Hanoi (16th October)
Our hotel in Hanoi provided breakfast, but they only provided it until 9am, in the 10th floor restaurant.
A challenge, I know, but we did manage to make it upstairs in time. Literally upstairs, as the hotel has 10 floors and the lift goes up to floor 9. Then you get out and walk the last lot.
At 8.30am there were two people at breakfast. We could pick wherever we wanted to sit, so we took a little corner table looking over the vast West lake. Alice still wasn’t feeling well and just had rice and greens. I had all kinds of tasty stuff, too many to remember. Except for the little cheesy-bread puffs which came with mayonnaise… I remember those.
Then we retired to the couch. Our next excursion was out to get some water, toothpaste, put clothes in to wash, and to get morning tea. I forgot to take the toothpaste out of my carry-on at Hong Kong airport and consequently watched while it was tossed in the bin by security. We managed to acquire all of those things, as well as a proper filter coffee.
Lunchtime came around and we spoiled ourselves by getting chips sent down from the restaurant, at a grand total of $1.15 per plate.
And there’s not much else to report; we just kicked around the hotel room, wrote emails to people, looked up old sports scores and news that we had missed, and that was about the lot.
Greg
Hong Kong to Hanoi (15th October)
Finally: Vietnam.
People had been talking this bit of the trip up for a while so we couldn’t wait to get on the plane and get there. We also couldn’t wait to get to our hotel and have four full days of not moving around and fitting into buses, etc.
Before we could do (or not do) that we had to figure out how to get to the airport. With the metro express ruled out as being too expensive we discovered from the trusty Intrepid trip notes that there is an express bus which makes very few stops and costs only 39 HKD. And it stops near our hotel. Perfect.
Hong Kong was very entertaining, particularly at night with all the lights going and the restaurant smells thickening the air. But it was time to go… the flight was at 2.55pm so we wanted to be there by midday, and accordingly left the hotel just after 11am. We said our temporary goodbyes to those we would be seeing again in Vietnam, and promise to arrive safely, etc.
At the bus stop the timetable said there would be buses four times per hour, and we only waited 20 minutes or so before one arrived. Unfortunately we forget that you have to have exact change for the bus. Another couple that had been waiting at the bus stop with us also DID NOT have exact change so we stood there in the door of the bus wondering what we were going to do, while the bus driver rolled off, obviously not of a mind to boot us off immediately. We had a 100 HKD note, and needed 78, and so did they, but neither of us had enough coins to help ourselves or each other out. Even though we just crowding the doorway and looking clueless.
At the next stop a man got on who very nicely changed our hundred into five twenties, meaning that we had enough for the other couple to pay 100 and us 56 for the four tickets, and then we had enough coins to give them the 22 HKD change. With giggles all round we retired to our seats, where we discovered that the girl was from Taiwan but had actually been raised in New Zealand, first in Rotorua and then Auckland. And also they were going to Shenzhen, which was where we had just come from.
Despite the mild difficulties we still made it to the airport bang on midday, and walked into the terminal to find that Vietnam airlines check in is in Aisle D, which was right in front of the doorway, and that it wasn’t open yet. So apart from the last part where we couldn’t check in for our flight yet our plan worked perfectly. Alice was still feeling a little tender in the stomach, and I hadn’t eaten because we just wanted to get to the airport first and ask questions later. On the floor down from departures there is a food court, and a lady who stands near the escalators and cleans the hand rails with something anti-bacterial.
We looked and felt a lot better after lunch, and went back upstairs to find check in now open and a large line which was moving quickly, where previously there had been none. There was some rumour that we should double check the flight times and bookings, having booked as long ago as March, but everything was as we expected it to be. The flight was definitely on at the same time, and we did have seats still booked, but not together as we must have arrived somewhere near the end of the line.
After successfully getting my Hong Kong exit stamp on the same page as the entry stamp, simply by placing the HK departure card in between those pages, we waited around in departures, used the free but slow wireless internet for a while, and then toddled onto the plane where I had a nice Vietnamese man on my left and the man on my right kindly agreed to swap seats with Alice. The nice Vietnamese man told us useful info about Hanoi and the distances to various other cities, and I had a marvellous lunch because Alice only wanted to eat plain non-reactive food and gave me half her meal.
It was an hour and a half flight so by the time we’d finished eating and looking through the inflight mag, which had a short but excellent article on a Vietnamese photographer and some of his shots of coastal fishing people, it was already time to land. Customs at Hanoi is refreshingly fast and simple and basically the same as everywhere else. Luckily the nice man put the Vietnam entry stamp on the opposite page to my visa, so everything was proceeding according to plan there. We couldn’t get our ATM cards to work in the ANZ machine, which is odd because one is an ANZ card, but thankfully they worked in one of the others, so we could lay our hands on some Vietnamese Dong. I still had significant brain-fade from the late night-early morning that day and accidentally withdrew 50,000 dong, which on further reflection turned out to be about five dollars in Australian money. Take two…
Taxis crowd around and all but bid for you at the airport exit so we had no trouble getting into town to our hotel. But we paid $15 USD and then later on read in the trip notes that you should pay $12… (sigh).
What else that day? The porter carried our bags up to the room for us, and as the door opened I said to myself ‘Let it be palatial.’ And it was.
Our hotel rooms in China had been nice enough but not quite so big as this. Space to unpack physically is nice but not nearly so good as time to unpack mentally. Alice was still not feeling settled, but for plain food there is nothing quite as good as…Tofu Pudding! Which was now looking like a wise investment. And for the record, it actually tasted pretty good.
Greg
Hong Kong (14th October)
I nearly had something to add to the what have we lost page on our website this morning.
(so sorry to disappoint those who have been checking that page regularly; rest assure via the wonders of google analytics and statistics WE KNOW WHO YOU ARE.)
I had hung my sunglasses up over a metal railing next to my bad instead of putting them under my pillow with my wallet, phone, keys etc. Alice says she said something about make sure you remember your sunglasses but we can safely assume I did not hear it. Anyway I got off the train and thought that it was kind of bright out, and got straight back on the train.
When you get off the train in Hong Kong you’re not actually in Hong Kong yet; you detrain in Shenzhen and then cross the border.
Crossing the border involves two sets of customs, one to get out of China and one into Hong Kong, but for those of us who haven’t done anything illegal lately there’s nothing more to it than lining up for a while and trying to will the customs officials to put the China exit stamp on the same page as the China entry stamp, next to the Visa. Much neater that way; and we are getting together a really excellent collection of Visas and stamps now.
We got off the train at 10.30 and were on the KCR (metro train) for the 50 minute ride to the middle of Hong Kong not long after midday. From there we caught a taxi to the hotel, which we thought might be expensive, but it wasn’t because the hotel was really only slightly out of walking distance. Sadly when we got there they didn’t have rooms available for most of us because they were still being cleaned, but they let us put our stuff in there and then we moved ourselves out into the corridor when room service came around. There wasn’t really time for a shower before we were due to meet back downstairs for orientation walk at 2.30pm, but Alice did manage to have a little sleep in the chair in the corridor.
Other interesting facts about Hong Kong before I forget to mention them;
1. More than a few people speak English
2. There are both ten dollar notes and ten dollar coins. The ten dollar coin has a gold middle and a silver outside, while the ten dollar note has lots of inscriptions and stamp type things on it, making it look like a bus ticket.
3. Every shop has a huge flashing sign which sits just above eye level on the first floor, such that they all negate each other
4. The two dollar coin has wavy edges; it could probably be used as a shuriken.
Having had a look around the block to see what was where, and which way the main streets went, we partitioned off. Steve, Sat, Adam, Andy and ourselves walked down to the harbour to catch the Star ferry across the water, from where one can find one’s way up to Victoria Peak. It’s only about two HK dollars to go across, and it was great to get out on the water and get a look at the size and breadth of Hong Kong. We were supposed to meet back at the hotel at 6 for our farewell dinner; with that in mind we ditched plan A of catching the cable car up Victoria Peak and instead split into two taxis. At the top there is an observatory, although I can’t think what they would be observing other than smog, and a shopping centre. From the top of the shopping centre the view is really immense, and we had fun looking the free binoculars into various buildings, as well as pointing at some of the logos of various collapsed banks and saying ‘Ohh, better turn that sign off, can’t afford that now’.
As well as being able to see Hong Kong city and the harbour on one side, over the other you see more peaks and the busy port as well. The cable car leaves from under the shopping centre; once we’d had our fill we caught the cable car back down, really just so that we could say we’d done it. Turns out you’re better off to be on one side of the car than than the other, if you’d prefer to see the city instead of some trees and a cliff face.
From a map at the bottom of the cable car ride we worked out that we could catch a bus back to one of the metro stations on this side of the water, and from the there get a train to Jordan station, which would save us a lot of time and walking most of the way back up Nathan Rd to our hotel . The bus turned out to be an open-top sightseeing kind of deal so we went straight up top and had a ball standing up (which the sign said you shouldn’t do) and taking pictures of all the slightly unusual buildings. That’s one thing to be said for Hong Kong – there’s a hell of a lot of skycrapers but they’re not all the same.
We did indeed get back to the hotel with 5 minutes to spare before dinner, for which we walked all the way around the corner and had various stir fries, vegetables, etc. all spread out on a large table. As expected it was more expensive that China, but probably worth the money in Australian Dollars, and definitely worth the money in the USD we have been withdrawing against.
There were some street markets set up another block away, so we had a little look through there and then got a couple of bottles of beer to take back to the hotel. Adam and Andy had been complaining about how their room, before cleaning, looked like a bomb had gone off, or like there had been a huge party, and I’m sure that whoever took over their room the next day probably had a similar list of complaints. After some good old-fashioned fun we caught the metro back over the water to Wan Chai, where we had been warned that the drinks would be expensive. And expensive they were; after two drinks we called it a night, but the metro had closed so we had to get a taxi, which was unfeasibly expensive. Alice had said that we it would cost too much to hit the town in Hong Kong and of course she was right. Also she was starting to get an attack of the stomach bug, and we had a plane to Vietnam to catch, so we were happy going home earlier than some others.
Greg
Pingan to Guilin (13th October)
Today we had been promised a much shorter walk.
We needed to get down to the bus station, from which we would get a ride back to Guilin, and from there catch a train to Hong Kong. And even more importantly, we didn’t need to check out until 11.30. Some people from the group said the walk up to the top of the valley was nice (and short), so after breakfast of tasty tasty omelettes we found the path and climbed into the forest.
Each valley usually has a quaint name, referring to the shapes of the hills or something like that. Seven stars with a moon. Nine tigers and five dragons. The lookout at the top of the ‘seven stars with a moon’ has a couple of shops selling the usual whatnot and of course the view is quite handy. Right near the top we met an American man coming back down who teaches law in Beijing for a few months and then sneaks off somewhere new in China for a holiday. He recommended Dazai village as somewhere less touristy, but pronounced it like ‘Dajai’. That’s probably the right pronunciation because in between talking to us in English he translated for his Chinese friend in what sounded like fluent Mandarin. He’s right; Dazai has far fewer neon lights.
It took us a bit over three hours to walk to Pingan from Dazai but it would have taken him a lot more because when we were walking back down from the lookout he was stopped about 300 metres further down chatting to someone else!
At a junction a little further along we started to follow the path toward the other valley ‘Nine tigers and Five dragons’, but eventually turned back when we had walked around three hillsides and still weren’t going up at all, and also it was after 10am. We packed up quickly and Alice went back out to the front of the hotel to have another try at photographing the piles of drying chillis and mushrooms for her wall of interesting patterns. An old lady was tending a child and laughed at her for going ‘snap snap snap’. We’ll show that old lady – when we get back we’ll put together the best wall of interesting colours and patterns…(mumble mumble grumble).
The walk was as short as promised; it took about 20 minutes, and the bus ride was the main event. On the way up the hillsides don’t look so steep or so close to the edge of the road as they do on the way down. A couple of times we got into a bit of a horn frenzy after the driver would try to overtake a slow truck, only to have someone else come around the corner and have to pull out. Or the opposite would happen and we would get to beep at them.
Guilin is a much bigger, shinier and, let’s say, well-lit city than Yangshuo. Actually it was more like a mini-Beijing. And by the time we arrived everyone was starving, and with a slight detour to the Bank of China for those whose ATM cards wouldn’t work in the banks near the station on Saturday, we went straight into the first restaurant that looked like it might have enough food.
The train didn’t leave until 9.30pm so we got free time in the afternoon to wander. We sat near the pagodas by the lake, twiddled our thumbs and waited for lunch to start having an effect, and then bought an ice cream and wandered back and forth in the main cross-shaped shopping streets, where we encountered other bunches of people from our group doing the same.
‘Anything interesting up that way?’
‘No, don’t go that way. It’s a trick.’
In the mini-market where we bought some train food they had packets of stuff labelled ‘Instant tofu pudding’. The ingredients on the back were; Tofu, sugar. So for a laugh and to see just how bad it could be Alice bought some of those.
We came to what looked like a main street and on that main street was a large bookshop, perfect for killing time until your train arrives. Most of the books in the ‘English Books’ section were books to learn English, printed in Mandarin. Those in the foreign books section were foreign books, printed in Mandarin. But near the English books Alice did manage to find a book of short stories by Mark Twain.
Out on the corner we got a cab ride back to the station, and a slightly odd look from the driver, which made more sense when we saw that it wasn’t really that far to drive. We waited outside the baggage store and went and took some time-exposures of traffic flying past and that type of thing. Predictable while you’re sitting in the middle of the road some Chinese person crossing the street will stop to see what on Earth it is that you are doing, so I zoomed him the picture on the LCD screen and zoomed in on some writing in the background to show that it was perfectly legible. He seemed happy with that and went on his way.
Slowly the group arrived at the station, most of them having walked back to fill in time, and we collected everything and got ourselves on the train. This time we had most of the parts of a cabin, except for a front door, and after settling in we crowded around to watch a movie on Adam’s laptop which then promptly ran out of power half way through, in the middle of a suspenseful part.
Greg
Dazai to Ping’an (12 October)
Sunday morning doesn’t usually begin at 8.30am with a three and a half hour walk through steep hills in rice terraces, but when it does it makes a nice change.
We were walking from Dazai village over to Ping’an; James kept saying it was 25km but there must have been some miscommunication somewhere. As promised it was much cooler up in the hills; actually you’d have to say it was the perfect temperature for walking. We didn’t see many people apart from our group in the first half hour, the exceptions being a farmer taking a horse down the hill or something like that. It didn’t take that long for the group to get split apart into those who felt like walking quickly, those who didn’t feel like walking quickly, those who stopped very regularly to take photos, and those in between the others.
Lilian had come across some kind of flu, and wasn’t looking too energetic, so she walked back down to the carpark we ascended from yesterday, and caught a bus around to meet us. James took us through the hills, and we later discovered that he is from that region of China anyway. So you could say that he knew where he was going, and with the regular stops to make sure everyone took the right turns here and there, and then having to double-forward to make sure people at the front didn’t too long, he probably walked twice as far as any of us.
We had been warned about a four-hour ‘death-march’ style trek which would be much harder than the Great Wall of China, but actually we had more rest breaks on this trek and so it ended up easier. Probably the most difficult thing was eventually eating the last piece of my Shanghai nut cake at one of the little wooden huts we sat in along the way… Goddamn it, that cake had been with me for a while, and I was sorry to see it go. Also, it had softened a lot in my bag and could nearly be pulled apart instead of being hacked with a big sharp knife.
I can’t tell you that much about what Alice did on the walk because we didn’t really stay together, but from my own point of view the sharp drops everywhere around the path and the elegance of the steps in the terraces never did cease to amaze me. That’s why I took four hundred million and two photos.
Along the way we came across a man and a lady carting two rice bags on a bamboo pole across their shoulders. They let us try and lift the bags, which frankly wasn’t happening. Each bag was 20kg, but if you don’t lift them across your shoulders then it feels a bit heavier than that because the bamboo flexes. Of course while we were standing around wheezing and drinking water the Chinese man was having a cigarette. Mike got James to translate and found out that he was 51; he looked younger when he slung the rice back over his shoulders and cantered off the down the path ahead of us. And when I say cantered I mean that he was pulling away from the front of our group..
Further on we stopped in a small town where some long-haired Yao tribeswomen live. It’s traditional not to cut the hair after age 18, and they’re not supposed to show it to anyone until they’re married. Some of the hill tribeswomen hold records for the longest hair (or maybe it’s longest average?), and are only too happy to be photographed for a small price. As we walked away, the price quickly became smaller. “40 yuan, 20, 10,” they shouted after us
The landscape is just so nice to walk in, and the air so fresh, that it was almost a let-down to walk over the ridge and down the last hill into Ping’an. But everyone was starving so lunch was assigned greater priority. The number of bizarre things we have seen on this trip is piling up; here’s another one. No where in Ping’an village is there a road, nor even a path wider than about 1m, nor a hill of gradient less than 15 degrees. Almost all the buildings are two-or-three stories, panelled in dark wood. But in the restaurant we went to there was a shiny glass cocktail bar with blue lights and a variety of spirits.
And because some of the meals were slow arriving the owner bought us out two huge bowls of popcorn and urged us to return later that night when they would turn the music up.
We had more urgent things to attend to upon checking into the Li Qing hostel in Ping’an: going directly to sleep for two hours. Having done that we slothed to the restaurant downstairs only to find that several other people had just woken up as well. The hostel was well set up with the restaurant right next to the reception, all of which led on to a balcony looking over the terraces. And that seemed just as good a place as any to chat away the rest of the afternoon.
Just like our hostel in Dazai, you could hear what was happening in every other room of the building; in fact in Dazai you could almost hear what people were ordering for dinner. And just like in Dazai, our room had a shower head that pointed more or less into the toilet, and possessed the further novelty of being the only bathroom I’ve seen with a Western toilet sitting on top of an Asian squat toilet. The pipes out the bottom (excuse me) of one literally just ran into the top of the other. And the toilet rocked if you knocked it too hard turning around. But once again the shower was brilliant; hot and consistent pressure.
Dinner was great, even we thought we were in for another marathon waiting session; when we ordered they had to ring the chef and get him to trot on up the hill and get started! Several people got sucked into buying a bottle of the Great Wall-brand red wine which was staggeringly average. Why they ordered another after that, I will never know. But it was all in good fun, as we sat and puzzled about why anyone in their right mind would have strung up a very long line of twinkle lights along the edge of the terrace, which stretched halfway down the hill, and we waited around until 8pm when we were booked in to see a cultural performance by some of the local Yao tribeswomen. I confess now to dreading this in advance, just as I had done with the folk songs in Russia and the song and dance in Mongolia. And I confess to being wrong by a country mile. Again.
Our tour group filed into the performance room, and took up seats on one end while the women arranged themselves and ceased giggling at the other end. Dressed up in their white, blue and pink costumes the tiny women (the tallest was maybe 5’4″) started with a welcoming song, moved on to an ornate dance, then took up their bamboo poles for an intriguing dance in which they moved around in pairs, beating out a rhythm on the ground and on each other’s poles.
And then… they asked us to sing a song.
We had a collective mental blank until Lilian translated what they were asking for as ‘An English song, they want you to sing an English song’.
So Dom started singing the first line of ‘Wonderwall’ by Oasis, and because we all knew the rest, we joined in. There you are. An English song. Probably should have gone for Yellow Submarine but no one thought of it fast enough.
Then they asked for a dance… so we got some clapping rhythm going while Dom took the middle of the floor and busted out some major-league disco moves. Oh, sorry, that should be Moves (with a capital M). He was good, and it was all in good fun so the tribeswomen loved it.
What next, you ask? I guess it gets very lonely in the hills over winter so they play a game where everyone holds hands and dances around in a circle, and one of the tribeswomen puts on a blindfold and picks out a man. Then the man puts on a blindfold, circle starts again, and the man tries to pick out a woman. Then he takes the woman up in a piggyback, circle starts again, and in they can’t break out then they are married. So now you begin to see the logic of it… After that they drink toasts in three different styles (of the 38% by Vol. rice wine I mentioned), then they really are married.
So that’s how Dom and Myf (Catherine who had been called Myf to distinguish her from Kate and Katie) ended up being legally married in China. I think.
The craziness continued when the circle reformed and turned itself into a tunnel, with pairs of people holding hands on either side. Pairs at the front of the tunnel would through while being hit by everyone else, the rejoin at the end as the tunnel shuffled along.
To finish off, they bought the bamboo poles back out, and set them up in the middle of the floor with two poles longways about a metre apart, and other poles being wielded lengthways by the tribeswomen. With two poles in each hand they moved the poles left and then right in a click-click-clack/ click-click-click clack-clack-clack/ rhythm so that there gaps between the poles but the gaps were moving. We took hands with the remaining tribeswoman, one by one, and attempted to dance across in the gaps, and then back, and so forth. It looked easy but there was a funny half-step you had to do when you got to one side and started back the other way. We couldn’t get it right consistently and ended up out of step with the Yao woman, who knew exactly was she was doing. Of course, if any one us showed signs of being half decent at the game, the women would quickly speed up the rhythm. Lilian, who had led this trip before, was the best by some distance.
We left the room giggling ourselves silly, and would have been happy to go to bed except that some Dutch people staying in the hostel decided that Sunday night was karaoke night, and that to do it right they needed to put on their old favourites from the 80’s and sing really badly. I’m sure they had fun. I hope they did, otherwise no one did.
Greg
Into the Rice Terraces (11th October)
For Saturday morning Lilian instructed us to pack a small daypack with a couple of days clothes as we would be carrying our bags everywhere through the rice terraces.
And there would be hills.
And lots of walking. And it would be colder than Yangshuo.
Knowing all of these things we picked and chose and then had breakfast, chucked ourselves and our bags in the van (anyone heard that phrase before?) and got ourselves driven back to the railway station in Guilin. Here we deposited the large bags (which Intrepid paid for) and got back in the bus to drive into the hills. By 1pm we arrived at the entrance to the Longji Rice Terrace Scenic Area. There were some minor difficulties along the way involving the size of our minibus, the width of the road, and the height of the drop over the edge as drove up and up, but they were nothing compared to the road workers we found blocking our way around one corner.
For about 10 minutes it looked like they really weren’t going to consider moving. They had a big truck set up to pour gravel out of and were making (necessary) repairs to the road. Three things needed to be moved before us and the several buses behind us could get past. One, the truck, but not very far; two; the piles of gravel, and they were going in holes in the road anyway; three, the road workers and their wheelbarrow full of gravel. After about 15 minutes, and after the steamroller they needed to finish the job squeezed past our bus on the outside, next to the ravine, and the workers, the majority of whom were women, got everything how they wanted it.
We had only to walk for around half an hour to get to our accomodation in the village of Dazai, up steep hills, along paths that were just as often cut-steps or rocks all jammed in together. And that was when it really started to feel like remote countryside. The local people are very short, wear lots of blue and purple, and the women seem to have those stretched ears with the huge earrings and whatnot. At the top of a very windy path we came eventually to our hotel; I might have said it was a short walk but I believe I did also mention the steepness, and not having had lunch yet everyone was quite glad to arrive. Almost the entire building was made of panelled wood. You can see that in the picture of the room, but also the floorboards and the ceiling were wood. Our twin room smelled like pine and like Olkhon Island, and the view out our window was sublime. First order of business was to open all the windows and look out at the rice terraces, which started 10 metres away under the window and finished somewhere along way away in the distance.
A horse was tethered to a tree down below the window eating rice out of a bag, next to the vegetable garden with eggplant and tiny tomatoes growing, and on the concrete patio out the front of the hotel they had spread rice to dry. Rumours of people growing their own tobacco in the garden there proved difficult to substantiate.
All around was clouds and haze, like it was already raining. A lady swept up and took inside the rice, after Alice cracked three of her very own grains open. I fetched the hackeysack from my bag and we started up a game somewhat like cricket involving stacked-up plastic stools for stumps and somebody’s sandal for the bat. If the ball were to roll off the edge of the concrete patio, into the thin channel of mud (and worse) running near the edge of the terrace, the batsman was declared to be out.
At our peak we were great, and drew a crowd of nearly ten people. The Chinese people walking past were faintly amused, while the ladies in the group sat on the front steps of the hostel drinking tea and bargaining with the locals. Alice tried to get James to explain to her how to play peek-a-boo with the average Chinese child, but he didn’t understand what she meant. But you can still play the game without knowing the words, and later on Lilian confirmed that of course they have that same game, but the words mean something more like ‘Where did I go? Here I am!’ Then we got tired, and somebody found a wooden paddle round the corner that was suspiciously perfect for use as a bat, but which made it almost impossible to get out.
Game over.
That began the trend of accomdation with a combined shower and bathroom. Either they were saving space to begin with or had added the shower after; either way they decided to put the shower in between the toilet bowl and the hand sink. So you couldn’t shower without getting everything in the bathroom wet. It was a really good shower, so we didn’t care.
Downstairs we all sat around two tables and ordered dinner, which for some reason took ages upon ages arriving, although it was very tasty when it did. Almost everywhere we have gone in China the food has been very tasty, plentiful, and cheap. And we were more than ready for bed that evening, knowing that we had a far more lengthy walk ahead the next day.
Greg
Bike ride to Moon Hill (10th October)
On Friday morning we couldn’t get our shower to work.
The instructions are quite clear:
Each set of rooms has it’s own gas hot water heater, so there should be hot water 24h a day.
If you add too much cold water, it may trigger the water heater to turn off.
There may be water pressure problems.
The water comes from a well, so don’t use more than you need.
And so it proved.
If you turn the hot water tap on, you can hear the gas lighter starting. You can smell a bit of gas as well. And then you get steaming hot water at low pressure. Then you add the tiniest bit of cold, and the hot water stops coming.
Then you rinse and repeat.
(sigh)
Seeing as we were going riding around the countryside and climbing Moon Hill, it seemed wiser to shower afterwards rather than before, so we went directly to breakfast. The selection of bicycles available was limited to those which had strong front brakes and weak rear ones, clunky or non-working gears, uncomfortable seats, or combinations of the above. In the end I settled for one which was about two sizes too small for me but had reliable gears, and then I moved the seat up a long way.
Alice’s gear lever had to be hit (firmly, just kind of al dente) so that it might change gears 50% of the time. That is, so it would change gears when you’re going downhill, but never when going uphill.
But enough about the bikes – unsurprisingly the countryside around Yangshuo gains even more scenic value when seen from a rolling bicycle, and everyone was in a playful look-at-me-riding-with-my-feet-on-handlebars mood. Or a try-and-grab-onto-each-other’s-backpacks and get a free ride mood. In between tomfoolery we had to pay attention enough to dodge the occasional villager, cow, or large tour bus approaching from behind, and a good time was being had until we made a left turn down a dirt path, came over a bridge, and stopped for a break. We waited five minutes; no Dom and no Mike. 15 minutes, no Dom and no Mike. 25 minutes and the guide, after making some phone calls and asking a passing motorcyclist to keep his eye out, suggested we might like to go for a swim in the river while we waited.
Somehow, in between unreliable gears and altering seat heights they had missed a turn off, and were getting far more than their money’s worth of bike-riding. If they had paid by the kilometre, it would have been very cheap, because once the guide had got a phone call to say they’d been found and had turned around, we took off through concrete bike tracks, rice fields, bumpy rocky dirt tracks, and villages; and they didn’t catch up until we’d gotten where we were going.
Moon Hill.
Or more precisely, the restaurant at the bottom of Moon Hill that sells cold drinks. We left the hostel at quarter-to-nine, and it started to feel pretty hot by about ten-to-nine. There were a few flushed faces when we pulled into the carpark (bike park? there were no cars), on the way dodging an armada of elderly Chinese ladies who were running out at us from the gate and offering goods for sale. I don’t think anyone in the group expected to be ambushed by old ladies attempting to be first-to-the-tourists, but that’s what happened.
Why is it called Moon Hill? The pictures speak for themselves, and what we would really like to say at this point is that climbing that hill at 11.30 am when it’s about 30 degrees is not a very good idea. I’d walked about 1/8th the way up and a French man coming down thought he would be ‘helpful’ by telling us that there were 768 steps to go from this point. He escaped with his nose intact; I had not the energy to dent it.
Alice actually went ahead of me most of the way because I was stopping to ‘take pictures’, e.g. having a sneaky rest break, while just as at the Great Wall the ladies picked someone to follow all the way up, even when we showed them the water bottles which we already had in our bags. But you can’t really tell them to go away, because it wouldn’t be very polite, and also because they won’t.
Alice: My lady was actually quite nice on this occasion. She knew I had no money (and was carrying a large bottle full of water), but she walked up with me having a chat, and reminding me to go “slowly, slowly” and sharing the breeze from her large fan. When we got to the top she went off and tried to sell her wares to other tourists. Which was a nice change from the aggressive tactics of the ladies selling souvenirs and drinks on the Great Wall.
Greg: Near the arch of Moon Hill there is a nice little rest platform in the shade where we stopped for 10 minutes or so, before those-who-must-do-such-things (Alice stayed at the first platform) found the trail which led the last 10 minutes up to the very top, that is, up on top of the arch. Up to the main platform there are easy stone steps all the way; the trail up the arch really is a trail, with tree roots sticking out and gangly shaped rocks in the way and sharp ascents. Meanwhile I got most of the way to the top only to meet June coming back down!
The view from the top, need I say it, is worth the climb. And with no womenfolk about, Mike, Dom, Adam and I were free to remove our shirts and cool off temporarily.
On the way back down we found that the group had gone on without us, but of course they were waiting at the restaurant, where our included lunch was served. I don’t think there was a scrap of food left on any of those plates.
We were promised that the ride back to our hostel was much shorter, but that didn’t mean there was no more trouble coming. We rode through more rice fields, past old ladies waving water bottles, water buffaloes dozing in the river, and stopped at a village school were Steve gave some of the kids little stuffed koalas. In between that village and the next Dom and Adam had even worse problems with gears not changing and chains slipping off, but we had picked up another guide named James from the Moon Hill restaurant, so our yellow-shirted guide Sam could wait ahead and James could follow behind.
So we waited in another tiny village for Dom and Adam; I’d forgotten James would be coming through so I thought it would be a good idea to go back and see if they had managed to continue, although what I really wanted was to ride that 500m section of bumpy trail we had just come through at full speed, instead of the speed of whoever was riding in front. So I had a great time doing that but when I got to where they had stopped with bikes upside down to put the chain back on, there was no one there. I turned around and rode back to the village, at top speed, and… there was no one there. So I kept on riding through, got to a turn and caught sight of one of our group riding over a bridge in the distance, and rode off that way. Over the bridge I found James waiting not for Dom and Adam, but for me, having already taken them back to the group via a shortcut he knew.
That was secretly perfect; it meant we had to ride quickly to catch up. We went flying along a small length of wide dirt trail, and then turned back onto another 3m wide concrete bike/motrocycle/truck path. I was just changing up gears when the dreaded hiss began. Three seconds later the dreaded hiss stopped.
My tire was flat. Flat as a Dutch hayfield.
Sam and James stopped. They had no puncture kit.
Would I like to wait here for the motorbike to pick me up later? No.
Would I like to get a double with James while Sam held on to my bike and dragged it along with him? OK.
The path was mostly flat, having neither large hills up which one person could never ride with another person sitting on the back of his bike, nor large hills down which one person could have an extended break. So after five minutes I got off and jogged for a while up one hill (which was fun with my backpack on in the heat), then coasted down the next hill, then took a turn of riding the bike with James having a rest on the back. We went on like that for maybe 2km, and eventually came upon the main group waiting for us. You could say they were amused by the sight of us flying down the incline with James sitting side-saddle on the back.
But the fun ended when we came to the next section of bumpy path. Even though James was riding now the ride on the metal frame at the back was none too comfortable, and we couldn’t get much momentum happening over the rocks. So I got off and jogged again, counting the bruises in between my knuckles, and was very relieved to come around a corner about 5 minutes later and see the entrance to the hostel. After a beer with James and Sam we went straight upstairs for a cold shower, which was just the thing.
With our core temperatures resuming normal limits we settled into the outdoor restaurant area for an afternoon of sitting around, talking, walking up the pool table, and trying to hold out until 5.30 to order dinner. Having actually done some exercise everyone was starving. The menu showed fried noodles with egg and vegetables for 10 yuan, and I looked no further. The hotel information booklet informed us that free WiFi was available, and that one needed to go to the pool table area. Down by the restaurant it was intermittent, but that was party central, so everyone stayed there and I sat by the pool table and uploaded lots of pictures to go with the posts from Russia and Mongolia where we had only had time to put up the text.
We slept well that night.
Greg
The day Alice decided to move to Southern China
This morning as per usual Greg and I were running late.
For our 10 o’clock calligraphy lesson. So at 9:45am I went and waited in the lobby (Lilian was meeting us to take us to the calligraphy lesson), while Greg sprinted down the road to go to the bakery and find something that we could eat for breakfast. He returned at 9:55am with pastries and a little pizza bun for me.
As it turned out we only needed to cross the road and go down a little side street to go to the calligraphy lesson – so Greg was still eating when we arrived.
It was a little shop with a long table going down the middle. The table was covered in newspaper, and had calligraphy brushes and special lined paper set up on it.
For the next hour we spent most of the time perfecting the kindergarten art of trying to write the number 1 – 10. Apparently the number 1 – 10 contain all the brush strokes you need to construct more complicated Chinese characters. Number 1 – 5 use straight lines and number 6-10 use curves, so that they compliment each other (ying and yang). After the number we went through a couple of simple words: person, sun, moon, big, and too much. And then learnt to write our names.
All this was surprisingly complicated, and also really interesting because every character had an internal logic to why it looked like it did (listening to the explanations was quite an insight into the Chinese culture). I found it a really relaxing thing to do.
After calligraphy Greg and I went to track down the vegetarian restaurant again. Luckily it was open today. It was a really beautiful space inside, with equally nice food. We had braised mushrooms and beans, stir fried tofu skin (much better than it sounds) and rice. Amazingly I think the food here was even better than the vegetarian restaurant in Shanghai, but Greg might dispute that.
Greg and I then went wandering down towards the river. There were people there peddling boat rides, others fixing boats, and others washing what looked like sheets in the river. There were also market stalls all along the river selling scares, hats, jewellery, and other Chinese type knickknacks. Interestingly I saw exactly the same mirrors as my Mum bought back from Vietnam last year (confirming my belief that everything was being pumped out from one super factory for the entire south East Asia souvenir market). We yet again had to perfect the art of saying no to people trying to sell us things.
Down near the river there was a little water fall – which Greg duly went to photograph. And there we met our photo friend. He didn’t speak any English – but he also had a Nikon so he and Greg got along just fine. Using an elaborate combination of hand gestures and showing each other pictures on their cameras Greg discerned that he was to go six stepping stones into the water to get the best angle for photographing the waterfall. And I had my photograph taken yet again – but participated this time by taking a photograph of him as well.
After this we took the opportunity to head back to our hotel “Fawlty towers” and jump on the internet and post more pictures onto our website… before heading off to the cooking school at 4pm. While we went to the cooking class our bags were also being taken to our next hotel which was a 20min drive out of the city – in fact it was right next to where we finally had the cooking class.
But before we headed out of town we went on a walking tour of the local food market. The range of fresh food, tofu and meat there was staggering for someone used to shopping at Coles. The meat was so fresh it was clucking, and in some cases barking. You then had to take it home and kill it yourself, or take it to the slaughter people at the edge of the hall. Greg and I remained in the fresh food section. But our cooking instructor took some of the group over to see the meat being prepared – which included dogs – and most of them came back visibly shocked by the whole experience. But they had been warned.
We then piled into buses and headed to the cooking school. It was a beautifully renovated Chinese Farmhouse. The long kitchen had sliding doors which opened an entire side of the kitchen out onto the countryside. Directly outside the doors was a verandah shaded by two large grapefruit trees, and just beside that was a beautiful veggie garden (with the karsts rising up in the distance beyond). In fact at one point Greg jumped the veggie garden and the fence so that he could photograph just how scenic it was. When we were ready to start the next part of the lesson he was still missing – so I had to practice my vocal skills and go looking for him. Luckily he was found.
Greg and I cooked the vegetarian version of all the meals. All up we learnt to cook: stir fried eggplant, lotus root with Cashew nuts, tofu braised in a beer sauce, steamed stuffed vegetables, and green vegetables with garlic. It was a feast.
Now we just need to work out where we can buy some of the ingredients like lotus root, and black bean and chili paste in Australia.
After eating we walked the 100 metres to our hotel, and checked into our rooms. The Outside Inn, where we were staying, rivals the Ger camp in Mongolia for my favourite accommodation of our entire trip. A dutch man has renovated our farmhouses into guest rooms and a private restaurant. Our room was on the second floor, had wide windows, a comfortable double bed with mosquito net hanging above, and a neat and tidy bathroom.
We went and joined the others sitting in the courtyard near the the restaurant, and had a chat and a beer before heading to bed. It was probably at this juncture that I decided we absolutely had to come back here and spend some more time learning some more calligraphy, Mandarin, and cooking thrown in for good measure. Luckily there is a huge demand for english teachers in this area because of the tourism industry – so I may just be able to orchestrate our return. Stay posted.
Alice
