China: Guilin and Xingping

Guilin and Xingping 21.05-27.05

By the end of 3 days in Beijing, we were quite looking forward to escaping the smog. Unfortunately, escaping the smog meant taking a 28 hour (!!!!!) train to Guilin. We left at 09.30am and arrived around 1.30pm the following day! Thankfully we had booked in the hard sleeper class so at least we had a bed to stretch out on. Everyone in our cabin was extremely interested in us, and ever after we had established we spoke no Chinese, they all continued to speak at us and ask loads of questions. The elderly couple sitting opposite offered us various types of food including some seeds which you had to crack open with your teeth before eating them. We found this pretty difficult to the huge amusement of everyone around us. The next day about 15 people crowded around us to openly discuss our looks while pointing and laughing! In China it doesn’t seem to be rude to openly discuss these things. All the women were very impressed by Nina’s eyelids and eyelashes, while everybody seemed quite disgusted by my freckles!

We finally arrived in Guilin and spent around a day and a half exploring the city. Probably the most impressive thing that we saw was the Reed Flute Cave which had hundreds of stalactites which were lit up in various different colours. All of the rock formations had names which described what they looked like, but some didn’t make as much sense as others. For example, one described a formation as “A centipede frightened by a magical mirror”, which we really struggled to see. We had a walk around the rest of central Guilin and went to see the Sun and Moon pagodas which sat on the central lake. We had expected Guilin to be full of karst mountains but to be honest it became clear that to really enjoy the scenery you had to venture out of the city to the smaller towns. We decided that we would go to Yangshuo, a town around 70km south of Guilin, that was supposed to be a bit of a backpacker’s hub. However we realised that by mistake we had booked a hostel in the town of Xingping, an even smaller town that was 25km outside of Yangshuo. This turned out to be a blessing as we arrived at our hostel with a room overlooking the Karst Mountains and a lovely river.

Reed Flute Cave

Reed Flute Cave

Reed Flute Cave

Sun and Moon Pagodas

The view of the river and the Karst Mountains in Xingping is actually shown on the 20 Yuan Chinese banknote. The first thing we did was visit the 20 Yuan spot and take the exact picture. We then climbed up the nearby Laozhai mountain which the hostel staff said was an easy 30 minute walk. This was a complete LIE! It was more or less straight up and although we went up for sunset it was still about 35 degrees and 100% humidity. By the time we reached the top we were ridiculously hot and sweaty but were rewarded with an amazing view of the mountains at sunset.

The following day we woke up to heavy rain and were a bit worried as we had planned to go cycling. Luckily it cleared up and we were able to rent some mountain bikes and go and explore the local villages. Although we got lost a couple of times, it was amazing as there was nobody else around and we had the mountains entirely to ourselves. We were sad to say goodbye to Xingping as it was our last stop in China but made our way back to Guilin to catch a flight to Vietnam!

E

The 20 Yuan note viewpoint

View at sunset from he top of Laozhai mountain

Karsts and more karsts...!

The 20 Yuan note

Nina with the road to herself

In the middle of nowhere!

China: Beijing and the Great Wall

Beijing 18/05-21/05

We took a sleeper train from Xi’an to Beijing. We upgraded to a ‘hard bed’ this time around, which was a lot more pleasant than our previous overnight train. We spent three days in total looking around Beijing. We enjoyed our stay there, lots of places were very interesting but one of the minor setbacks was the multitude of Chinese tour groups! At every popular tourist site, huge groups of Chinese people, usually with matching hats on, would push and shove in order to get the perfect photo closely followed by their tour guide shouting through a microphone! This sort of destroyed the atmosphere in certain places but it was quite funny seeing people wearing matching group clothing!  On the first day we explored the Summer Palace. Once again it was rather touristy but one cool part was the Theatre which displayed props used in the old Chinese Operas and some actors were actually performing on the old stage which really brought the whole place to life! We also went to see the Olympic Park. This was a surprisingly lively and fun place although the smog made things a little hazy! For dinner we ate the famous Peking duck which was delicious! It was served with cucumber and plum sauce although it was a little different to the one at home as they served us nearly every part of the duck including the feet! 

The Summer Palace

The Summer Palace theatre

A performance in action

The 'Bird's Nest'

The 'Bird's Nest'

On the second day we visited the Forbidden City overlooking Tiananmen Square. As we gazed at that very famous photo of Mao, as if on cue, marching Communist music started belting out of the tannoy and water fountains began dancing and jumping in time with the tune!  The Palace was very grand and as it’s still all mostly authentic you can start to imagine what life was like for the dynasties. As expected, it was jam packed with tour groups our favourite of which being ‘The Fiji Police Force’. We also walked through Tiananmen Square which is surrounded by grand communist-esque buildings such as ‘The Great Hall of the People’. In the centre of the square is Mao’s mausoleum where it’s possible to see him embalmed body. Unfortunately whilst walking around we started to get caught in a dust storm! Every few minutes a large gust of wind would blow dust into our face and eyes so we headed to the subway for some respite! Our next stop was ‘The Temple of Heaven’ which was where Emperors used to come to pray for a good harvest. It was a very beautiful and unique structure painted with deep blues and greens. In our busy day we also managed to fit in visiting ‘The Lama Temple’ which is a Tibetan Buddhist Monastery. It was a large complex with many different shrines and had an aura of peace and tranquility in stark contrast to the hubbub outside!

The entrance to the Forbidden City

Tour Groups asssssemble

National Museum

Tiananmen Square & Forbidden City

The Temple of Heaven

The Temple of Heaven

Tour Group Mob

Lama Temple

Lama Temple

Our final excursion whilst in Beijing was of course a visit to the Great Wall! We’d decided to pay a little more money for a tour in order to get to a slightly less touristy part of the wall. The area we visited was called ‘Mutianyu’. Our guide was a slightly odd Chinese man called Tony whose English accent made him sound like he was from Only Fools and Horses! En route he provided us with some history of the wall and explained that we’d have three hours to walk along the wall on our own and then we’d be having some lunch. Once we arrived we could either walk up 2000 steps to reach the wall or take a chair lift- we of course chose the chair lift option! We were really lucky with the weather as it was warm with blue skies the entire day! When we reached the top you could see that the wall stretched continuously along the top of the mountains! It was beautiful!- and what’s more, it wasn’t heaving with people, so we were able to explore at our own pace! A lot of the wall has been reconstructed for the safety of tourists but if you walked to one end you could reach an old rubble section which had been there for around 700 years! The wall was originally built 2000 years ago by Emperor Quin, the same man who made the Terracotta Warriors. The wall was rebuilt many times afterwards but the most recent time was in the 1300s during the Ming Dynasty. We walked along taking lots of pictures and absorbing the atmosphere. We’d assumed that it would be quite an easy walk along the wall but actually there were continuous steep staircases moving up and down the mountain ridges! Our route down was quite unique as instead of walking down the 2000 steps, we were able to take a toboggan! It obviously felt a little strange at first to be tobogganing at the Great Wall of China but it was actually really fun!

N

China: Xi'an

Xi’an 15.05-18.05

We got to our hostel in Xi’an and figured out it had taken us 28 hours from door-to-door! We treated ourselves to huge breakfasts and had very long showers. The Hostel had amazing authentic Chinese décor with red lanterns and life-size terracotta warrior statues all over the place. The main reason for our visit to Xi’an was to see the Terracotta Warriors or ‘Soldier Horse Pottery’ as their name can be translated to from Chinese. The whole area surrounding the Warriors has unfortunately been planned out with loads of tourist shops, stalls, restaurants and there was even a ‘ghost experience’- which looked like business was going terribly. The complex itself was separated into 3 pits. Pit 1 is the ‘main event’, as you walk in you see thousands of perfectly excavated terracotta soldiers and horses all in battle formation staring at you. Each soldier is completely unique and the detail is amazing. They were built in around the 3^rd Century B.C. in order to protect Emperor Qin, the first emperor of China, in the afterlife and were discovered by farmers trying to dig a well! As Emperor Qin didn’t want them to be disturbed, they were never mentioned in any documents and he had all the builders of the complex killed after they had finished so nobody would know the location! Pit 2 was yet to be excavated and really showed how difficult it must be to uncover the soldiers without damaging them. Finally Pit 3 was a lot smaller and served as the ‘command centre’ of the Terracotta Warriors in Pits 1 and 2. The zoom lens was used in force and proved its worth as we managed to get some great close-up pictures of some of the soldiers.

We also had a good walk around Xi’an city and found the really interesting and lively Muslim Quarter which had loads of markets and street restaurants. We tried some fried tofu and went into a bakery and picked out an unusual looking pastry with Chinese writing on it that turned out to be delicious. We also wanted to get some dinner so we entered a restaurant, pointed at some noodles and gestured for them not to be too spicy. The noodles turned out to be served cold with a really bitter peanut sauce that left quite an aftertaste. Although, we weren’t complaining as our meal came to the total cost of a pound. The antique alley had lots of interesting bits and bobs including posters, tea-sets, Chinese games, jewellery and lots of communist-themed souvenirs. We couldn’t resist getting a pack of Mao playing cards and were very tempted by the Mao alarm clock!

E

China: Jiuzhaigou National Park

Jiuzhaigou 12.05-14.05

We took an 8 hour bus from Chengdu to Jiuzhaigou although it would have been a lot faster were it not for the food/toilet stops every 50 minutes! Once we reached Jiuzhaigou as soon as we exited the bus we were swamped by touts carrying large posters advertising their rooms. A friendly looking Tibetan woman approached us with quite a good deal on a room so we decided to take a chance and go for it. This proved to be a good decision as not only was the room really nice and great value for money, the woman also helped us to book our onward bus ticket for two days time! The hostel we stayed in was in a small town called Pengfeng about 20 minutes walk from Jiuzhaigou National Park entrance. The village had lots of nice Tibetan and Chinese restaurants. As we hadn’t really had Tibetan food since McLeod Ganj in India we decided to opt for that. Our dinner was delicious! At one point whilst we were eating a group of really drunk Chinese men came up to us and insisted we ‘cheers’ them with alcoholic wines! I think the wine was affecting their memory as we ended up having to ‘cheers’ them about 5 times!

The day we went to the National Park we were up at 6am as we were determined to see as much as possible! The park opened at 7 and we were outside queuing at 6:45am (although obviously this queue completely disintegrated when the ticket office opened as Chinese people don’t understand queuing). With a little use of the elbows, we were able to take the first bus to the top of the park. Jiuzhaigou gets around 1 million tourists a year and so have created a useful bus system which can take you to all the main scenic attractions. As we only had one day we decided that we’d take the bus to the furthest point and then walk as much as possible back down to the entrance. So our first stop was ‘The Primeval Forest’, at 3000m at 7:45am it was absolutely freezing! We’d dressed for warm spring weather so only made a very short tour around the forest as Ed’s nose was starting to go blue! Luckily a little bit further down the weather was a lot better! The park was absolutely stunning.  We walked through lakes, streams, waterfalls and mountains. Some lakes were so still and clear they looked like mirrors and others were so strikingly blue you couldn’t quite believe they were real! The multitude of Chinese tourists seemed to just take the bus everywhere, take a picture and then move on, so some areas were quite busy but actually walking from place to place we basically had the park to ourselves! We ended up walking about 23km! We were tired but it was just so beautiful we wanted to keep going! We stayed in the park until nearly closing time and ended up taking over 400 photos!

The only down side to Jiuzhaigou was that it was rather out in the sticks so to get to our next destination of Xi’an we had to take an 8 hour bus followed by a 15 hour train ride! As we had been unsure of our travel timings we had to book the train on the day which meant that we had to sit for 15 hours over night in the ‘hard seat’ section of the train. I can confirm that ‘hard seat’ is an accurate term to describe it. It actually ended up being a rather amusing train journey. We had a hilarious English/Chinese (we speaking English, he speaking Chinese) conversation with the man opposite us. We just about managed to explain we were from England and we were going to Xi’an, Beijing and Guilin! The group of guys across the way relentlessly gambled throughout the night and one man was drinking hard spirits at 6 in the morning! Just before bed (which consisted on sitting on our hard seats and putting our heads on the table), I wrote my diary which I do daily. At this point everyone gathered around and simply stared at me! I had no idea why until I noticed that they were staring at my hand! Nobody in China writes with their left hand!!!!! Apparently from birth you are told that you must write and use chopsticks with your right hand! Therefore, they think I’m some sort of freak of nature! The man opposite even made me try and write with my right hand to check that I wasn’t lying!

N