A quick one (while he's away)

S 31 54.700 E 115 57.100 - Perth - 15 January 2009

Ok, so I get complaints, I write way too much. Ok, maybe I don't write all that often but when I do, the entries tend to be a bit long and have lots of detail. "I have to speed read through your entries", "you should edit more", blah blah blah.

Loads of pictures in albums in this directory. The internet wasn't so great in Cambodia and Thailand so I didn't upload for a long time. And some last albums here, the rest of Thailand and Malaysia and then finally a few in Australia.

Well, ok, for the time impaired readers, let me see if I can speed up the whole thing for you. Perth is hot, Fremantle is less hot and pretty and by the ocean. It is sort of the end of the major travel on this trip, but it looks like it will be a while before I can look for a job and actually settle down here. But I dawdle, trip report then.

August, train from London to take the ferry to Norway. Cool fjords, way expensive, great camping. Sweden, slightly less expensive and a lovely week of camping on an island. Finland, grr, apartment fell through, to Estonia for a week in an apartment to relax, then a quick few days through Finland and the train onto Russia.

September by then, St Petersburg, a few days there seeing the stuff you are supposed to see and struggling with Russian. Just a few days in Moscow and onto the train across Siberia. A very cool 4 days watching the country go by, zipping through time zones and finally getting off at Irkursk and spending a few days on Orkhon Island in Lake Baikal.

October now, we take the train to Mongolia and head off on a 10 day trip around Mongolia, through the Gobi with some people we had met in Siberia. Then we take another shorter 5 day trip nearby Ulan Batar. Winter hits when we are there, deep snow to hike through before we catch the train to China and we head back into autumn.

China is awesome and the planned three weeks turns into every possible day of our 30 day visa. We take sort of a typical route, Beijing to Pingyao to Luoyang to Xi'an and finally down to Chengdu. There we have a nice 5 day bird tour up towards Tibet. Last few days of China through Yuanyang and over the border to Sapa, Vietnam.

November by now, a quite special home stay with a Red Dao hill tribe family and then the train to Hanoi, lots of yellow buildings and gigantic bundles of wire on the power lines. Another train to Hue, the old imperial capital of Vietnam and very close to the old DMZ area. A sleeper bus to Hoi An and a few days on the beach there. Train to Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) so that we can make a dash up to Cat Tien, a national park with lots of pretty birds. Back to Saigon and then catching a three day boat trip (ok, lots of buses) up the Mekong to Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

Mid December now. A few days looking at Phnom Penh before heading out to Siem Reap. Time is starting to run short now, we have to make it to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia by 12 January for our flight. We spend a few days overdosing on temples in Ankgor, which is totally cool but overwhelming. We wanted to see the Prek Toal bird sanctuary on Tonle Sap Lake, but it was really expensive to get there (would have been like 300 USD for both of us) and apparently the storks haven't shown up yet and all that was there were some normal wader birds that you can see anywhere. So, we didn't stay over Christmas then and left early to head off to Bangkok.

Christmas eve we arrive in Bangkok. Christmas day wasn't overly festive because we picked a super cheap place to stay and they woke us up at 6 am when they were cleaning the bathrooms and with a loud tv in the lobby, so Christmas was spent finding somewhere else to stay a little nicer and getting myself a haircut. Most of the rest of the few days in Bangkok was spent figuring out where to go next. We didn't go to the south part of Cambodia to the beach there, or didn't go to northern Thailand, so Koh Tao seemed like it would be a nice place to spend a week or so just relaxing and also doing some diving.

We spend 4 days, including New Years Eve, on the east side of Koh Tao in a rather isolated bungalow. The roads are tough to get there and it was just the one group of bungalows, but on a beautiful cove with some fantastic snorkeling. Four days of doing nothing but swimming, snorkeling, eating, sleeping, and chasing away spiders from the bed.

Then we head over to the other side of the island. Koh Tao has mostly become known now as the cheapest place on earth to get your open water diving certification, so yeah, I want to do that, sign me up. It is a huge contrast from the other side of the island, loads of resorts, lots of people, and all the rest of that. I spend 3 days getting my certification, sitting in classrooms and doing 4 training dives. Classroom stuff is boring but the dives are really great. C does some fun dives while I'm in class and then we do a night dive together and one more day dive. I'm hooked. Luckily Australia is diving country.

Now we are basically out of time. Well, stupid Thailand changed their visa policy right before we got there, no more 30 days, it is only 15 days now so we got hit with a fine when we left after 16 days. We then dash across Malaysia to catch our flight. A night in Georgetown on Penang and another night in Kuala Lumpur before flying out. Malaysia seemed interesting, I didn't give it much of a chance being almost an after thought after all the planning what went into the rest of it. But KL is on the way to lots of places, I assume I'll be back there some day.

Then Australia, after five months and one day traveling, here we are. Australia has dawdled on my permanent visa application, should have been done by December but no known date in sight now. We had planned on goofing around in Australia for a month or so before heading to Melbourne and getting serious about where to live, finding jobs, and all that. The job market is a little worrisome considering how the world economy seems to be crumbling. Anybody need a senior level Java J2EE engineer? Drop me a line.

So yeah, another entry with lots of words but it covers five months. More stuff later, probably go back and write about China and other places I didn't say much about yet.

I want magic bus - you can't have it, or I call that a bargain, the best I've ever had

N 22 19.963 E 103 50.598 1504m - Sapa, Vietnam - 22 November 2008

(Funny, as I write this, I am sitting in a sort of cafe in Sapa, Vietnam, the day is foggy out, it is early and people are starting to move around, but I can just see out of the corner of my eye two women, in brightly colored hill people sort of costumes just dying to catch my eye so they can get me to buy some embroidery or something like that. This has been going on for at least 10 minutes now.)

Our visas expire on the 21st and we need to be out of China by then. We go through all sorts of different plans for our last week in China to try and get to the border in time yet still see some things. Our bird trip in Sichuan was sort of longer than originally planned, but that's fine, it was great and worth the time, probably the best part of the whole China trip.

But Kunming is the next stop after Chengdu and we don't have a lot of plans for it, hopefully try to get to Dali or somewhere nice. Kunming is more or less another big Chinese city and is mostly nice for just a bit of rest and recovery after lots of travel through Sichuan. There doesn't seem to be time for Dali so we go to Yuanyang instead.

Now to get out of Yuanyang, there is a 7 am bus to Hekou and it is about 150 km to there. Not sure how long it will take. The border closes at 5 pm and we need to be out today. Once we are across, then we can either stay in Lao Cai (hopefully not, apparently it is the Most Boring Town In The World) or try to get to Sapa. Minibuses are supposed to only run until early afternoon and might not be running when we finally make it across. But we are optimistic, it is only 150 km, how long could that take? We have water and some biscuits and nuts and should be ok for food and water.

Well, the 720 bus isn't exactly a 720 bus. It is strange, every other bus we have taken in China, it is scheduled for like 1130 and it either completely full or everybody is on the bus by 11 and it leaves at 1105, so we are taking no chances. We would have missed our bus to Yuanyang from our connection in Guiju if somebody hadn't come to find us to let us know it was leaving. (Of course in Russia, the bus would have just left and it would have taken us ages to find out and the next bus would have been tomorrow.) So, we are taking no chances and we show up at 645.

Funny then, the bus station (luckily it is just about 10 meters from our hotel) is almost completely deserted, except for one woman in the ticket booth (or maybe it was more the parking lot, the bus station was both) warming herself over a small fire. We say we are going to Hekou and she laughs because we are so early. Ok, she also laughs because we mispronounce it badly, which happens a lot, no matter how many times we hear something pronounced, we just can't quite get it.

Another hour then in the dawn and cold people start showing up and loading onto the bus. We are happy we are the first stop because buses fill fast and getting on later might not go so well with a full bus. We leave at like 8, or maybe it was later than that and start heading down the hills. The fog that surrounded Yuanyang for most of the time we were there seems to have lifted and it is quite pretty. We stop at the main bus station for the town, already an hour late there, see some really tempting looking sleeper buses and then head on.

We have another hour going down to get to the new town. Yuanyang is split into new town and old town. The scenery is still nice, starting to get more tropical, the beginning of bananas and all that. In new town we drop off a few passengers and pick up some new ones. One family looks like they are moving house, huge bags and a room fan. (Take note of this family, they will be important later.) Twice in China, once in Beijing and then again in Kunming, we posted a whole lot of things out of our bags back to Australia and the decrease in weight has been lovely. This last time was finally the end of the camping things, our sleeping bags and a few other things like that. Up until China, I had been a bit embarrassed by how much stuff we were carrying, but on all the buses, we generally have had the least amount of stuff, their loads consisted of gigantic builder bags which took two people to carry.

Outside of new town, we stop again for quite a while. There is a convergence of our bus and a few minibuses and a whole lot of passengers and baggage. We must spend at least 30 minutes here as the driver smokes and people argue about who will get on the bus and what bags they can take, or whether they will take a minibus. The Chinese woman in front of us yells let's go in Chinese. We wait longer and finally there is a bit of movement. A few more passengers load on with their seed bags and mud covered spades and hoes.

Then this next part of the trip is quite a blur for me. We go for hours on really bad roads. It is the smokiest bus we have been on in China, most everybody smokes, not just a chain smoking driver. At least we can open the window to try and get some of the smoke out. (Also note this point for later in the story.)

The most frustrating part of the trip, well, ok I have to put C's sweater against the window frame (another point to note for later) and lean on it instead of banging my arm in the same place for hours as we go over bumpy bad roads. The most frustrating part though is that we spend almost this entire time driving under a really plush looking expressway. I see a sign, Hekou is still 87 km away, according to the sign on the expressway. We slowly come to 83 km and I stop looking after that.

In a way, this expressway sort of symbolizes a lot that I found in China. There is this luxurious road, raised up on pillars for miles and miles across the land, bulldozed across the landscape. It looks nice and brand new but also it appears to be cracking and falling apart already. We don't use it, I assume it isn't finished yet or is too expensive for normal people (or people who ride on buses instead of taking their own car). The road isn't used by locals who have had their road destroyed by the heavy traffic using it (and probably by the traffic required to create a huge road like that) and live underneath the pillars out of sight of those on the expressway.

We continue under the expressway for hours, along side the Red River on one side and miles and miles of banana trees on the other side. There also appear to be pineapples and huge plantations of some sort of sap tree, not maple as far as I could tell, or maple that I know, with collection cups on each of them. We stop a one town and the child behind me leans out the window and throws up, into my window. I get some on me but C's sweater gets the worst of it. She is completely pissed off, I'm mostly just a bit shocked. She finds a plastic bag to wrap it in, we clean up the best we can and she scowls at the kid for much of the rest of the journey.

Ok, it is just too long and too much to write about the rest of the bumps and the rest of that. Hekou, finally at like 4 pm, after about 8 hours of traveling. I guess that does sort of average about 20 km/hour. We rush through Hekou, do we cross first to get it all done and out in time or find something to eat?

Our last Chinese meal is some fast food place, they put bits of different dishes on a place, I guess an all you can eat thing. It is all a bit cold but isn't horrible. I'm pretty tired and out of it by now, so it doesn't really matter much. I will miss Chinese food though, what a great run of great food we had there.

The road leading up to the border is quite fantastic. There are hundreds of different sort of handcarts, big wagons, fully packed bicycles, and anything else that could carry anything by hand filled with boxes and vegetables and all sorts of goods, all lined up to cross over into Vietnam.

We pass through customs and exit the country, not such an ordeal as I might have expected. They x-ray our bags and then ask to see what books we have. The rumor is that they are confiscating Lonely Planet China guides, not liking some of the content, mostly at the Hekou border crossing. No idea why they would do it leaving the country, maybe just because they can. Searching for other Hekou border crossings seems to bring up lots of tales of woe. But we flummoxed them, I pull out a Birds of China book as well as two Chinese dictionaries (we love China, you know) and we had also posted our China guide from Kunming and switched over to a generic SE Asia guide. So we didn't have anything for them to take. Ha.

We cross the bridge to Vietnam and we are out. No visa worries now for about a month when our Vietnam one will run out, but we should be out of here way before that.

Outside of the border, we are immediately hit upon by the touts. Motorcycle taxis, buses, loads of crap to buy. We know the minibus to Sapa should cost about 30,000 dong (about $2) per person but don't quite know where the bus station is or where to catch the bus. We get loads of offers to get us to the bus station and then to Sapa starting at like 100,000. The guide says the station is like 3 km away, which probably isn't so bad to walk but no idea what way it is. We finally get one guy down to 75k (yeah, totally overcharged us but we are tired) for a ride to the station and then to Sapa on a minibus. A security guard watches the whole transaction is amused by the foreigners getting ripped off. Ok, it is only about $1, but the principal of the thing really annoys me.

I think he goes off to find the minibus to bring it to us, which makes it a little less painful, instead of just flagging down a passing one with Sapa clearly marked on the front of it. At least I hope so. We have a bit of a commotion paying him, making sure that he actually pays the minibus instead of just taking the money and running. He does run because he gave me 2500 for change instead of 25,000. Ok, I can handle bargaining badly and getting ripped off that way but getting short changed, that sucks. We get the minibus to circle around looking for him and C goes and yells at him to get the correct change. Yes, that's pretty cool. He laughs and gives us the correct change then and thinks we will do ok in Vietnam.

The minibus then goes to the bus station. Ok, figures. Then cruises around town to look for more passengers, another 30 minutes of that, picking up a few locals and finally head off towards Sapa. Sapa is straight out of town and up a mountain. We climb and climb and head back into the fog. The roads seem a little bit more civilized than in China and get excited to see a couple riding up the hill with my panniers and a nice looking touring bike. Sigh, if we could have done that. China, I think I would have been scared riding on those roads, but here seems like it would be doable.

In Sapa then, hostel touts appear out of the fog and mob around us. We try to get a different spirit about them, instead of getting down about it, see if it can be nice. A group of like five of us head over a few blocks towards the hotel section of town and we tour three different rooms to see what they have, get the different option packages and make a choice. They all seem like nice rooms, range from $8-10, then you can have a heater for another $1-3, or a dvd player or better windows, or internet in the hotel, etc, etc. Friendly Hotel seems fine, the host is helpful, let's just stay there. We also look at the Lonely Planet recommended ones for fun, but they are all full. I guess it is a bit lazy, just picking the ones in there, but it must be like gold when a hotel gets a mention in there.

The town is foggy and we can't see anything. We walk around town looking for dinner and have a a look at a lot of menus, most of them are pretty expensive (ok on a relative Vietnam scale). We wrongly pick the less expensive one and the meal is pretty boring and bland and not great. But we are so tired by then it doesn't really matter. It was something and now we can go back and go to sleep. In bed by 9.30, does it get any better than that? Welcome to Vietnam. I better get my bargaining skills honed quite quickly or I will be in trouble.

I'm livin' on Chinese rocks

N 23-something, E 102-something - 20 November 2008 - Yuanyang

Well, an abbreviated post, I'm in an Internet cafe in Yuanyang (no internet at the hotel or room) and don't have my diary and notes with me. We just stuffed ourselves with our last Chinese dinner and have an early morning tomorrow, catching a 7 am bus to Hekou to make sure we are out of China by tomorrow when our visas expire. It will be sad leaving, especially the food. Up to now, Mongolia had been my favorite place we had been but China has been just really amazing, great food everywhere, cool things to see, really nice people, and a rather challenging but compelling language.

Yeah, maybe I'll write up our bird trip eventually as well as the rest of the month in China that I haven't written about yet. There is so much yet to write about. But then, Sid already wrote about some of our bird trip and Tibetan adventures here, and there are lots of good pictures there and all that, so I can let that stand for a bit.

Today we spent the day in the back of a small motorbike taxi going around seeing rice terraces. Ok, it is better than it sounds, except for the motorbike taxi. A lot of the way was on really bumpy roads and it took a few hours to go there and back and we were here for one day when the fog decided to roll in and cover the whole region. BaDa was clear and was really amazing, DuoYiShu was completely covered in fog and we couldn't see a thing. In MengPing, we had barely stopped before hawkers were shoving stuff into our faces (and into the vehicle), look postcards, needlepoint stuff, blah blah. My only regret there is that I didn't take a picture of them, it was just so funny, about six of them all yelling at us, pushing their stuff at us.

Well, I'm sure there will be more in Vietnam to take pictures of. This has been the first place in a while with really aggressive hawkers (actually just that one stop today) everywhere else in Yunnan has been pretty mellow. We are a little more off the tourist route now and it isn't really high season now. Not like being on the Great Wall and being followed for miles by persistant hawkers, "waterbeercoke" while pushing t-shirts and postcards in your face. After Beijing and Pingyao, it was mostly just the scrum at train stations and bus stations and if you happened to go down a especially touristly street, followed by lots of "hello, look here" and the standard followup question, "where are you from", I guess to engage you in a conversation before the sales pitch.

But rice terraces, they really are pretty amazing, entire hillsides, looking like an OS map, contour lines and shining rice paddies with different colors of water, from black to tan to silver. Even the fog was nice, when it wasn't too much to obscure everything. It added a nice atmosphere and highlight. We might have flumoxed the driver a bit, a little distracted sometimes from the terraces by something flying overhead. Sorry Sid, I'm not sure we learned our lessons very well, we can't identify them immediately like you. Some sort of buzzards, maybe, or there was that one with the distincive wing shape, curved like a bow, which I can't remember now of what it is distinctive. Or the one with the clearly spread fingers on the wingtips. The shame. But they looked cool circling over the terraces and were nice to watch with binoculars as we tried to ignore the hawkers pushing stuff in front of us.

Anyways, as I always seem to say, more later. Too much stuff to see, too much already seen and not enough time to write.

Just for you, here's a love song

N 30 41.010 E 104 05.103 - 16 November 2008 - Chengdu

Ok, more directories of photographs, this should get us through the current part of China now. Sorry, just bought a new camera last week so I took a whole lot of pictures. And lots of them were of birds, which are hard to get before they fly away and you end up with empty tree pictures. Oh well, sorting later when I get to Australia.

Anyways, I know I haven't written about Beijing, Pingyao, Luoyang, Xi'an, or even Chengdu yet, really not a lot of time to write and I've spent a lot of time trying to get better at Chinese. I'll try to get back to those and write about them at some point. But this last week was quite a nice trip through Sichuan and over nearly in to Tibet (umm, ok the Xizang Autonomous Region) up over the Tibetan Plateau looking at birds and seeing the countryside.

C had been determined to find some sort of birding trip, especially since we missed our opportunity when we were in Sweden (stupid English test) and spent (much to my annoyance) a lot of time searching for different sorts of bird trips in China and stumbled upon Sid and Meggie who said they could lead us around and gave us a quote that seemed pretty reasonable for 5 days, straining our already way over budget journey but then again so much else has. We jettisoned the idea of the Yangtze river cruise (already rode a lot of ferries and saw lots of fjords in Norway and didn't fancy the idea of sharing crowded cabins on a ship with lots of smoking Chinese tourists) so that freed up some money we had thought we would spend there. And we are in this amazing place in China, when else would we get to do something like this. Happily it lived up to our expectations and was a great five days.

Chengdu is yet another huge Chinese city. We half heartedly went through some of the temples but mostly just kind of chilled out and also spent a lot of time shopping for a camera (C's camera died and mine isn't so great anymore). China isn't a great place to buy electronics and it took a lot of looking and bargaining to get it down to about what you would expect to pay in London. But the camera is nice and I loved having it on the trip.

On Tuesday, we were up and ready for our 8 am start. Sid and Meggie were caught in traffic and were a little late. Traffic has been rather mad all over China as more and more people ditch their cycles for cars or even just electric scooters. It was a bit sad to be here and not see the masses of bikes that had always heard about here. China has become just another crowded motorized city and we spent a whole lot of time stuck in traffic or really lost. Road building is booming here and so much is torn up or old signs haven't been taken down and no new signs put up that reflect the changes. Also, the roads seem to be falling apart so quickly too, roads that have been barely used. I suppose either shoddy cheap materials or just overly used by lots of traffic and lots of heavy trucks.

Our plan is to start out slow, get us out sort of into the country, see some birds and get us into the rhythm of what to look for and just how to do it and then plan the rest of the trip after that. Since we are in Chengdu, everybody who comes here goes to see the pandas. But it is also a park and Sid thought there would be some good birds for us to see there and we could see the pandas as well.

Sichaun suffered some pretty devastating earthquakes a few months ago and there is evidence of it all over still. The panda reserve was almost in the very middle of it all and suffered a lot of damage and much has been moved around since then. It seems like this region has suffered quite a bit since then, especially since a lot of the tourist trade dried up pretty quickly. But yeah, there were still pandas there, the beloved national symbol of China and featured on countless products all over the region, even cigarettes.

The birding was pretty cool. You know, you can just go random places, they don't even need to be pretty and there are birds around to see. A lot of our trip was just stopping by the side of the road and wandering off a few meters and there were lots of things. We would even wander around people's backyards, in their farmland, which was a really interesting way to see China. C was totally into the birds. I liked it but don't have the same capacity for watching them, but the other things to see certainly kept my attention.

I have lists of birds from the trip, but I'm not quite sure how to present them in anything but a boring list that would mean nothing to anybody who hadn't been there or who isn't just super tweaky about birds. In the panda reserve, we see Mandarin ducks, wild ones who haven't had their wings clipped and Sid gets really excited about that. We tromp around the back areas of the reserve seeing kingfishers and loads of small little things that somehow Sid could instantly recognize even before I could find them in my binoculars.

The other interesting thing about the back areas was the laborers. China might try to project an image of being very technologically advanced, cutting edge and all that, but really, almost all the work in China is done by that guy with a shovel and a wicker basket on his back. The amount of manual labor we saw was just overwhelming, I guess since it is cheaper to hire a worker than any other way of getting work done. Labor costs are almost negligible.

The pandas, yeah, they were pretty cool. I actually think I like the red pandas better. It was a bit sad seeing endless tourists (mostly Chinese) taking flash pictures of them and all that. Seems like a sad life for a panda, but they seemed to just move slowly and seemed happy having bunches of bamboo chucked at them for their meals.

We leave the park and head over to a nearby lake with a boardwalk around it and have a picnic and plan our route for the rest of the trip. Going to Moxi tonight, Kangding the next day, then over to Tagong and then work our way back to Chengdu over the next two days. A lot of this area is just slowly opening up again after the recent events in Tibet, it has all been closed to foreigners and only in the past week or two are the roadblocks starting to come down. We still see hundreds of police cars and army vehicles (funny, they are mostly white Land Cruisers) over the five days, especially as we get closer.

Much of the rest of the day was spent getting out of Chengdu through the horrible traffic jams and then started on the expressway climbing up into the mountains and stopping for the night in Moxi.

So much more to write about, but no time today to finish. Didn't even get to the subject, the mountain that had been commercialized with "The Love Song" written all across it which annoyed Sid to no end. And Tibet...

But another day.

I am just a new boy, a stranger in this town

N 39 53.420 E 116 22.349 - 25 October - Beijing

A lot more pictures now, here and here and other directories in that same area. This should finish up Mongolia and gets us into China pictures.

Arrival in Beijing after a long train journey. Last night was a late night. The border crossing was tiring, they kept waking us up for different parts of it. Even then if you could sleep, the boogie changing (putting different sized wheels on the train) was loud and there were lots of jolts and bumps. One of them was so strong that it nearly knocked me off my feet when I was standing in the corridor watching and had knocked all sorts of things off the table in the compartment.

Our cabin mates were late sleepers which is a bit annoying, I had to creep up the window shade early in the morning and could only peer out a small crack at first and then a little more as we went along. I watched the sunrise and caught my first glimpse of China.

Then land is vaguely the same as the last part through Mongolia but the buildings have really changed a lot. No more gers and no more wandering flocks of animals. There is a lot of agriculture, mostly corn, and it seems to be harvest time since all that is left in the fields are dry stalks and there are yellow ears of corn stacked up, hanging up, spread out on the sides of roads, drying all over the place. There are a lot of adobe looking squat houses and when we go through towns, they are quite spread out and have lots whitish drab looking buildings.

At like 9 am, we start going past sections of the Great Wall. It is nice our cabin mates are sleeping but you really have to see this, so I open the shade the whole way and wake them up, look, the Great Wall. You know, the Great Wall is one of those huge attractions, so totally hyped, talked about, millions of photographs, but really, it deserves it. Even from a distance, the section we can see, a few miles of wall winding through the mountains and up and over, damn, that is really cool.

It disappears over a mountain range then after a while and we head on, into more hilly regions, through tunnels and past lots of terraced hill sides. The group of us share some beer and peanuts and practice counting in Chinese, especially the various hand signs for different numbers.

Then Beijing, we head through more industrial areas, more built up areas and eventually arrive at the station. I was sort of expecting a rather bewildering experience. Billboards, words, are all over the place. It is strange being somewhere that the words are just completely different. In the rest of the places, Russia included, they were all in different languages but at least you would work out what they say. Here, it feels like what it would be like to not be able to read at all, that letters and words are just strange squiggles.

Fortunately for us, the Olympics rolled in here a few months before and I don't know what Beijing was like a year or two ago, but I suspect it wasn't so English-izied. Most useful signs are subtitled, or at the least they are also in Pinyin. So at least instead of looking for a symbol that looks like a tv set with radiation coming off the bottom of it, you can just look for Chong Jie Tang, or whatever, to just throw some random words out there.

The thing that doesn't quite come across though from looking at maps and trying to work out how to get somewhere before you try it is just how big it all is. Roads are enormous and wide, public squares go on for miles, and walking what looks like a few blocks on the map takes a long time.

We take the subway a few stops, to the closest stop to the hostel, walk a really long way, get a bit lost since we are staying in a hutong and those are not on normal streets, and finally make it there quite tired. Hutongs seem to be unique to Beijing, the sort of neighborhoods that a large percentage of people live in in the city. They are small little streets off the main streets, like little worlds hidden back out of view from the main streets. The fronts have shops and restaurants, people are out front playing cards or games with big round pieces, pushing around carts of food, bicycles and mopeds are racing down the streets weaving around everything, and behind it all, in courtyards are lots of residences. I think a lot of Beijing Bicycle as we walk around these areas over the next few days.

But our hostel is right in the center of one of the hutongs (I think it means 'similar whiskers' but I'm not completely sure, it might have some other meaning) and we spend lots of time wandering around them. We pick a restaurant at random, have a very nice waiter who speaks English fairly well, who tries to correct our really bad Chinese and help us out a bit, and order far too much food (although we eat it all) and pay not so very much for it. The food prices are fairly cheap but I suspect that if we spoke Chinese it would be even cheaper. The prices printed on the Chinese menus and the ones on the translated picture ones are different, we pay the tourist prices.

So, first day in China, it seems exciting, people have been really friendly and we are tired. There will be a lot to do and see.

There are 9 million bicycles in Beijing

Well, it has been ages since I've written much. I had more to write about Mongolia, but I better move on now. I've been in China for almost two weeks and there is so much there to write about too. China has been really amazing, maybe my favorite place I've been on this trip. There is just so much to write about, I'm not quite sure where to start.

N 43 39.269 E 111 58.916 - 23 October 2008, somewhere over the Chinese border.

We caught the train early in the morning from Ulan Batar and rode most of the day across Mongolia towards the border. It was beautiful, the entire area was covered with a light snow. I was so used to seeing Mongolia all brown and dusty, the white really suited it. The landscape was slightly hilly and our train wound up and down a bit and gradually left the snowy parts and onto flatter browner areas again.

We had new people in our compartment, an English couple who were traveling until probably April. Our entire carriage was mostly western travelers, we were on the tourist train. Our other friends, who we had traveled through Mongolia and the end of Siberia were a few compartments down. When our compartment-mates produced some ayrag, the fermented mares milk we had been hearing about for a few weeks but never quite saw anywhere, we sampled some and passed it on to everybody else so they could experience that before they left Mongolia. I can't quite decide if it was vile or if it wasn't so bad. We had tried to find it all across Mongolia, but it seems you can only really buy it from kids on the street selling it in old reused plastic bottles. It was a funny last taste to leave in your mouth has Mongolia passed by for the last time.

We spent most of the rest of the journey all practicing Chinese, trying to be ready. Basic things like counting and hello and the rest of that. What a really difficult language. The characters are difficult enough, thousands of them (I believe that 8000 is the common amount the average person uses) which make up compound words but then the sounds are really difficult too. The sound 'ma' can be pronounced 5 different ways, with a rising inflection, downward then rising, high inflection, etc. Each of the inflections is a completely different word. In addition, each of the sounds (which maps to a character) usually has a bunch of different meanings based on the context.

Then the words themselves are generally composed of two characters, put together to create some sort of meaning. Bei-jing means north capital, lunch is composed of noon-rice, China is middle-country, America is beautiful-country, etc. Wow. At least the grammar is totally easy though. Translations into English you see commonly make more sense now, considering how sentences are usually composed in Chinese characters. Although I have been quite amused by them. I might have to compose a list of my favorites, I've taken loads of pictures of various ones.

I have to say, that I have been completely fascinated by Chinese though, I might try to learn it over the next few years. I would love to come back to China some day and it seems like it would be even better with a better command of the language, feel like it would make it more accessable. And you would be able to tell better when people are calling you a foreign devil or some such thing like that. Yeah, I'll still standout totally as a tourist, but even a little bit of Chinese seems to go a long way in conversations.

The border crossing was quite interesting. It wasn't quite as intense in terms of official stuff, searches and passports and stamping things as coming out of Russia. It was night by the time it started and was very late when it all finally finished. The customs man was quite nice and funny, knocking on the doors, please wake up, I have your passports.

The most time consuming part of it was the boogie shed. Mongolia and China have different sized train tracks, so before we cross over, they need to change the wheels on our train. It takes like an hour or so. They move the carriages into a special shed, like 4 parallel tracks with lots of lifting equipment, separate each of the carriages, bash them around back and forth for a while pulling them apart (we were still in the carriages, some people trying to sleep) and then they pick them up and slide different wheels underneath and put us back down again. It was fun to watch the different carriages on other tracks being lifted up and watching the Chinese workers dancing around outside (it was freezing cold that night). Finally by midnight or so, we had new wheels and our passports back and headed into China.

I'm hungry and we need to do some things in Xi'an today, so the rest of this will have to wait until later. But next stop, Beijing.