Planes, Trains and Dodgy Food

As you may remember I left the last entry with me being rather unwell in the airport at Kathmandu. Somehow after popping down a few more tablets I was able to last the double plane journey to Beijing, although I can’t say that I was having a comfortable time.

Looking worse for wear in KunMing airport on the way to Beijing

Jay unfortunately was forced to fly back home to the UK following further complications with his hearing, but after what seems like successful treatment at home he should be able to rejoin us again sometime soon. It will be good to see him back as we are missing having him around.

After a short taxi ride we arrived rather late at night at the Beijing City Centre Youth Hostel. We were allocated a very light, airy and spacious room with a view overlooking the city’s main train station. There was however one small issue….there was no toilet in the room! After a small amount of exploring, we discovered the shared bathroom was about 40 yards down the corridor (a 40 yard stretch I would be becoming very familiar with over the next 3 days!!)

The first 2 days after our arrival I was confined to the room which was incredibly frustrating, but Vicky was able to enjoy a short visit to Tiananmen Square as well as a day trip to the Great Wall. Vicky enjoyed her visit to the wall, but was surprised how steep it was in places. Some areas of the wall were in fact near vertical, with a few people deciding to descend on their backsides for the sake of safety. The area of the wall that Vicky visited was accessed by a cable car on the way up, with a toboggan ride available for the way down which looked amazing fun. Compared to the photos that some of the rest of the group took, the area of the wall where Vicky went was far less crowded, with some reporting that they were barely able to move for people.

A moderately steep section of the Great Wall away from too many tourists

The day after Vicky’s visit to the wall, I was able to venture out of the hotel and into China properly for the first time. Vicky and I caught the metro over to Tiananmen Square, and opted for a visit to the Forbidden City. It is essentially a palace the size of a city within the city of Beijing that was solely for the use of the Emperor and his officials during the Ming Dynasty as a sign of their supremacy. The city area was a reasonable size, and we were unaware that visitors are only able to enter through the South gate and exit through the North gate, therefore meaning that we would have to walk all the way back around the circumference of the city walls to get back to the metro. It was in truth maybe a little too much for me so soon after having been so unwell in the previous few days.

One of the squares in the forbidden city starting to become flooded with tourists

The one thing that you couldn’t help but notice about Beijing is how clean it was. The streets are regularly swept and washed, and you would feel comfortable about eating your dinner off of a lot of the paved areas.

On the topic of food, that evening we made a visit to one of the city’s night markets which are mainly dedicated to some of the stranger culinary delights you will stumble across in China. Scorpions, seahorses, lizards, frogs, spiders along with rat and dog meat on a stick to name a just a few!

A less than yummy selection of snacks at the night market

On the whole here vegetarian food can be tricky to find, but there is enough around just to get by. Finding a restaurant every couple of days that had western food on the menu was always a welcome sight, even if one chilli pasta dish did leave half of the nerves in my face twitching with it’s sheer strength!

Most places that you go in China there is boiling water readily available, and so pot noodle type dinners are very common here and play a prominent role on the shelves of a lot of the shops. Most of them again are meat flavoured with meat chunks included, but fortunately these are individually bagged and therefore easy to leave out. Plain noodles have been on the menu a few times here for me!

The following day we jumped on our next train to head down to Xian which is best known for the site of the Terracotta Warrior excavations, and indeed on our second day there we duly paid a visit to the site. The excavation work is a very slow process due to the delicate nature of the artefacts, and to this day work is still continuing to expand the collection of warriors for show. The main trench is a vast size, and all of the areas where digging has been completed are lined with warriors that have (mostly) been reconstructed. Looking at the areas where digging is currently in progress, you can see the vast number of small pieces that need to be catalogued and matched up to bring these amazing pieces of work back to their former glory.

An example of one of the warriors from an exhibition area

There are 2 other trenches at the site which are comparatively smaller, but they also offer some great examples of the work which is going on here.

Us with rows of warriors in the background

On our final day in Xian we decided to head down to the South side of the city walls where you are able to hire a bike and ride along the top of the walls. Xian is one of the only places in China where the city walls are still complete making this a unique opportunity. The walls have a circumference of 14km which made for a reasonable amount of cycling, and although most of it was flat there were a few up and downhill sections to contend with. By the end of our circuit I was pretty knackered (it’s been a while since a bike and I were closely associated!) although Vicky, Janet and Becca who accompanied me looked like they could have gone on even further! We did however elect to get out of the hot sun and enjoy a nice cold ice cream under the shade of a café’s umbrella.

Along the top of the Xian city walls

Back to the hotel and bags packed again, it was back to the train station for yet another train; this time to Cheng Du.

Note: Most of our train travel was done on sleeper trains, in which each carriage would have a very narrow aisle down one side running past small cabins that would have 2 triple bunk beds within them. Only the bottom bunk would afford you any headroom however, with the middle and top bunks not even allowing you to sit up at all. The beds are pretty narrow and just about afford you enough comfort to get some sleep, although to call it a good night’s sleep would be pushing the boundaries of the truth! The only other potential pitfall with the trains is that the top bunk would also be right next to the air conditioning unit, and so half of the group (myself included) are now suffering from the humble common cold!

Back to Cheng Du and the most popular attraction in the area; The Giant Panda Breeding Centre. Most of the group made their way early in the morning to the breeding centre, with the hope of catching the Pandas having their breakfast (there are 2 main things pandas do; sleep and eat. If you don’t see them eating then you won’t see them doing an awful lot!). We were in luck, and in several of the enclosures we were able to observe the extremely cute pandas taking in their daily nutrients. The breeding centre is careful to feed them a very healthy diet including some vitamins that they would normally struggle to get in the wild on their staple diet of bamboo.

These cute fellas can eat up to 20-30kg of bamboo a day

There are now less than 2000 Giant Pandas in the world, with their only remaining habitat being in the western parts of China. The centre is working hard to ensure the continued breeding of these amazing creatures and so far has enjoyed a considerable success rate. Whether any growth in numbers like this can ever happen in the wild is doubtful, but with people like these on the panda’s side their chances will be significantly higher.

It was after our outing to see the pandas that we learnt that Emily had decided to leave the trip and fly to Australia where she would see some of her family before flying back to the UK. It is really sad to lose another member of the group, as it feels like we are getting smaller all the time, but we hope it will be the right decision for Emily and that she travels safely.

Just like in Kathmandu we were able to take part in a pub quiz at our hostel in Cheng Du (Sim’s Cozy Garden Hostel), and mine and Vicky’s team (team name will remain anonymous on this occasion for fear of corrupting any younger readers) was actually able to enjoy a very rare victory! I will admit that we did have significant help from the other members of our team who were all on their travels from America. Not a single question on football though!

Our next train journey would turn out to be a marathon one though. Making our way from Cheng Du to Lijiang was a near 36 hour journey spread across 2 trains. Tired and weary we made our way from the train station to our hotel which was it seemed only built very recently. The rooms were kitted out in a wonderfully modern style, and each room having it’s own large en-suite and a 40” TV (no not in the en-suite!).

Lijiang is commonly known for it’s proximity to Tiger Leaping Gorge, however due to recent heavy rainfall in the area we were informed that a lot of the paths that navigated the gorge were too dangerous to be used at the time. So saving ourselves the cost of a bus trip to the gorge we made our way down into the centre of the “Old Town” which is a maze of streets lined with local craft shops and restaurants. It can be fairly easy to get lost amongst the many streets that all have similar characteristics. There is no saying “we turned left by Boots and headed down towards WH Smith”, as there are no large retailers in a town like this (although several establishments from the UK are visible in the larger cities such as Beijing), but rather you will be saying “we came past that shop that sold tea” while looking round at the 13 different tea shops you can see just from where you are currently standing!

The entrance to one of the hotels in Lijiang

Wandering the streets of the town was fairly relaxing and fun however, as with no real time scale to stick to you were free to satisfy your curiosity by following any roads you liked and looking in all the shops you liked too.

In the absence of a trip to Tiger Leaping Gorge we instead made a visit to Black Dragon Pool, which is a lovely relaxing lake just outside of the city area. We enjoyed sitting in the sun and playing cards while enjoying the incredible views.

Part of the edge of the lake at Black Dragon Pool

Our next (and shortest at only two and a half hours) train journey took us to Dali for a single night at the excellent Jade Emu Hostel. Once again the hostel rooms were wonderfully kitted out, and they had even gone to the trouble of setting up their internet to let facebook and YouTube etc work (as these websites are normally all banned in China).

Vicky and Janet took the afternoon to do a horse riding trek up into the hills above the town, while I stayed and used the opportunity to put the finishing touches on the Nepal blog. By all accounts the girls enjoyed the horse riding, although they commented that the route was very steep and muddy in places. Hopefully the view from the top was worth it all for them.

The view from the summit where Vicky and Janet went riding

After our solitary night in Dali, we made our final Chinese train journey to the city of KunMing where we would be staying for our final 3 nights in China. KunMing is a fairly large city that however seems to have very little to do in it’s immediate vicinity. The city centre is packed with many multi-national stores that you would expect to find in most major cities, and to be honest it really lacked the cultural feeling that the small backstreets in the like of Lijiang had. It did however provide everybody with an opportunity to make sure they were stocked up on the essentials they would need before we would head on into Laos, mostly taking advantage of the huge Carrefour supermarket just down the road. China Post was required to send home all of our excess souvenirs and gifts that we had bought, making our bags a little lighter and more importantly making a bit of space for us to fill in the next few countries!

About the most interesting sight we saw in KunMing!

All that was required to complete our China experience was a sleeper bus journey that would take us over the border into Laos, and down to the city of Luang Prabang. More about that in the next blog though….