‘The Backdoor to Yunnan’ – “I thought it a Euphemism for something else” – Joseph Brown

Hey All,

This is an account of Jens first ‘Off the Beaten Track’ experience. We wanted to head fromChengdu in Sichuan to Kunming in Yunnan. Our intended route was Kanding - Litang - Xiangcheng - Shangri La – Tiger Leaping Gorge – Kunming.

The journey form Chengdu to Kanding has some nice scenery and we passed a huge damn being constructed. Kanding (2300m) is a nice enough town but the majority of the population are Han Chinese and the town is rapidly expanding. We were not able to get a bus to Litang the following day so had to spend an extra day. We just chilled for the first afternoon and spent the next day walking around Kanding and enjoying the nice weather. We were staying in a new hostel run by an American and his wife, it was very nice and they had the most mischievous Tibetan Mastiff puppy which was adorable: These things grow into monsters…The weather was pretty chilly.

We got the 6am 9 hour bus to Litang (4000m) passing through a 4800m pass. The scenery was great but the cloud meant that the photos we took did not do justice to the views. Attempting to purchase tickets in Litang was amusing. The staff were very unhelpful and just refused to get up from watching a T.V channel that advertised women’s underwear. For lack of a better phrase they were $&*$%^$ useless. The hotel we stayed at was OK but freezing. Jen wasn’t feeling great, probably because of the sudden change in altitude so we just walked around the town and had some local food. Litang itself was the location of a Tibetan uprising in 2008 and subsequently there are police and army officers every 100 yards. The Tibetans were not as friendly as other parts of Sichuan but I’m sure this is most likely because this route is quite popular with Chinese tourists. We had been advised that our only chance of getting a bus to Xiangcheng was to try and get on the 2.00 bus passing through from Kanding. We spent the morning visiting the local Gomba and walking outside the town in the countryside. Unfortunately there were no spaces on the 2.00 and again the staff refused to talk to me so we worried about how we were going to get to our next destination. We decided to cut our losses and head to another town called Daocheng slightly closer but not in the guidebook so we didn’t know what to expect. I was asking around the bus station about minibuses to Daocheng but to no avail…Later a Tibetan chap turned up at our hotel and we haggled hard for a price for him to take us the next day at 9.00. An hour or so later a nice American women called Rachael knocked on my door and asked if her and her husband Ed could tag along. So we were all there at 9.00 the next morning but no driver…After waiting an hour another chap came over and we agreed a price, he bundled us into a taxi which was odd as taxi’s aren’t allowed to take tourists on these long journeys (Don’t know why.). After driving outside Litang, the driver stopped and we were transferred to a minibus. We suspect that we had been poached from another minibus drivers turf…The scenery between Litang and Doacheng was spectacular, we moved from flatter grasslands through arid snow topped mountains and then down through alpine forested valleys. Our minibus had its mirror knocked off by a van driver at the top of a 5000m pass. Our chap jumped out hurtled down the hill after this van. They remonstrated for a few minutes, then some cash was exchanged - this gave us time to jump out and take some nice photos. Daocheng was surprisingly developed and it is very popular with Chinese tourists heading to Yading national park. Yading national park looks absolutely spectacular. We would have loved to have spent some time there but we had already lost two days and were having to knock Tiger leaping gorge off our itinerary. It’s even possible to trek from Yading to Shangri – La this would be amazing and something I may consider doing as a holiday in the future…When we arrived in Daocheng we went straight to the bus station to try and get tickets to Shangri La the next day. The queue was quite big and we waited in line for 90 minutes for someone to show up. For once a Chinese person was aggravated that a chap tried to push in. The Chinese guy getting annoyed was quite tall and I nicknamed him the Sino-enforcer, him and this guy argued intensely and the pusher sulked off. We were lucky to get tickets as there weren’t many. We walked a little around and out of the town and ate at a nice Tibetan place in the evening and had an early night as we had to be up early. Jen was really funny as we went to bed at 9 but she woke at 11 and because she could hear people and it was quite bright she thought we’d overslept…I refused to get out of bed (Electric blankets) into the sub-zero room and assured her we had not overslept, still I sneakily double checked my i-pod just to be sure…

We got to the bus station at 5.30 and boarded the bus, somehow Mr Pushy had got a ticket and was in front of us; ironically he was sat next to the Sinoenforcer. Jen and Rachael gleefully pointed to him to try and get a reaction from the Sinoenforcer but he assumed a look of stern indifference towards Mr Pushy. Mr Pushy may have been a bit of knob for pushing in but his wife and daughter seemed nice and were constantly looking and smiling at Jen which I thought was sweet. The 12 hour journey went surprisingly fast, the bus was freezing at first but warmed up when the sun finally came up. The views were beautiful but there was some cloud covering the sun which made the previous days scenery seem more spectacular. We stopped for food in the middle of nowhere. Usually I avoid bus stop food but the food was evidently boiling and smelt good. The pork, onion, pepper and chilli dish I got was possible one of the tastiest I’ve had in China! We got to Shangri-La about 6 and the journey had actually been pretty smooth, the road was only not sealed for about 2 hours in the middle, which was horrendously bumpy and uncomfortable.

A little explanation about the name Shangri – La. The town’s old name was Zhongdian and was little more than a dusty trading post. In 2002 after observing the meteoric tourism success of other Yunnan destinations such as Lijiang and Dali the local government decided to rename the town Shangri – La after the mystical harmonious valley in James Hiltons 1933 novel Lost Horizon. The local government even built a traditional style ‘Old Town’ which is very attractive. There have even been newspaper reports of people claiming to be the direct descendants of characters (fictional) in the book! We spent a day enjoying the nice cafes and western comforts such as central heating of Shangri – La before taking a night bus to Kunming.

The surrounding scenery of Shangri-La is gorgeous, further north on the Tibetan border is Deqin and Tiger Leaping Gorge is a few hours to the south. I have no problems with places like Shangri-La: In this area of China it’s so straight forward to get away from the masses and have original experiences that it is nice to return to the comforts of places like Shangri – La, the transport links are also particularly convenient…

I’ll finish with a little Ode to Jen : Chinese toilets are not the nicest. By partaking in this trip I think I’ve subjected her to toilet torture. I avoid the toilets at all costs but sometimes needs must…The ones I saw were so revolting that it brings bile to my throat. It’s a common fact that women’s toilets are far far worse in China. Poor Jen has had to go to these toilets at most stops to appease her golf ball sized bladder where as I just drop trou by the side of the road. I’m seriously proud of her, she’s not complained once and I think she appreciated seeing stuff that not so many people do. Also we were severely ill-equipped for the freezing temperatures but she donned ridiculous leg warmers and my thermal under-top with a certain laissez-faire grace.

We are taking a night bus to the border town of Hekou on the 25^th and then the train to Hanoi inVietnam and meeting up with our friend Bo (www.globespots.com) who will have just returned from guiding some Danish tourists around Laos.

Anyway sorry this is so long, most of you skip straight to the photos, so enjoy those below! Love to All!

Jen avec mongrel

Road to Shangri-la.

Tibetan building- Daocheng.

Jen face.

Tibetan kids.

The road.

Road to Daocheng.

Litang at dusk.

View from Kanding.

Hangzhou - Xi'an - Chengdu

Hey All,

I’m writing this from Litang, we’ve been unable to get a bus to our next destination Xiangcheng and there is not one tomorrow. If we are unsuccessful tomorrow then hitching might be our best option….

I don’t want to write too much about what we did in Hangzhou-Chengdu, instead I’ll give a brief summary and mention a funny story that happened to us.

We spent two days in Hangzhou mostly on and around the large lake in the centre of the city. The hostel was situated in a nice part of town with lots of nice restaurants nearby. We leftHangzhou and got a 22 hour train to Xi’an. The following day we saw the Terracotta Warriors. They were interesting enough, but not what I expected. There were hundreds of Chinese tourists which are always amusing to watch as they scurry from one vantage point to another, knocking and trampling anything in their path. We got an 18 hr train to Chengdu, which was fine for me, but Jen got sick during it. She wasn’t well for a couple of days but bravely managed to visit a Chinese opera and the Pandas in Chengdu. Our current excursion is the ‘Backdoor toYunnan’ which I’ll save for my next entry.

My amusing story is about photography. I’ve mentioned before that people like taking photos of Jen but the most amusing incident to date was in Hangzhou. Jen and I were just completing the marathon walk around the lake and were in this little scenic park next to it. This chap had been walking behind us for a while and then went for a swift overtake. After 50m or so he gets to this bridge (Bottleneck in the path.) he turns around and thrusts out a camera towards me and makes some weird noises. I assumed he wanted me to take his photo on the bridge overlooking the nice park. I point the camera but he starts gesturing desperately at Jen. I catch on before Jen and push her into the photo with the nice Chinese chap. Jen looked really confused not sure whether to touch him or not. The chap on the other hand went for a sombre blue steal attempt and he nearly pulled it off…After reviewing the photo he happily skipped off in the direction we’d come. Jen wanted to make a fast exit in case he told his friends, I saw a potential money making opportunity - Jen did not.

Lots of Love to All

Alex

Coggy

Coggy on the move

Where's Jen?

Beijing - Tai'an - Nanjing -Shanghai

Hey All,

For those of you following Jen’s blog I’ll try and talk about other stuff that we did. But sometimes I’ll have to give my version of events…

I picked Jen up from the Beijing International airport, we had a tearful reunion after 3 months apart…Jen was exhausted from the 16hrs of travelling and hadn’t slept for ages so she attempted to sleep off the jet lag. We spent the next couple of days being culture vultures seeing all of Beijing’s main sites: Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, Summer Palace and the Great Wall. We wanted to see the Underground City (Vast network of tunnels and facilities developed by the Chinese during the cold war.) Unfortunately it was not open so we wondered around the Hutong’s (Old narrow streets, too narrow for cars).

Beijing was an awesome city, huge shopping malls, small unique shops and every type of cuisine imaginable. The cuisine really got me going, we attempted to track down the Peking duck restaurant mentioned in lonely planet twice and failed on both occasions. Once we got lost and the second I got tempted by a noodle chain called Ajisen noodles (Outstanding!). Eventually I settled for a duck restaurant next to the hostel as it was raining one evening. I was not disappointed, it was amazing. They brought separate plates containing: the crispy fat, breast meat, leg and underside. In addition a bowl of broth that the duck had initially been boiled in and the carcass that amazingly still had loads of meat on it were presented?!?! I have seen some ducks in China and even the ducks that look exactly the same as England seem to be two or three times the size. The plum sauce, pancakes and other bits were also provided. This meal could have happily satisfied three men. Bo was dining with us (On transit to North Korea.) and Jen doesn’t like duck, so we had a feast. In addition we’d ordered sweet and sour pork, a leg of lamb and a vinegary vegetable thing. The lamb was delicious seasoned with what I think was capsicum but we had ordered way way too much food… The duck was polished off but the lamb had only been dented. This whole meal for three cost us a whole 187 Y = £18 pounds. Considering we could have fed 6 people I thought it amazing value. I also love the fact that throughout China beer at restaurants is super cheap, ranging from 50p-£1.20 for a 660ml bottle. English restaurants take note!

There was a Chinese holiday starting on the 1^st of October so there were no cheap trains to Shanghai until the 2^nd /3^rd. So we got a train Tai’an instead. The main attraction is a sacred mountain. After getting in late at night and having a lie in we arrived at the start of the mountain with every intention of climbing it…Until they were trying to charge 125Y (£12.50) for what looked like quite a mundane trudge up 6000 stairs. We settled for wondering around a local park and taking photos of each other jumping off things. That evening we went to the train station to get tickets to Shanghai, again it was booked so we settled for the old capital of China Nanjing. The queue was humongous; when we got to the front come fat Chinese guy pushed in front of the guy in front of us. Jen lost it she was shouting at him in English, him and buddies seemed to size me up and decided to stay put. (I wonder if I was 6’6 if they would have pushed in…) They ‘honourably’ offered to let us in front of them. Jen tried to tell him to get to the back but he just laughed at her. Jen was fuming. Those guys couldn’t get the tickets they wanted and sulked off looking pissed. Another chap and his gf pushed in front of us just as we got to the front. Jen told this guy to get lost but his gf managed to get her order in. As they left with their tickets the guy with a ridiculous accent (and hair cut) goes “fooook yoouuuu nannnn”, I gave him some back but halfway through insulting his hair realised he wouldn’t have a clue what I was on about. Anyway I advised Jen to in future show some restraint and keep her cool. No evidence of change observed thus far.

Nanjing was a pretty cool city, I’d group it with Beijing with regards to the food options and shopping scene. The tube made transport easy and we were blessed with nice weather. We visited the Memorial Hall of the Nanjing Massacre. In 1937 the Japanese invaded Nanjing and during their occupation slaughtered over 300,000 men, women and children. Raped more than 20,000 women of all ages and destroyed a lot of the city. The museum was seriously unsettling as there were photos of the mass graves, executions and even Japanese newspaper clippings detailing the race between two Japanese soldiers to kill 150 civilians with their samari swords. The most disturbing part for me was the accounts of the Japanese soldiers that had been tracked down for the museum. These very old men admitted to gang rape and murder, all were remorseful but the admission that at the time they justified it because “everyone was doing it” was sickening. Again my lack of world history knowledge was highlighted. An Encyclopaedia of Modern World History is on the Christmas list.

The next day we went to Zijin Mountain. We took the chair lift up and walked down. It was a nice enough view – a bit hazy. We were aiming for this restaurant for lunch but by the time I’d made Jen walk the 5 miles there and gotten lost (Terrible lonely planet map…) it was 7.00 p.m and dinner time.

I am writing this on a high speed train from Nanjing to Shanghai, 200 miles in just over an hour! We are due to stay with my cousin David and his girlfriend Michelle which should be fun. There is a world expo on as well which will be interesting.

…

I am writing this in Hangzhou after spending 6 days with Dave and Michelle. Shanghai was an awesome city, the expat community seemed more centralised than what we experienced in Beijing, but maybe that was because David and Michelle were taking us out…

The city itself was exceptionally easy to travel around and there was lots going on. We visited the Bund twice and ate out a lot in the French Concession part of town. The world expo was pretty interesting, some of the queues were enormous and I think that we would have had to go 5 or 6 times to even put a dent in seeing most of it. The U.K expo was rubbish; it was a large porcupine like structure made of Perspex rods. Inside of all the rods were seeds. This was supposed to represent a seed bank in the U.K. There was also a large space with deck chairs and artificial grass. At the exit tucked out of the way there was one model of a guard from Buckingham Palace. As U.K passport holders we got to jump the queue, this was good because the two hour wait to see it would not have been worth it. Some of the pavilions were interesting, but some were just weird; Spain’s was visually very entertaining, but the last room contained a giant robotic baby. Australia had evidently had no input into theirs as the whole attraction was a circular rotating screen playing an animated film featuring three children. A Chinese child was the main knowledgeable character and they were rabbiting on about planting a seed for the growth of the future. Every now and then the screen would be retracted and a sculpture would be revealed, the Chinese went MAD for this. What interested me most was that there were restaurants attached to most of the pavilions (The U.K did not have one?!) and you could check out the menu’s and have a peek at what everyone was eating…

Michelle took us to a water town an hour’s train journey outside of Shanghai. It was gorgeous and the weather was lovely. We were just unlucky to go during a public holiday which meant it was absolutely packed. Either way it was very picturesque and we got some good photos.

We have come to Hangzhou because there were no tickets to Xi’an from Shanghai for another week. Luckily we have got some for Sunday so we are back on track. Hangzhou itself seems a very pleasant city and I have noticed some very tasty looking restaurants. I am looking forward to getting out of the big cities after Xi’an and back into Sichuan which I became quite familiar with. It will also remove the temptation of the truly delicious bakeries and cafes that seem to populate the east coast cities. In Shanghai we indulged ourselves in some delicious western food for which I feel a little guilty, but some of it was outstanding. Shanghai is a great city and the balance of Western and Chinese culture would enable me to truly enjoy living there. Michelle’s command of Mandarin was really impressive considering how little time she has been learning and convinced me that with a little work it is possible to live and work in any developed city.

It was great to spend time with Dave and to get to know Michelle, they were really great hosts and our Shanghai experience wouldn’t have been as good without them taking us out and sharing their city know how with us.

Will try and start blogging more frequently, we have mastered circumventing the Chinese government when getting on the internet, but my bandwidth is seriously compromised when the latest episode of Eastenders is downloading...

Don’t forget to check out Jens blog for some more photos etc…www.jennalaurenslater.blogspot.com

Love to All

Alex

Rice Wine pots
Water town

Water town

Perspex seed display - U.K pavillion Shanghai world ExpoExpo

View from the Bund

Dave and Michelle taking us on a historical walk around the French Concession
Nanjing East rd -Shanghai
Shanghai
Hazy view from purple mountain
Purple mountain Nanjing

Chillin
Finally found a BK - No XL bacon double cheese though...:(
Lil pretty Jen
Wall
Wall
Tienanmen Square at Dusk
For me this photo epitomises Jens arrival in China
Forbidden City
Jen and I
Forbidden City
Forbidden City