17 - 20 March: 'Bright-lights, good friends and finding that first cup of green tea in Hong Kong'
We were lucky to start our trip in the warmth of a friend's home in Hong Kong: Lucy helped us find our bearings and fed us well while her darling little daughters entertained us. It was a comfortable way to ease into the beginning of our journey. We spent a couple of days exploring the bright lights among the busy Hong Kong highrises and night markets..thirsty work and Rejane was eager to find some Chinese green tea which we assumed we'd be drinking by the litre, like we did chai in India. However, China has moved on from street-side tea stalls and most people have tea with their meals in sit down restaurants. Once we ready for dinner, we found a busy looking eatery and sat down delighted to find a jug of warm tea on the table. Rejane promptly poured herself a cup and we congratulated ourselves on having found how to get a cup of tea while out and about in China. However, while the green tea anti-oxidants revived us, we noticed the other patrons using said tea to wash their rice bowls before eating...well wouldn't you know, it seems that tea is used for a lot more than just drinking in China...so there it was, our first faux pas - drinking the washing up water!
21 March (morning): 'Train into mainland China and experiencing a real 'China Mall' in Shenzhen '
Leaving the comfort Lucy's place, we crossed over into the Mainland at Shenzhen, a Free Economic Zone - if you ever wanted to experience the 'real 'China Mall (I know some of you are getting veeerrrryy excited right now) and wanted to shop in bulk till you dropped, this is it! Needless to say we were glad of the experience but equally glad we were holding overnight train tickets to Guilin where we would go onto Yangshuo, known to the Chinese as the most beautiful place in China.
21 March (evening): Overnight on the comfy, very clean Chinese long-distance rail
22 - 25 March: 'Exploring Yangshuo, regarded by most Chinese as the most beautiful place in China'
Yangshou is surrounded by dramatic karst outcrops and with a river running through pretty farming villages, it is a popular local tourist destination. We happily observed that the explosive Chinese tourist market of recent years has made foreigners insignificant in tourist hotspot areas, and in complete contrast to India, we can move along peacefully being thoroughly ignored by touts (Chinese tourists have a lot more money to spend than a couple of ragtag backpackers). So of course we spent the next few days entertainingly as voyeurs observing Chinese tourists on their holidays taking boat rides on contraptions that allow boats to move gently upstream over white water rapids (the Chinese are very clever!) and taking posed wedding pictures ala Claremont Gardens. Another treat in Yangshuo was seeing the Light Show, an outdoor theatre performance by the Director of the Beijing Olympics opening and closing ceremonies, it has been going for 10 years and has played to packed audiences of 1000s of people a night - it was just awesome (curiously the audiences, who ooh and aah throughout the show are not big on clapping. The Chinese lack of bursting into applause or giving any kind of applause at all at shows was disconcertingly confirmed later in our travels, feeling sorry for the performers at shows we've started to clap very enthusiastically, earning ourselves a few more strange looks, which we are certainly not short on.
25 - 28 March: 'Enjoying the amazing craftsmanship in over 100 nail-less 'Wind and Rain' bridges in Chengyang while trying to buy a tea-house'
In Chengyang village the millennia old craftsmanship of bridge-building is stunning not only in the completely nail-less engineering feats that they are but also in the rendering of minute attention to detail and aesthetics. Still on our mission to find good China tea, we tried a proper tea house this time and were treated to the locally grown, just harvested, spring crop, one of the best of the season. After experiencing the charmingly complicated ceremony of brewing the tea just right, we splashed out for a bag of our own. Because it was loose-leaf - of course - we would need a tea strainer to prepare the tea at our hotel so we asked the tea house owner about how to say 'tea strainer' in Chinese. She informed us that we had to ask for a 'chalou'..we promptly went around to the local tea shops asking for a chalou but all we got were (more than our usual quota of) strange looks ... a couple of days later we made an English speaking Chinese friend and complained about how hard it was to find a tea strainer in China where everyone drank loose-leaf tea, she giggled and said that we had been asking for an chaLOU (uptone) which is a tea-house instead of a 'downtone' CHAlou which would be the tea-strainer (or, well, maybe it was the other way around mmmm) - anyway, anyway, the cross-eyed looks from the Chengyang village shopkeepers who were fresh out of tea-houses for sale, now made sense somewhat...will there be no end to our China tea faux pas?
28 March: Overnight train to Kunming
28 - 31 March: Enjoying the balmy Kunming Spring weather while being thoroughly entertained in Green Lake park
After the poor show of spring weather in the more northerly areas we'd come from, we were happy to arrive in sunny Kunming, also the first proper Chinese city that we were to experience. After dropping our backpacks at the hostel, we took a meander around, as we usually do, on arriving in a new place and were unprepared for the extravaganza that is the weekend dance and singing entertainment in Green Lake park...packed with families all participating in various synchronized dancing and high-pitched singing activities... anyone harbouring stereotypes of a boring, controlled communist society, needs to experience the crazy exuberance of these weekend park activities, for a sample, take a look further down at the video of the geriatric, Chinese flag waving, transvestite who drew a large gawking and obviously appreciative audience...although, again, no applause (except for lots from us, of course). We later found, by complete co-incidence, this newspaper story about the crazy old guy and why he does this performance:
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/photo/2010-10/13/content_11401859.htm
31 - 2 April: Being surprised at the extent of the tourist-related construction boom in Puzhehei, a little town made famous by a TV programme, kinda like the eponymous Orkney Snorkney
Puzhehei was once a quiet village town, built around a pretty lake that is now beginning to look a little like a Langebaan Mykonos resort (sans the white paint). Puzhehei is currently in enthusiastic hotel construction mode throughout the village since a single Chinese Travel TV programme did an episode on it a few months ago leading to an influx of tens of thousands of Chinese tourists ...it certainly was interesting to see just how full on the Chinese take opportunity when it knocks, no messing around...
2 - 6 April Late-night barbecues and new Chinese friends in the charming old town of Jianshui
Having been on the move for the past 2 weeks, we were keen to find a good chill out place for a few days. Jianshui, a cobble-street, ornate wooden building town was just the place. In contrast to India, the local Chinese backpacker market is booming and we made a few great friends. Jianshui is famous for street barbecues, where you choose your meat or vegetable kebabs and they are braaied on the spot, delicious (but hold back on some of that chilli!)...with a chinese-english phrase book, dictionary mobile apps, a little English on that side, a (very) little Chinese on our side, we spent many hours into the night getting to know our new friends. The local markets in Jianshui were also interesting where you can buy beautifully coiffured dogs (the Chinese spend a lot of money dressing and making up their dogs), turtles, frogs, all kinds of fish, cats, dogs also for eating, any kind of electronics, clothes, handicrafts...
6 April - 9 April Sunrise over the rice terraces of Yuanyang
The rice terraces of Yuanyang are just beautiful and at sunrise and sunset, the light over the rice field water pools, which are yet to be planted for the season, are a treat. Chinese society, including the farming communities, is quickly moving into middle class life and farmers, like these, are fast educating their children to move on from peasant life. Rice terrace farming won't be easy to mechanise once the labour pool has moved onto office jobs and it is hard to see how these scenes can be much longer for this world. We also spent a couple of nights in nearby Shengcun village where it was market day with surrounding minority villagers streaming in to sell their array of interesting produce.
9 April: Very comfortable overnight sleeper bus to the tropical area of Xishuangbanna bordered by Thailand and Laos
While on the move to Xishuangbanna we stopped in for a meal at a typical local eatery where, for R20 you get a very large bowl of rice that you top with a range of meat and vegetable stews, buffet style. You are allowed 4 or 5 toppings but that day our tummies were feeling a little tender so we opted for just one topping each. Well the Mama of the restaurant was not having it, she starting scolding us in Chinese and gesticulating wildly, we of course had no idea what she was on about and just smiled while chewing on our meal. In exasperation she grabbed a pen and wrote something down in Chinese characters (in China there are many mutually incomprehensible dialects spoken but the written language is standardised, even for Japanese people for whom it is hard to speak and understand Chinese, the written characters are similar.) Which is why, we may not be able to understand the buffet topping wheedling mama, we surely should understand her writing, we of course did not and were none the wiser about what we'd done to offend her, she just threw up her hands as we walked out). We took a picture of what she'd written down and sent it to one of our new English speaking Chinese friends who confirmed that she just wanted us to take our full quota of toppings included in the price). We had to pass through that bus station again a few days later and (luckily) our appetites had returned because the mama was thrilled to have another shot at feeding us and piled us with far more than the requisite toppings this time (she didn't bother with trying to communicate and just scooped food into our plates until we began to pop some blood vessels). The only analogy I can think of with the writing being the same characters regardless of dialect is that our numbers would written the same regardless of whether you were English, French, Italian, Afrikaans or whatever and had different pronunciations for each number.
10 April - 16 April: Accepting and sharing water-festival blessings while running around like 7 year olds with waterguns
The water festival in Jinghong, Xishuangbanna - this was the highlight so far! A Buddhist new year festival where everyone washes away the bad luck of the past year...foreigners who stand out (like Dave) get special attention and thousands of people (adults, not kids - it's too crazy for the kids)..run around laughing and squealing, armed with waterguns, buckets and anything that will hold water, completely drenching one another all day. It was more belly aching laughter fun than we've had since at least the 3rd grade. (checkout the videos :)
16 April: The villages around Xishuangbanna (Menghai)
After Jinghong's crazy running around, we were keen for some authentic village exploration. We tried the villages around the Xishuangbanna area but alas (for us, the tourist), many have moved on from the picturesque old traditional buildings to more comfortable (for the residents) modern houses. So we moved on, with the advice of chinese friends, to see a village still preserving traditional life (probably for the tourists income it generates) to a village called Wengding
17 April - 19 April: Wengding Village, homestay with traditional Wu people
Wengding, home to the Wu people is lovely. The traditional houses interesting to experience but it is surrounded by nearby villages that are too moving into more modern construction. While it is fairly obvious that the thatched roof, wooden building, compost toilet village, albeit anachronistic, is being preserved for the tourist market, it is still a lived in village and we were appreciative of being afforded the experience and warm family hospitality of our homestay.
20 April - 25 April: Nightclubs and Cooking lessons in the backpacker town of Dali
In Dali we met up with some of the friends we'd made in Jianshui and enjoyed the party but laidback atmosphere of (the now mostly Chinese backpacker) town of Dali. With rice wine flowing and great DJs, the nightclubs make for a good night out and Dave made sure to introduce some ass-shaking African dance move to the amused Chinese crowds (although he represented our continent well, alas still no applause). Rejane got some wonderful Chinese cooking lessons from one of our new friends so you guys are in for a treat when we get back home :)
25 April to today: Dumpling soup and warm yak milk while acclimatising to the 3300m elevation of Shangri-la
As we write this blog, we are huddled around a wood-burning fire stove eating dumplings and drinking warm yak milk while acclimatising to the 3300m elevation in Shangri-la before heading off to a 7 day hike around Snow Mountain which is dotted with ethnically Tibetan villages...that for the next blog...
We were lucky to start our trip in the warmth of a friend's home in Hong Kong: Lucy helped us find our bearings and fed us well while her darling little daughters entertained us. It was a comfortable way to ease into the beginning of our journey. We spent a couple of days exploring the bright lights among the busy Hong Kong highrises and night markets..thirsty work and Rejane was eager to find some Chinese green tea which we assumed we'd be drinking by the litre, like we did chai in India. However, China has moved on from street-side tea stalls and most people have tea with their meals in sit down restaurants. Once we ready for dinner, we found a busy looking eatery and sat down delighted to find a jug of warm tea on the table. Rejane promptly poured herself a cup and we congratulated ourselves on having found how to get a cup of tea while out and about in China. However, while the green tea anti-oxidants revived us, we noticed the other patrons using said tea to wash their rice bowls before eating...well wouldn't you know, it seems that tea is used for a lot more than just drinking in China...so there it was, our first faux pas - drinking the washing up water!
21 March (morning): 'Train into mainland China and experiencing a real 'China Mall' in Shenzhen '
Leaving the comfort Lucy's place, we crossed over into the Mainland at Shenzhen, a Free Economic Zone - if you ever wanted to experience the 'real 'China Mall (I know some of you are getting veeerrrryy excited right now) and wanted to shop in bulk till you dropped, this is it! Needless to say we were glad of the experience but equally glad we were holding overnight train tickets to Guilin where we would go onto Yangshuo, known to the Chinese as the most beautiful place in China.
21 March (evening): Overnight on the comfy, very clean Chinese long-distance rail
Yangshou is surrounded by dramatic karst outcrops and with a river running through pretty farming villages, it is a popular local tourist destination. We happily observed that the explosive Chinese tourist market of recent years has made foreigners insignificant in tourist hotspot areas, and in complete contrast to India, we can move along peacefully being thoroughly ignored by touts (Chinese tourists have a lot more money to spend than a couple of ragtag backpackers). So of course we spent the next few days entertainingly as voyeurs observing Chinese tourists on their holidays taking boat rides on contraptions that allow boats to move gently upstream over white water rapids (the Chinese are very clever!) and taking posed wedding pictures ala Claremont Gardens. Another treat in Yangshuo was seeing the Light Show, an outdoor theatre performance by the Director of the Beijing Olympics opening and closing ceremonies, it has been going for 10 years and has played to packed audiences of 1000s of people a night - it was just awesome (curiously the audiences, who ooh and aah throughout the show are not big on clapping. The Chinese lack of bursting into applause or giving any kind of applause at all at shows was disconcertingly confirmed later in our travels, feeling sorry for the performers at shows we've started to clap very enthusiastically, earning ourselves a few more strange looks, which we are certainly not short on.
25 - 28 March: 'Enjoying the amazing craftsmanship in over 100 nail-less 'Wind and Rain' bridges in Chengyang while trying to buy a tea-house'
In Chengyang village the millennia old craftsmanship of bridge-building is stunning not only in the completely nail-less engineering feats that they are but also in the rendering of minute attention to detail and aesthetics. Still on our mission to find good China tea, we tried a proper tea house this time and were treated to the locally grown, just harvested, spring crop, one of the best of the season. After experiencing the charmingly complicated ceremony of brewing the tea just right, we splashed out for a bag of our own. Because it was loose-leaf - of course - we would need a tea strainer to prepare the tea at our hotel so we asked the tea house owner about how to say 'tea strainer' in Chinese. She informed us that we had to ask for a 'chalou'..we promptly went around to the local tea shops asking for a chalou but all we got were (more than our usual quota of) strange looks ... a couple of days later we made an English speaking Chinese friend and complained about how hard it was to find a tea strainer in China where everyone drank loose-leaf tea, she giggled and said that we had been asking for an chaLOU (uptone) which is a tea-house instead of a 'downtone' CHAlou which would be the tea-strainer (or, well, maybe it was the other way around mmmm) - anyway, anyway, the cross-eyed looks from the Chengyang village shopkeepers who were fresh out of tea-houses for sale, now made sense somewhat...will there be no end to our China tea faux pas?
28 March: Overnight train to Kunming
28 - 31 March: Enjoying the balmy Kunming Spring weather while being thoroughly entertained in Green Lake park
After the poor show of spring weather in the more northerly areas we'd come from, we were happy to arrive in sunny Kunming, also the first proper Chinese city that we were to experience. After dropping our backpacks at the hostel, we took a meander around, as we usually do, on arriving in a new place and were unprepared for the extravaganza that is the weekend dance and singing entertainment in Green Lake park...packed with families all participating in various synchronized dancing and high-pitched singing activities... anyone harbouring stereotypes of a boring, controlled communist society, needs to experience the crazy exuberance of these weekend park activities, for a sample, take a look further down at the video of the geriatric, Chinese flag waving, transvestite who drew a large gawking and obviously appreciative audience...although, again, no applause (except for lots from us, of course). We later found, by complete co-incidence, this newspaper story about the crazy old guy and why he does this performance:
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/photo/2010-10/13/content_11401859.htm
 |
| Blind maseuses |
31 - 2 April: Being surprised at the extent of the tourist-related construction boom in Puzhehei, a little town made famous by a TV programme, kinda like the eponymous Orkney Snorkney
Puzhehei was once a quiet village town, built around a pretty lake that is now beginning to look a little like a Langebaan Mykonos resort (sans the white paint). Puzhehei is currently in enthusiastic hotel construction mode throughout the village since a single Chinese Travel TV programme did an episode on it a few months ago leading to an influx of tens of thousands of Chinese tourists ...it certainly was interesting to see just how full on the Chinese take opportunity when it knocks, no messing around...
2 - 6 April Late-night barbecues and new Chinese friends in the charming old town of Jianshui
Having been on the move for the past 2 weeks, we were keen to find a good chill out place for a few days. Jianshui, a cobble-street, ornate wooden building town was just the place. In contrast to India, the local Chinese backpacker market is booming and we made a few great friends. Jianshui is famous for street barbecues, where you choose your meat or vegetable kebabs and they are braaied on the spot, delicious (but hold back on some of that chilli!)...with a chinese-english phrase book, dictionary mobile apps, a little English on that side, a (very) little Chinese on our side, we spent many hours into the night getting to know our new friends. The local markets in Jianshui were also interesting where you can buy beautifully coiffured dogs (the Chinese spend a lot of money dressing and making up their dogs), turtles, frogs, all kinds of fish, cats, dogs also for eating, any kind of electronics, clothes, handicrafts...
6 April - 9 April Sunrise over the rice terraces of Yuanyang
The rice terraces of Yuanyang are just beautiful and at sunrise and sunset, the light over the rice field water pools, which are yet to be planted for the season, are a treat. Chinese society, including the farming communities, is quickly moving into middle class life and farmers, like these, are fast educating their children to move on from peasant life. Rice terrace farming won't be easy to mechanise once the labour pool has moved onto office jobs and it is hard to see how these scenes can be much longer for this world. We also spent a couple of nights in nearby Shengcun village where it was market day with surrounding minority villagers streaming in to sell their array of interesting produce.
 |
| Repairing hand bag |
 |
| Market day |
9 April: Very comfortable overnight sleeper bus to the tropical area of Xishuangbanna bordered by Thailand and Laos
While on the move to Xishuangbanna we stopped in for a meal at a typical local eatery where, for R20 you get a very large bowl of rice that you top with a range of meat and vegetable stews, buffet style. You are allowed 4 or 5 toppings but that day our tummies were feeling a little tender so we opted for just one topping each. Well the Mama of the restaurant was not having it, she starting scolding us in Chinese and gesticulating wildly, we of course had no idea what she was on about and just smiled while chewing on our meal. In exasperation she grabbed a pen and wrote something down in Chinese characters (in China there are many mutually incomprehensible dialects spoken but the written language is standardised, even for Japanese people for whom it is hard to speak and understand Chinese, the written characters are similar.) Which is why, we may not be able to understand the buffet topping wheedling mama, we surely should understand her writing, we of course did not and were none the wiser about what we'd done to offend her, she just threw up her hands as we walked out). We took a picture of what she'd written down and sent it to one of our new English speaking Chinese friends who confirmed that she just wanted us to take our full quota of toppings included in the price). We had to pass through that bus station again a few days later and (luckily) our appetites had returned because the mama was thrilled to have another shot at feeding us and piled us with far more than the requisite toppings this time (she didn't bother with trying to communicate and just scooped food into our plates until we began to pop some blood vessels). The only analogy I can think of with the writing being the same characters regardless of dialect is that our numbers would written the same regardless of whether you were English, French, Italian, Afrikaans or whatever and had different pronunciations for each number.
10 April - 16 April: Accepting and sharing water-festival blessings while running around like 7 year olds with waterguns
The water festival in Jinghong, Xishuangbanna - this was the highlight so far! A Buddhist new year festival where everyone washes away the bad luck of the past year...foreigners who stand out (like Dave) get special attention and thousands of people (adults, not kids - it's too crazy for the kids)..run around laughing and squealing, armed with waterguns, buckets and anything that will hold water, completely drenching one another all day. It was more belly aching laughter fun than we've had since at least the 3rd grade. (checkout the videos :)
16 April: The villages around Xishuangbanna (Menghai)
After Jinghong's crazy running around, we were keen for some authentic village exploration. We tried the villages around the Xishuangbanna area but alas (for us, the tourist), many have moved on from the picturesque old traditional buildings to more comfortable (for the residents) modern houses. So we moved on, with the advice of chinese friends, to see a village still preserving traditional life (probably for the tourists income it generates) to a village called Wengding
17 April - 19 April: Wengding Village, homestay with traditional Wu people
Wengding, home to the Wu people is lovely. The traditional houses interesting to experience but it is surrounded by nearby villages that are too moving into more modern construction. While it is fairly obvious that the thatched roof, wooden building, compost toilet village, albeit anachronistic, is being preserved for the tourist market, it is still a lived in village and we were appreciative of being afforded the experience and warm family hospitality of our homestay.
20 April - 25 April: Nightclubs and Cooking lessons in the backpacker town of Dali
In Dali we met up with some of the friends we'd made in Jianshui and enjoyed the party but laidback atmosphere of (the now mostly Chinese backpacker) town of Dali. With rice wine flowing and great DJs, the nightclubs make for a good night out and Dave made sure to introduce some ass-shaking African dance move to the amused Chinese crowds (although he represented our continent well, alas still no applause). Rejane got some wonderful Chinese cooking lessons from one of our new friends so you guys are in for a treat when we get back home :)
25 April to today: Dumpling soup and warm yak milk while acclimatising to the 3300m elevation of Shangri-la
As we write this blog, we are huddled around a wood-burning fire stove eating dumplings and drinking warm yak milk while acclimatising to the 3300m elevation in Shangri-la before heading off to a 7 day hike around Snow Mountain which is dotted with ethnically Tibetan villages...that for the next blog...
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