining the relatively high price, which remained pretty high for one kilometer, we jumped in.

He drove us near the border and started to call by phone and drive around and back and forward and stops and calls until one hour later we finally returned to the place where we started and he left the jeep again. The doors didn’t open and we went out of the car from the front seat, and started to look for another jeep. We walked around for 15 minutes not knowing what to do. The same driver saw us and point to another jeep that had already other two passengers, two Mongolian women. This time we headed straight to the end of the queue.

It took hours to move a meter! Then we got the first control where we stand for half and hour and then again to the jeep, to a jam as terrible as the previous one and then the second control. It took around 7 hours under the heat of the desert.

When we finally crossed to Erlian in China, we found out that we would have to wait until 1am to take a train in the direction of Beijing. We checked in the bus station and we found an overpriced “sleeper bus” to Beijing. A sleeper bus, is like regular bus, just that the seats are removed and replaced by two-berth beds.

The bus left us somewhere in Beijing at 4am. Beijing is a very lively city, and shops and cafes open early and close late, but in the middle of the week at 4am, at least on that area, everything was closed. Luckily, a 24 hours McDonalds received us, and we drank bad coffee until the amazing city of Beijing woke up.