David and Edel

Largo do Senado street in Macau.

Macau is a funny little place – one part Havana with old colonial buildings, one part Rio de Janeiro with black & white cobble-stone patterns a la Copacabana, and six parts Las Vegas with massive casinos housed in oddly shaped buildings, musical fountains playing “Luck be a Lady”, and neon, neon everywhere, blinking neon, pulsating neon. It was a Portuguese colony for hundreds of years even before Hong Kong became British, and once it had lost all trade to Hong Kong it reinvented itself as a casino heaven that now pulls in more money than Vegas. Portugal was actually trying to hand it back to China for decades but the Communist Party didn’t want the crazy mess of gambling and prostitution…until by the 90’s they had realized that money is more fun than socialist ideals! It became another “special economic zone” of China just after Hong Kong.

Macau casino quarter at night.

We spent 2 nights in Macau, walking around town, enjoying some great sea-food, and walked up to an old fort and museum on a hill overlooking town (good displays on the great ocean voyages and the silk road) but skipped out on the gambling which I hold to be a special tax for people who can’t do math – something I like pointing out to friends and family members who enjoy buying one or two lottery tickets a year… I can be a real pain sometimes 😀 . We did visit one casino/hotel complex one evening though, to catch a Cirque-du-Soleil show – very lucky with the seats and ended up on 2nd row even though we only bought mid-class tickets at about 50 euro each. The show, Zaia, was fantastic – it’s on a custom made stage for this show here (with one show every evening) with a big sphere rising from the floor and floating around the ceiling with different things projected on it, great acrobats bouncing around in amazing costumes looking like some sort of psychedelic wood-elf space-aliens.. While some acrobats are performing in the foreground there are usually lots of other things going on in the background, an astronaut on an antique high-wheel bicycle powered by fire-crackers flying through the air or a polar bear slowly floating by… Great show – like the visual equivalent of listening to Shpongle music..

More fun on Macau – when you arrive and the networks pick up your mobile phone all the big casinos bombard you with text message ads for hours to get you to go! There’s also direct casino ferries from Hong Kong and free casino buses everywhere to reel you in. And a final interesting note worth mentioning – we found an inventive fast-food place called “Ireland’s Potato” that served french fries with kiwi flavoured yogurt and sported the slogan: “Ireland’s proverb says: There are two things in the world that can’t be joked: 1 marriage, 2 potato“!

We left Hong Kong to head for Guilin and the Li River area. As soon as we were through immigration, just a few meters across the border, all sign-posts changed back from proper English into the funny Chinese variety that we’d started to miss over the last few days. At the station it turned out all the trains to Guilin were booked full so we ended up buying first class which was the only thing available – had our own cabin and bathroom on the train, and in fact much more space than we’d actually had in the room where we stayed in Hong Kong last few nights! Once in Guilin we only stayed one night, enough to book a cruise down the Li river to Yangshuo for the next day. The highlight for Guilin was watching Edel skillfully butter toast with chopsticks in the hotel breakfast buffet 😀

On the Li river.

On the Li river the next day – I hated myself a bit for booking an organized group tour, wearing a colourful panda sticker and following the guy with the panda flag, but there were no easy alternatives short of building our own boat.. When the guide went through all the cringy group-tour things..”Are you all having a good time?” (..crowd: “mumble…“, guide: “I can’t hear you!…“) and having everyone rehearse pronouncing his name I was gnawing at my wrists, but Edel stopped me just in time and I feel much better now.. Also on the negative side; the food on the boat was positively diabolical and not worth missing a second of the scenery for, but the less said about it the better. On the positive side; this is some of the most stunning limestone scenery we’ve ever seen anywhere – hundreds of craggy oddly shaped forested peaks jutting up from the flat flood-plains and rice fields, with tall strands of bamboo hanging out over the river-side. Many of the peaks are named after their shape in typical Chinese fashion with imaginative or poetic names like “Four dragons watching a kitten play under a banyan tree…” etc., but you’d need imagination beyond that of mortals to make it out. The river was busy – a long string of 100-passenger boats with observation decks spaced about 50 meters apart as well as many smaller bamboo rafts.

Sunrise view over the Yangshuo carst landscape.

In the village Yangshuo where the boats drop people we checked in to a cozy hotel in the quiet side of town where we stayed for five nights. The restaurants in Yangshuo had some of the most exotic items we’ve seen on a menu so far – one place we went back to a few times had dog, bamboo rat, pigeon and pig brain/stomach/feet/lung…though we only ventured as far as stuffed river snails and some small crunchy river prawns that are eaten with the shell. We took a cooking lesson one day and made beer fish and other local specialties though nothing too weird – they did take us to the market beforehand though where we saw dogs in cages waiting for the chop chop (..plus half a dog hanging from a hook) and piles of turtles and frogs in sacks. I didn’t see a pangolin or anything else that I could identify as endangered at least though.

Hot air balloons over Yangshuo at dawn.

One of the days in Yangshuo I went up in a hot air balloon for sunrise (Edel stayed behind as she’s slightly more afraid of heights than I am of early mornings). It was my first time in a balloon – it seems a great way to fly and takeoff is smooth and only takes a couple minutes, after which you spend hours trying to land somewhere depending on where the wind happened to blow you that particular day, while standing up with your head inches away from a three meter flame next to what looks like a very flammable material which is all that separates you from falling to your death half a kilometer below. Bit spooky at first as you’re very exposed in the little basket, but nice once getting used to it and the views were incredibly beautiful and unreal – more and more limestone peaks visible as we were rising higher, the serpentine turns of the river and the red sun rising through the thin rims of mist hanging over the peaks in the morning. I snapped a billion photos (..which also helped to avoid looking down). We were just under a kilometer up in the air at the highest, then for the landing… The driver (balloonist? ballooneur?) tried quite a number of times to nail a spot that wasn’t in the power-lines, on the road or in a flooded rice-field while the yellow-overall ground crew was racing around below on the ground. We eventually landed in a muddy rice field after a close shave with a roof-top.

Early morning light over Yangshuo.

Yangshuo dreamscape.

Other excursions around Yangshuo; we climbed a couple of the smaller peaks around town for the view, and went to watch cormorant fishing one evening. It’s a funny tradition – a fisherman goes out on a small bamboo raft after dark together with half a dozen birds – the birds have rings around their neck to stop them from swallowing the fish they catch, and once they’ve caught a few the fisherman picks them up and gets them to cough up the fish into a basket. Apparently they get to eat every 7th fish, or else they refuse to work! Very inventive, and it’s amazing to see what efficient fishing machines those things are. On the last day we went biking the countryside around Yangshuo, really cute with rice fields, little villages and more craggy limestone peaks everywhere. A nice villager couple out picking fruit gave us a bunch of a strange one we still haven’t found the name for. When we gave them a small bill to say thanks they first didn’t want to accept it, then gave us another really big pile – were eating them the whole rest of the day and gave some to other travellers we met as well. In one spot we hopped on a bamboo raft to go down one stretch of a smaller river – it turned out to be a real tourist-trap complete with people selling photos of you going down the tiny rapids. Two seconds into the trip the rafts-man (who spoke no English except “Hello”) pointed to his belly to indicate he was thirsty or hungry and ten seconds later the first out of an army of rafting drink-sellers wanted us to buy a beer for the captain when we ourselves didn’t want anything. I gave him some money and he bought himself a coke, finished it, burped loudly and threw the empty can straight in the river! I just don’t get it..some part of him must have figured out that he has a salary only because people come from all over to see this beautiful river so why turn it into a garbage heap… We didn’t share a language of course, but hopefully he’ll remember our looks of utter disgust long enough not to do it again for a while.

Longji terraced rice fields.

Next morning we headed north – bus back to Guilin, another bus to Longshang, and another bus again to a small village called Ping-An in the Longji area (the southern end of a mountainous ethnic autonomous region) which is famous for some of China’s finest terraced rice-field scenery. It felt like we were getting back to the type of traveling we enjoy best, being the only tourists on the local bus to get there. A woman on the bus who’s 14 month old baby waved at us for 20 kilometers straight started talking to us and she ran a small hostel where she invited us to stay. It was quite a walk uphill in the rain with the big bags once we got off the bus where the road ended, and when we finally did get there it turned out the room had been rented out while she was away. She was really apologetic about it the poor woman, but luckily her friend who also ran a family hostel had a room just another small bit up the hill. The owners there didn’t speak any English at all (though they did have something resembling it on their menu card) but we got on fine with sign language for the three nights we stayed there.

Girl in Longji village.

We spent our days in Ping-An doing short walks around the area. The area is stunning with the hills landscaped into perfect contour lines for terraced rice fields over many centuries – very green with some strands of bamboo here and there on the hill-sides. The villages are really charming with dark wooden houses and bright yellow corn cobs or red chillies lying out to dry everywhere. Ping-An has a bit of tourist development, and sees some day-trips from Guilin, but another village a little further (called Longji like the area) is completely traditional. As we walked through there we were met by some really cute kids who wanted to look at every single photo we had in our camera.

Corn cobs in Longji village.

From Longji we headed back to Guilin to catch a bus back to Hong Kong and spend a couple nights in Macau before flying to Japan. We spent a few hours idling in Guilin before the bus, walking around town and checking out the restaurants with live animals, bamboo rats and turtles, in cages waiting outside. The night-bus to Hong Kong was a new experience also – actually had real bunk beds inside it in three rows…though of course the beds were about 10cm shorter than I am..one of the few times Edel slept better than me on a bus.

Ducks in a Longji rice field.

Our tiny Hong Kong room.

From Beijing we took a train the whole way down to Hong Kong – our 60-day China visa was issued as a dual 30-day, meaning we needed to exit the country in the middle of our stay and come back. Hong Kong of course is technically the same country these days, but you still get your passport stamped and it allows you to start the 2nd part of the visa. We decided to stay for a few days and spent four nights on the Kowloon side in the smallest room we ever stayed – 1.45 meter wide including the bed and as long as the bed plus a small bit where the door opened – maybe 3 square meters excluding the bathroom and not much more including it. Showering had the option to lean over either the toilet or the wash-hand basin. Quite an experience and at 20 euro/night a total bargain for Hong Kong! Hong Kong in general is a funny place, smells of money more than anywhere we’ve been with tall skyscrapers and electronic stores everywhere selling the very latest gadgets. English is spoken everywhere which we’re not quite used to after China and the people are much more mixed – there are many Indian merchants on the street who, bringing the Delhi style of business with them a little too much, ask you if you need a suit or a tailor roughly every ten seconds. Luckily they don’t all work as tailors, and we had some great Indian food a couple evenings. Also found some very good sushi and dim-sum breakfasts. We caught an omnimax movie in a space museum one day, and went over to the main Hong Kong island to go to Victoria peak for the famous view over the skyscraper jungle one night, though they were in the process of closing off the viewpoint because of typhoon risk when we were there… We had seen “Typhoon signal 1 hoisted” signs the first day when we arrived, changing to signal 2 the day after and then 8 the day before we left. Never saw more of it than some rain and a restless wind changing direction all the time, think Taiwan got the worst of it.

Google Earth screenshot of the near-miss..

More fun on Hong Kong – they’re completely paranoid about germs! There’s messages in the subway warning about them, notes in the elevators that the floor buttons will be disinfected every two hours, and disinfection mats at the mall entrances where they ask you to rub your shoes. They also love air-condition here and blast the living daylight out of it where-ever it’s available – meaning that you spend a day in town constantly alternating between 15 degree C and 35 degree C…pretty taxing on the body and makes it easier to get sick, but of course lets blame the germs and be paranoid about them!

Night view over the Hong Kong cityscape from Victoria Peak.

One out of tens of thousands.

Xi’an is the home of the terracotta army. The city served as capital for 11 dynasties from 1000BC to 1000 AD, and became capital of all of China in 221BC when Qin Shi Huang became the first emperor to unite the country, presumably so that he would have enough people to build him the tens of thousands of life-size terracotta figures he’d always wanted. He also started the Great Wall project. His other hobbies included eating lots of mercury in various forms in order to prolong his life, a practice that eventually killed him while he was on an expedition to the east coast looking for the legendary “Island of Immortality”. The terracotta army is very impressive, housed in several airport-sized hangars and while only a fraction of the figures have been excavated so far (they were only discovered in 1974) there seems to be tens of thousands of them, each one different. Qin Shi Huang’s tomb is nearby as well, but apart from finding that it contains an incredible amount of mercury it hasn’t been excavated at all yet… Records has it he had 700,000 people work 36 years to create him a scale model of his whole empire underground in the grave, with rivers of mercury made to flow mechanically – and that many of the workers and hundreds of concubines were locked inside when the grave was sealed.

The Big Goose Pagoda.

Wile mercury has now gone out of fashion in the local cuisine we did find lots of other excellent food in Xi’an. The place we stayed in was close to a hotpot restaurant – less spicy than the Sichuan version and a bit less oily – we cooked muchrooms, corn, tofu, beef and various strange squid-like sea-foods which we’re still not quite sure what they were (flat sheets with a spiky texture on one side, grey or white, and squid-like in consistency and taste). Next-door was another good restaurant that featured “Lettuces with Bacteria” on the picture-menu, here we had great steamed dumpling-rolls and gong-bao chicken, plus half a roasted duck which probably was more work than it was worth to pick meat from, at least calorie-wise. It arrived with neck, head, beak and everything at the table and was pretty spicy..nice and crispy though.

Temple of Heaven in Beijing.

Apart from visiting the terracotta army and the Big Goose Pagoda (and lots of good food) in Xi’an we went to the traditional Muslim quarter in the center of the city – it’s the only part of town where the old buildings has survived..everywhere else Xi’an feels like it was built yesterday with wide boulevards, big squares and shopping malls – like Chengdu and Beijing as well once we got there a day later. Sometimes it’s hard to feel you’re really travelling and seeing any of the actual China..everything’s new and there’s the enormous crowds of domestic tourists and tour groups surrounding all the sights..it starts to feel more like an extended trip to a themepark at times. Beijing was no exception – we visited the Temple of Heaven and the Forbidden City but I found it difficult to really make them come alive. The monuments certainly are very impressive, but even knowing the emperor would have stood at the same spot you’re standing now the big tour groups and signs pointing out bathrooms and no-smoking make it all feel very Disneyland, and the ancient buildings look way too new. Actually some of them are. The Temple of Heaven was entirely rebuilt by the last emperor after being destroyed by lightning just 100 years ago – this horrible omen and apparent punishment from the gods was explained as having happened because a sacrilegious caterpillar had climbed too close to the sacred golden roof of the building and this the gods just had to stop…the heads of 32 members of the court had to roll for allowing this to happen!

Socialism and surveillance at Tian'anmen Square.

Speaking of sensible mild-mannered rulers, you don’t see Mao’s face around that much in China any more, but there is one very big portrait hanging right above the entrance to the Forbidden City. And then of course, across the road in Tian’anmen Square you can go to the Chairman Memorial Hall and see the stiff frozen corpse of the old communist mass-murderer, if you’re into that sort of thing – it’s hauled out of the freezer every morning and hauled back in a couple hours later before he starts to thaw… (We got there too late in the day to enter and missed the spectacle..) Mao himself actually wanted to be cremated, but perhaps by this stage people around him had finally noticed that whenever he got his will millions of innocent starved. Like the Memorial the rest of Tian’anmen Square looks pretty unassuming, with some Soviet-style statues celebrating the revolution that gave everyone freedom, and piles of security-cameras, soldiers and civil-clothed policemen keeping an eye on everyone…

Barbarians to the right, civilized people to the left!

Our other item to check of the list in Beijing was the Great Wall – we picked a section between Jinshanling and Simatai which makes a few hours walk along the wall in a section that is slightly quieter than Badaling (where most of the domestic tourists who don’t want to do much walking go). Some parts along the way were still ruined while others had been reconstructed; quite a nice walk though it was crazy hot this day and the wall never fails to pick the most difficult route from hilltop to hilltop. This section is about 110km from Beijing, a distance that probably would have taken 3-4 hours by bus back in India on the terrible roads we saw there, but in modern Beijing with 6-lane highways and hundreds of flyovers it took…3-4 hours due to the typical terrible traffic. Development can be funny.

Next we hopped on a 23 hour train to Hong Kong before the first part of our dual-30 day visa would run out. On the train we had dinner with a Hong-Kong student who shared our compartment, and we tried frog in the restaurant half by mistake. Not sure still if we ordered this dish without knowing, or if our new friend did..there were some very funny moment anyway when he was trying to explain which animal the meat came from – we were sure he was saying “fox” instead of “frog“. “It is like fox, about this size, and green…“! Frog tastes a bit like chicken, though with extremely little meat on the bones and slightly slimy, unless my mind might have added on this extra detail. Will double-check next time, if I ever get the urge to try again.