China number two (south and east)

The last stop before Hong Kong was Yangshuo, a night train away from Kunming. I had only a vague idea of what there was to see there; I just went there because many people had mentioned it. When I woke up the next morning in the train, I noticed the landscape had completely changed, and was very special. The area was dotted with narrow hills with steep slopes, made up of gray karst rock. The small town of Yangshuo sits on the side of the beautiful Li River, surrounded by karst peaks. Unfortunately, I had only three days left before I had to move on to Hong Kong. I discovered Yangshuo was a little paradise, where you could spend weeks. Bicycle tours, bamboo rafting, trekking, and last but not least, amazing rock climbing - the possibilities are plenty. What's more, the weather was perfect: it was sunny and warm, but not too hot. I rented a bicycle explored the surroundings, with two other Belgians (indeed!). Between the karst peaks was the same rural scenery I had enjoyed in the bus to Lijiang: beautiful yellow fields, people working the land, perfect pyramid-shaped bundles of straw. Riding through this landscape, alongside the beautiful Li River, waving to people on their bamboo rafts, was a beautiful and relaxing experience.

Yangshuo...

In Yangshuo, I wanted to go to the barber to have my beard shaved. I was tired of the wilderness on my face, and had been looking for someone to eradicate it for quite some time. I had taken up the habit of going to barbers to get a shave in India and Nepal. It's efficient, well-done, and if you pay a bit more, you can even get a face and head massage. Spoiled as I was, I refused to do my own shaving. Unfortunately, contrary to South-Asia, where you don't need to do more than three steps before you stumble upon a barber, in China it's pretty hard to find. The fact that Chinese have very limited facial hair growth, and their south-eastern neighbors plenty, is no doubt at least part of the explanation. I was getting desperate when, for the fourth time in a week, I was walking around randomly looking for someone who could rid me of my bristles. When I saw a fancy-looking hairdressing salon, I walked in and asked if, by any chance, they also did beards. The answer was yes, but the price four times what I though was reasonable; but I was so tired of walking around, that I agreed. They started by attacking my facial jungle with an electric razor, which I found a reasonably intelligent approach. Next, however, I stopped him as he was about to put a razorblade to my face.
-"Wait a minute - aren't you going to use any shaving foam?"
-"Sorry?"
-"Shaving foam!"
I mimicked applying shaving foam to my face with a brush, but he didn't seem to understand. Impatiently, I took my phrasebook and found the translation of "shaving cream". He nodded and went over to his colleague, with whom he had an animated exchange. He came back with a cup filled with what looked like, smelled like, and probably was, plain hand soap. He clumsily smeared it onto my right cheek with his hand and started, extremely cautiously, to shave me. He cut one area and then the other, clearly avoiding the most difficult parts. In the meantime, as I saw in the mirror, pretty much everybody - both his colleagues and the other clients - was stealing more than occasional glances at us. I didn't really know if it was more embarrassing for me or for my improvising barber. But, although he was a bit nervous and very slow, after half an hour he had shaved my entire beard, including the hard parts, without cutting me. After finishing he said "okay?", and didn't seem to understand why I looked at him expectingly. It soon became clear, with the help of my trusty phrasebook, that I was going to have to do without aftershave as well. I decided regretfully that the time had come to buy myself a razor again.

The next day, I rode to Moon Hill, a special peak with a big half-moon shaped hole in it. I had gotten the tip of ignoring the "no trespassing" sign (the actual sign said something like "passenger no allow") and going to the very top of the hill. Indeed, the view from up there was breathtaking. Although it was a bit misty, I could see peaks rise up all around. It was a pretty surreal view - an endless exhibit of gigantic sculptures, all made by the same artists: wind and water. Up there, where I thought no-one else would come, I met two British girls, who happened to take the train to Hong Kong that evening, just like me.

After an uneventful night in the train, we arrived in Shenzen, at the border with the Hong Kong region. At the customs, they were a bit puzzled by my one-person group visa, which was just a ordinary piece of paper, but eventually they let me pass. There were three things I wanted to do in Hong Kong: to apply for a new Chinese visa, to do some sight-seeing, and to enjoy the nightlife. The first day wasn't a very pleasant one. I had to arrange my visa right away, which took me a couple of hours. After that, I still needed to find a place to stay. HK is notorious for its pricey and shabby accommodation for backpackers. The common place to go is the infamous Chungking Mansions, a huge apartment block with several small hostels on each floor, and possibly the slowest and busiest elevator in the world. It's full of immigrants from South-Asia and Africa, and when I arrived, something made it feel strangely familiar - the smell of curry and the pushy Indian touts may have something to do with that. I first tried my luck with a hostel on the fifth floor. It was full, but the owner told me to try one on the seventh floor. Full again. Try the third floor. Too expensive. Maybe on the fourteenth floor? Sorry, maybe tomorrow. Tired of going up and down the building, I started randomly checking hotels with a nice sounding name. Hotel Tokyo? Too expensive. Pay Less guesthouse? Great name, that's probably why there was no room left. After about an hour of running around - I had learned quickly to forget about the elevator and just use the stairs -, I ended up on the sixteenth floor. I found a bed in a dormroom for an acceptable price. My roommates were a bit unusual, though: two old men, a hippie woman who was also way past her prime, and one young Chinese tourist. From a pretty confusing conversation with one of the men I gathered that they lived there, just like many others. One night I woke up because the two old men were having a loud argument right next to my bed. The reason? One of them had opened the window while the air cooler was still on.
The center of Hong Kong consists of two parts: the Kowloon peninsula and Victoria island. A must-do for tourists is to take the old tram to Victoria peak. Around dusk, me and my British friends took the ferry to the island. By the time we reached the peak, the sun was setting. We walked and watched as the sky turned dark and all the lights went on. It was my first time in a city with skyscrapers (not counting Dubai, which I regard as fake), and I was awe-struck by the view. The next day we just walked around a bit on the island, went to a temple and to a park. That night we went on an organized pub crawl, and had a lot of fun. The next afternoon, it was time for me to leave again. I really enjoyed Hong Kong, though. There is a particular buzz to the city, hard to explain. The pace is very high, everyone seems to be in a hurry all the time; but somehow that makes you feel like this is the place to be, this is where it's all happening. It's a bit like I imagine New York to be, and it seems that I'm not the only one who makes that comparison. But Hong Kong is expensive, and full of temptations, so I had decided not to stay too long. Besides, I was still determined to make it home before Christmas, so I had to get moving towards Beijing.

Hong Kong by night from Victoria Peak

From Hong Kong, I undertook the long train journey to Shanghai. I was going north again, and I had gotten various reports of cold and foggy weather in Shanghai and Beijing. I was a bit reluctant to leave the warm climate and small towns of the southwest for the big cities in the east. I told myself the most pleasant part of my stay in China was probably over. Still I was not giving up on the idea of going back to Europe through Mongolia and Russia. I was very lucky, though; when I arrived in Shanghai it was sunny, and it would stay so for the biggest part of the following two weeks.

My expectations of Shanghai were high - too high. I think for some reason I was hoping to find traces of the harbor city full of rickshaws and Chinese banners I knew from the Tintin album "The Blue Lotus". Instead, as was to be expected, I round a big, modern, rather sterile city. With its skyscrapers - some of very doubtful taste - and multinational business (Mc Donalds and Starbucks, Esprit and Zara, you name it), Shanghai tries to be some kind of Hong Kong, but it has none of the buzz of that city. To be fair, I spent only a few days there; but I never really grasped the soul of the place. I did enjoy walking by the riverside, looking at the famous skyline of the modern district on the other side. The former French concession, with its European feel, is a pretty nice place to stroll around as well; no wonder it's full of expats.

There was one place, not too far from Shanghai - that is, one night train away - which quite a few people had told me not to miss. Huang Shan, or the Yellow Mountain, was one of the inspirations for the film 'Avatar'. I was fortunate enough to share a room with a jovial Dutch guy who wanted to go there as well. Huang Shan is not just one single mountain, but rather a whole area with various peaks. The plan was to walk up one peak, spend the night there, walk around the next day and go back to the city that evening. On the way up, it was very foggy. I was fearing a similar experience to Emei Shan, where I hadn't seen anything for two days. This time, though, at least I wasn't alone. In fact, we had delayed our departure because the weather hadn't been so good, and we hoped it would better the next day, as the weather forecast predicted. Sure enough, the sky started clearing around sunset, and by the time we went to bed, the stars announced a good following day. We got treated to a breathtaking sunrise the next morning, and we could finally admire Huang Shan in its full splendor. The Yellow Mountain has been an inspiration for many Chinese painters and poets. Once again, erosion has created a surreal scenery. Abrupt, irregular peaks with sheer flanks have been carved out of the light brown rock. The cracks and lines formed by the relief are mostly vertical - in fact, the peaks look like gigantic versions of the termite mounds I have seen in pictures from Australia. The finishing touch, which gives Huang Shan its almost magical look, is provided by the pine trees (the species is effectively called "Pinus hwangshanensis"). With their broad, flat-topped crowns of long, level branches, they are perched on unlikely places, even where the rocks are perfectly vertical. In the afternoon, clouds rolled in, reducing the visibility to almost nothing. But when we climbed to the highest peak, we gradually got out of the fog. We were above an endless sea of white clouds, brown peaks with green trees rising up left and right like mysterious islands. This magnificent view completely made up for the missed opportunity at Emei Shan.

Huang Shan (top), one of the inspirations for James Cameron's 'Avatar' (bottom)

Above the sea of clouds

From Huang Shan, I went straight to Beijing. There were no available bunks in sleeper class, so I had to spend the twenty hour journey in the hard seat class. I expected it would be a bit of an ordeal, but that I would have some funny stories to tell. Quite the contrary, it was fairly comfortable, but boring. I wasn't on a very busy line, so my carriage was never completely full. I tried to start a conversation with some people but they didn't seem in the least interested in me.

Although before I went there I found it hard to imagine why, people had always been very positive about Beijing. I ended up staying there for more than a week, and had the best time. The sun was shining, the hostel was great, the people were amazing. Beijing is a city where you can find everything, from traditional Chinese architecture to modern clubs. The subway gets you everywhere for almost nothing. My hostel couldn't be better located, right next to Tienanmen square. Apart from all the going out and having fun, I forced myself to do some tourism as well. Tienanmen square: cool place, center of the highest populated nation on earth. Forbidden City: everything but forbidden (read: very crowded), and frankly a little bit boring. Summer Palace: gigantic lake, impressive complex. Great Wall: great. We went to a "forbidden" part of the wall, and we were the only ones there. The running joke at the hostel was to take a naked picture on this otherwise so touristy spot. Apart from the sight-seeing and having fun, I also had a lot of other stuff to do: arranging visas and trains, buying warm clothes, etc.

"What a great wall!" - R. Nixon

I was doing stuff, I was seeing stuff, I was having fun - it was great ending of stay my stay in China, and I was very glad I had continued despite the difficult moments. I felt ready to start the very last chapter of my trip: the long way home, through Mongolia, Russia and Europe

China number one! (the southwest)

China. I didn't really know what to expect. I had met some Chinese students in Delhi, with whom I got along really well. Some people had told me China was a great country to travel in. Others complained about language barriers and other cultural differences. I was reading Jung Chang's 'Wild Swans', which gives a rather grim image of the country and its people just a few decades ago. Surely the Chinese must somehow still be affected by the atrocities of Mao's Cultural Revolution?

My train trip from Lhasa to Chengdu, 43 hours, was my first real encounter with Chinese people. I found friendly, smiling, helpful people. Of course, the language barrier was huge. One young man spoke a little bit of English, and with the help of my Mandarin phrasebook, we managed to have a modest conversation. On that first train ride I also realized that the time of challenging culture differences wasn't over yet. The Chinese are known for spitting on the floor - and yes they do, and in the same loud manner as the South-Asians. To be fair, I think they do it much less then, say, a decade ago, and most of them do spit in the sink or in the dustbin. Also well-known is that Chinese eat very noisily, slurping and smacking to express their enjoyment. It sounds harmless and funny, and it really is, but I challenge anyone to try and calmly enjoy a book when your surrounded by all kinds of salivary sounds. The inhabitants of the Middle Kingdom also share with the South-Asians the habit of talking loudly; when you hear two men having a fierce argument, they may well be just discussing the weather. Last but not least, while in China they don't seem to have the horrible habit of chewing tobacco - and thank God for that -, they do tend to smoke a lot, and everywhere, and all the time. The second night on the train I woke up at three o'clock in the morning because the person in the bunk below me was smoking the old middle-of-the-night ciggy in bed, someone on the opposite bed was noisily enjoying his dried meat, a third person did hes best to get rid of all his mucus by snorting and spitting continuously, and some other people were debating loudly about the advantages and disadvantages of instant noodles (that's my best guess). Yes, it was three o'clock in the morning. Fortunately, India and Nepal had given me ample training in in this kind of situations, and I somehow managed to fall asleep again.

Since I had come through Tibet, I had a one-person group visa ("1 persons", it said) that couldn't be extended. My visa was valid for 26 days, from which I had just over two weeks left by the time I reached mainland China. In these two weeks I wanted to visit the south-west of China, before going to Hong Kong to get a new visa. I had received quite a few tips from other travelers in Nepal, and you know me: I wanted to do it all. So it was with a very heavy schedule that I arrived in Chengdu. I got of the train in the morning and went straight to Chengdu's main attraction: the giant panda park. I was a bit tired and I didn't have high expectations, but the second I laid eye on these wonderful creatures, I started walking around smiling like a little boy. How can anything possibly be so cute? They are lucky to be so, because other than that they are utterly hopeless. They only take in a fraction of the 9 to 14 kilos of bamboo they eat, because they have the digestive system of carnivores. So they permanently overeat - we all know how tempting it is to take a nap on such moments. They are too lazy even to reproduce; and even if they do, it's kind of hard because the poor guys have hopelessly small penises (Asian anatomy?). And even if they do get a baby, the newborn are so small (they weigh about 800 times less than their mom!), that the mother doesn't really know how to treat it and oftentimes starts playing around with it like it's some kind of cheap Chinese toy. Hopeless. But so, so cute.

Panda's!

I started to understand why people like traveling in China when I checked into my first hostel. It was clean, with excellent dormitories, hot showers, friendly and helpful staff, a great common area and a nice atmosphere. Almost all the hotels I went to in China were exquisite, undoubtedly among the best you can find anywhere in the world, certainly for that price. The contrast with South-Asia, where I spent many nights in shabby single rooms, couldn't be bigger.

After spending one night in Chengdu, I moved on to Emei Shan, a nearby mountain. On my way there, I felt extremely depressed. I was alone, I had moved an awful lot in the previous months, and I knew I was going to have to rush through everything if I carried out my plans. I felt like my traveling-bubble had burst. I had lost the urge to see everything, to meet knew people, to explore new territories. I just didn't care anymore. I wanted to take the next plane home. But I decided to carry on and see how I would feel in the following days, and take a plane home from Hong Kong if I still felt depressed by the time I got there.
Emei Shan, accessed through a cable car or thousands of steps, is supposed to offer spectacular views, including a "sea of clouds". Unfortunately, this phenomenon is a bit less interesting when you're inside the sea. When I reached the top of the mountain at around 3000 m it was freezing cold and the visibility wasn't more than a couple of meters. I was all alone, depressed and cold and I ruined my knees by rushing down the many steps - let's say it wasn't the best moment of my trip. Emei Shan was also my first encounter with Chinese tourists. I've talked about Indian tourists before - same same, but worse. Think big groups, megaphones, flags and matching caps, and of course, the cheesiest of pictures. They seemed very impressed with my wearing shorts, and all raised their thumb when they saw me rushing up the stairs: "Oooh! Vewy Stwong!".

From Emei I took a twenty-hour train to Kunming, in the southwestern province of Yunnan, and on to Lijang. Since, like often, I had no idea what to expect, I was completely surprised by the beauty of the Yunnan province. On the modest hills, the reddish earth matched the dark green trees perfectly. The valley was like a blanket of yellow-brown dried-out rice fields. The straw was arranged in small pyramidal bundles, on equal distances. It all looked so perfect that it made me wonder if someone had designed the whole thing. The houses looked lovely in their simplicity: white walls (sometimes with paintings) and gray tiled roofs with typical curved corners. Many people were working in the fields, wearing straw hats, mostly weeding, as far as I could tell. The plain was dotted with stacks of burning weeds, their thin plumes adding a finishing touch to a magnificent painting. It reminded me that China, although it's the world's second biggest economy, is still a country of peasants: more than half of its inhabitants are still farmers.

Lijang is supposed to be a picturesque town with cobblestone streets and traditional houses. And that's what it used to be, but it has been turned into some kind of Disneyland for Chinese tourists. Almost every traditional house has been turned into a a shop, a restaurant or a hotel. I had never expected o see so many Chinese tourists in one place. It's a bit like Venice in peak season but the more concentrated and seemingly without local inhabitants except for people who work there, and with a vast majority of Chinese. Another thing they have in common with Indian tourists is that they love spending money. They buy all sorts of tacky souvenirs from the shops, and at night they drink liters of expensive alcohol in bars. The bars are quite an experience, full of enthusiastic Chinese who knock on the tables with small wooden blocks to applaud cheap entertainment. I witnessed an auction over a cocktail, where some drunk man ended up paying the equivalent of five hundred euros. He gave the drink to a girl who didn't even touch it. That's when I realized some people in China are starting to have money, and lots of it. In general, I was surprised about the grade of development China has reached. The roads are impeccable, the buses nicer than ours, the trains more comfortable, everything seems well-organized. China and India are often linked because of their spectacular economic growth, but it's obvious that China stands much further already. This is confirmed by the numbers: China's GDP per capita (PPP) is more than twice that of India. That being said, the inequality is higher in China (for those who care: according to Wikipedia, India's Gini coefficient is 36.8, while China's is 46.9). Contrary to India, China is not a democracy. The middle and upper class of the biggest population on earth have a very comfortable life, with all the freedom and infrastructure they need. However, on the poor countryside, people still live medieval lives, and many are not allowed to move to cities. There are thousands of riots every year in rural areas, but the media barely talk about it. Unfortunately, as a tourist, one seems to see only the positive side of China. To be honest, I didn't have the courage just then to explore more authentic, rural areas - I'm going to have to go back.

The typical tourist photo in Lijiang

From Lijiang I went to Tiger Leaping Gorge to do a two-day hike, one of the most beautiful ones in China. Walking on a ledge above the deep canyon, facing a sheer rock face topped by snow capped mountains was pretty impressive, but I must say I was a bit blasé after my three-week Annapurna trek. The next stop was Dali, a traditional backpackers hangout. And that's exactly what I did there: hanging around with nice people for a few days. Sometimes you need a break from traveling, and I didn't have many opportunities to do so.

Tiger Leaping Gorge. The path is the small ledge on the right.

Dali was my last stop in Yunnan. After that, I started going east, on my way to the big cities: Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing!