China

We started our Chinese adventure in Hong Kong where we spent a week while our visas came through. Greg’s friend Richard lives in HK so he showed us around and even got us invited to a Thanksgiving dinner on a roof terrace of one of the tallest buildings in the HK. The views were unreal – we had a awesome night but had “trouble” finding our way back to our hotel room at 4am. Rich also introduced us to Chinese food by taking us to some interesting restaurants – the food is really good! HK is a really diverse city and probably a good starting point for China. Every evening at 8pm the city puts on a light show which involves lights/lasers/beams etc going off from all the skyscrapers to music which you watch from the other side of the bay.

I have never been to Vegas so we went to Macau which is the Vegas of the East (but bigger) where we spent time in the Wynn, Venetian, Hard Rock trying to win big to extent our trip but no such luck.

Finally after a good last night watching Rich’s girlfriend in a show to celebrate MINT nightclubs 3rd birthday we left HK on an overnight train to Guilin on mainland China. From Guilin we caught the bus to Yangshuo where we spent the next week exploring the Guangxi province of South China. We stayed at a brilliant place called Yangshuo Outside Inn which was a farmhouse in the countryside amongst all the karst outcrops that Yangshuo is so famous for. Here we rode bikes through farms, country roads, off roads, everywhere, spent a day kayaking down the Li River, went hiking. The weather was really cold in China now so we spent the evenings by the fire eating amazing Chinese food – no dog on the menu which we were very pleased about!! The highlight of our stay though was this show we went and watched choreographed by the people who did the opening of the Beijing Olympics it was kind of like an opera/light show put on at night on the Li River with about 600 performers – it was so brilliant we could have gone every night. I tried to take photos but because it was so dark you couldn’t. Yangshuo is really poor and mainly consists of old people farming but its like stepping back 100 years with all old fashion farming methods but we found it so peaceful especially because the cities are so crowded (1.3 billion people is hard to comprehend until you are here!)

From Yangshuo we headed to Longji rice terraces, its not really the right time of year because they have just harvested but it was nice to see and we had a couple beers at the top overlooking all the terraces before the cold made us go back indoors. We may actually have been the only tourists staying there as it was dead quiet at night.

From Longji it was a 24hr train ride to Shanghai (Kim/Baz our trains in Thailand were luxurious compared to these). Thought I would stop here to tell you how much we enjoyed China. It is so culturally different we are permanently being surprised (although we soon got used to the burping, farting, spitting).English is not really spoken at all and we have had people (kids mainly) following us, run away from us and always people staring. It keeps us amused though.

After our arrival in Shanghai, I got ill so we had to take the days slowly exploring the city. We happened upon a cool market the one day. Away from the tourist areas China is ridiculously cheap, Greg and I joke that its almost like everything is for free. Backpacks are full though so we didn’t do much shopping. We also did a day on the Bund (Modern Shanghai), rode the Maglev train at 430km/hr and went to a acrobatic show – similar to Cirque du Soleil but on a smaller scale. In the meantime, I recovered and our Indian visas came through so it was time to move on again. We headed out west to Xi’an where we took a trip round the Terracotta Warriors – amazing that someone would actually build all these warriors and then just bury them. There are over 6,000 warriors but only half are currently uncovered. Xi’an is an ancient city so the following day we hired a tandem bike and rode on top of the wall around the ancient city.

Our time in China was now running out so we raced to Beijing – Beijing has benefited hugely from the Olympics. I had heard it was a dirty, chaotic, overcrowded city. What we found was actually slightly different. Beijing was the most organized, much less crowded city that we went to in China. It still has air pollution – I don’t think clean air exists in China though but the city works well and we really enjoyed it. We did a walk around Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. Tiananmen Square became famous in 1989 when students demonstrated against Communism and where soon opened fire on by the government – now days China seems to have adopted a democratic economy but still communist politics. The next day we just strolled around the park and Dong Chong area which was lovely. On our last day we did an 8km climb on the Great Wall. It was about -6 degrees at the start so we appreciated the strenuous hike to warm us up. The scenery was beautiful and we got to zip line off the wall and over a lake at the end of the hike.

That was China – the best way to describe our thoughts on China is that its really fascinating (in a good way). We would love to come back, in Summer, and do more of the country because its so big.

Now we are headed to Vietnam and more exciting is that we finally meeting up with friends from London, Al, V and Clydo. Al and V we will be traveling with for the rest of our trip along with other friends along the way which we are super excited about….