track our trek

judy, jon and jorma, whom we met in seoul, put us in touch with jan and ben in shanghai. they graciously invited us to stay with them, so we spent our last few days in shanghai at their lovely home. we have been overwhelmed by how generous people have been to us so far in our journeys...many many thanks to jan and ben (& chihuahuas blaise and danger too!) we are so grateful!  we have freely offered our parents' homes to anyone traveling to the new york or los angeles areas, and of course our door will always be open when we have a home of our own somewhere! we spent a couple more days wandering around shanghai, and enjoyed lovely massages at jan & ben's house one night. on our last day, jan took us on a long bike ride through the countryside to see what some of suburban shanghai used to look like before it was developed. it was lots of fun & quite interesting to see how most chinese people live in small towns and villages on canals and waterways...unfortunately, the camera battery died along the way, so we don't have many pics....gotta make sure that doesn't happen at the taj mahal! lol! i took a spill off the "road" into a ditch when we met up with a big blue garbage truck that had no intention of slowing down on the narrow stretch of concrete to let us pass...i didn't even think the 8-inch raised slab of concrete was wide enough for a truck to negotiate, so it's no surprise i panicked when he passed me with what felt like inches to spare. i figured i'd rather take my chances in the ditch than get clipped by a piece of the truck bed!...nonetheless, we made it back home tired, but no worse for the wear. jan, who enjoys making jewelry made me some beautiful pairs of earrings while we waited to go to the airport...now i'm all decked out with my jan stanton original accessories & feeling a bit more like a girl again! (the tomboy backpacker look gets old sometimes...)

feeling satisfied with ourselves for coming up w/ a smooth solution to the indian visa problem, we headed off to the antiques market and yuyuan gardens markets to practice our haggling skills...at the antiques market we found dozens and dozens of stalls full of ceramics, jewelry, old coins and embroidered silks..."looky, look! cheapy cheapy..." knowing the chinese are masters of making a factory produced item look ancient, we had a good time joking about amber pendants that are surely plastic resin & antique coins that are probably in the back soaking in a compound to speed the oxidation process...jokes! at the end of a long day, we came away w/ a batik tablecloth (to be used first as a temple sarong) for 50Y - a good deal - and a tshirt for 20Y (probably still a rip-off...lol!) not bad for our first time out...here's how the game goes...you say "how much?" they type some astronomical number on a calculator... you say "no way! that's crazy!" and start to walk away...they say "ok, you say how much." and hand you the calculator. then daryll always types some number that's 1/10 or less than theirs, to which they reply, "euros?" with a confused look on their face... HA! it's hilarious....eventually you work your way to something within reason...or you walk away & say forget it...more often than not when you walk away they'll come after you & give in.

shit!....we need visas for india! we knew this, but have been racing to catch up with ourselves so much, we forgot to check the procedure. turns out it takes at least 5 business days to process the application & we only had 2 left before our flight to dehli! so we headed straight to the consulate general of india in hopes of paying an exorbitant emergency fee to expedite the process...alas, we had no luck..."why didn't you get a visa in your country of residence?"...if we wait the week for the visas, we can't travel anywhere else in china, as we need our passports to fly & check into hotels. and we'd end up losing 1 of our 2 weeks in india, since we must meet ryan in bangkok on nov 1. (can't wait to see you, ryan!) ...so, time to regroup & come up w/ a plan b. after some tea and time to think, we realized we could change our india trip to anytime before christmas by changing our flight dates w/ oneworld free of charge. piece of cake! after a quick look thru lp for national holidays and festivals we might want to avoid, we rescheduled the india trip for end of november...we'll spend the next few weeks somewhere in southeast asia & scope out thailand a bit before ryan gets here...crisis averted...we'll have plenty of time to get the visas in bangkok.

we reached beijing at 6am and headed for the youth hostel we'd spotted across from the train station to see if we could consult w/ their tourism people...they let us wait in the lobby for the hour and a half until the office opened and we debated our options....spend another day in beijing seeing some things we'd missed and take another 13 hour night train to shanghai, or book a 2 hour flight and just head for shanghai. it cost 450yuan for the soft sleeper train and 600yuan to fly...we opted to fly for the extra $20 apiece, booked our tickets on china eastern w/ the woman at the hostel, and hopped on the airport shuttle. when we landed in shanghai, we intended to follow the lp directions to our hostel...take the 725A bus to city center...so we waited at the stop for a few minutes until the 725 bus came...unsure of whether the 725 was the same as the 725A, we hesitated for a moment, wanting to ask the bus driver...the bus came to a rolling stop, let about 6 passengers on and took off! the poor old man who got on in front of me nearly fell out the open door and lost his bag as the bus pulled off! we weren't feeling up for a running jump at the next bus, so we turned on our heels and headed for the taxi queue. lol! we arrived and checked into our hostel & jumped right in the shower!...the first in weeks that didn't flood the entire bathroom...curious that in a 5000 year history of incredible civilization and engineering feats, we haven't found a bathroom yet in china that's got proper drainage or plumbing! we briefly considered downgrading from our double room to a mixed dorm for the second night to save some $$, but quickly dismissed the idea after a tour through the dorm floor and the common bathrooms. we hit the streets of shanghai anxious to see what this sprawling, more westernized city has to offer. the air is noticeably cleaner than in beijing... starbucks and citibanks are plentiful, but shanghai definitely lacks the historic architecture and charm of beijing. (i hope beijing won't lose too much of that historic fabric to development for the 2008 olympics.)

we wanted to head straight to shanghai from datong, but it turns out there's no way to do that....so our option was to head back to beijing on the overnight train and make our way from there...we bought tickets for the 10pm train from our trusty cits guy & killed time after our tour walking to the only ATM in datong (a city of 4 million people!) and having some yummy noodles and steamed buns at a place near the train station...we don't know what kind of meat was in the noodle broth...definitely not beef or pork...but the place was packed and we got a kick out of watching the guys shave the noodles by hand from a big slab of dough....rule of thumb....if the place is packed with locals...the food is a sure bet. just don't look too close at how clean (or not) the dishes may be. lol! we made friends with the cooks and promised to somehow mail them copies of the pictures we took ...which brings us to the train ride...i must say i didn't expect to burn through my first set of nostrils so early in the trip!! when we paid for our tickets, the cits guy asked if we wanted the good train or the bad train? "what's wrong with the bad train?" we asked..."nothing. it's just cheaper." he said and gave us some vague explanation about the difference. we opted for the cheaper train, thinking it couldn't be that bad...we should've paid the difference for the good train. lol! turns out the "bad train" was just an old train w/ open berths...no big deal...not quite as comfy as the one we'd taken into datong, but fine. we met a really nice couple, chen wei and xiao mo, both teachers in tianjin & chatted with them for an hour or so. after that, they turn out the lights on the train, so conversation gets difficult. dp climbed up to his bunk above mine and we settled in for the night. i was happily drifting off to sleep when the train reached its first stop and i caught the gust of air from the toilets 3 berths over...WOW! it was gonna be a long night. i cinched the hood of my sweatshirt snugly under my nose and settled in again...at the next stop, the nice guy in the bunk across from me (who was already snoring loudly) let loose...RAT...TAT...TAT!!!....the loudest fart i've ever heard. WOW again! he proceeded to do it five or six more times over the rest of the trip...each time startling me awake and causing me to readjust my sweatshirt hood! jokes...meanwhile, except for the first fart, daryll slept soundly through the entire trip! apparently the air current from the toilets wasn't reaching the middle bunk. in the morning, he asked how i'd slept & and i raised an eyebrow..."you don't smell the toilets?"..."no, what are you talking about?" then he sat down on the bunk next to me and he understood. HA! daryll gets the bottom bunk next time!

at the suggestion of an israeli couple we met, we decided to skip the 12 hour train ride to xi'an and the terra cotta warriors in favor of a shorter trip to datong to see the yungang caves. we headed for the train station early saturday morning in search of the "foreigners ticketing office" mentioned in lonely planet. apparently that office has closed since the book's publication, so we wound up in line with throngs of chinese, struggling to get tickets on the first available train to datong...not bad...we got hard sleeper tickets on the morning train. the quarters were very tight, and we scored the very top bunks (third level up where you can't even sit upright!) because we weren't aggressive enough pushing through the crowds to the front of the line. no orderly lining up here like in japan...it's every man for himself here...we saw one man throw his granddaughter over his shoulder and elbow his way to the front of the line like an offensive lineman!...6 hours through some pretty amazing dry mountainous landscape and a pretty comfy nap & we arrived in datong around 6pm... we were pounced on at the top of the escalator by a man wearing a CITS badge and ushered into his office..."you need a hotel? you need a tour? here...sit. i'll get you a room...there's a tour tomorrow morning to the yungang caves and hanging monastery...give me your money & i'll show you your hotel." yikes! give us a second to think, please! we went along with him...a bit wary of getting scammed of course, but he closed up the office behind us, handed us a slip of paper, pointed us across the square to our hotel, and told us to be back at the train station in the morning to take the tour. we were sure we'd walk into the hotel and be charged again, but they accepted our slip of paper w/ no questions and escorted us up to our room! we splurged (380yuan) on a 4 star for a night after our week in the dingy hostel. it was worth it for the yummy included breakfast alone the next morning!
then off to meet the tour group. we upgraded our package to include all the entrance fees and lunch and hopped in the bus with our group of 15 or so mostly german speaking tourists. a 2 hour bumpy ride later (i was in the front passenger seat...yikes) we made it to the hanging monastery...a 1500 year old monastery built into a cliff to avoid floods. monks climbed to the top of the mountain & suspended themselves from rope to excavate and insert the support beams 2/3 of the way into the mountain! at the time, it hung 100m above the ground, but over the years the floor of the canyon has risen 50m from sediment and rock brought by floods! in the afternoon, we saw the yungang caves...a sandstone mountain w/ 45 caves carved w/ some 45,000 buddhas! it is really beautiful...and overwhelming to think of the 40,000 people it took 64 years to build the largest buddha!

we decided to extend our stay at the hostel in beijing to try to wait out the holiday travelers before making our next move. five days in beijing and we are not getting any more comfortable with the spitting...daryll spent one day resting and battling a cold & we spent another day checking out the summer palace (the enormous estate the emperor built for summers.) it was neat to see the complex (again too big for us to see it all) including the 3-story wooden theater complete w/ mini performances! the air quality in beijing is terrible! after almost a week, we could almost understand the spitting! the pollution from coal burning gets in your throat and lungs and just stays there. blech...but in spite of the filth, we grew a little fond of our little hutong...in 5 nights, we had dinner at several different spots and had roasted eggplant about 4 different ways....always delicious! english menus are hard to come by, and when you find them, they often have things like "swimming sacrificed barking meat in casserole"...you can see why we stuck to the vegetarian dishes and lamb at a couple moslem joints. the food was yummy and ridiculously cheap for a ton of food! (21yuan for fried lamb w/ ginger, roasted eggplant, rice, and a pint of beer! that's less than $3US!!) btw, i'm quite proud to announce i'm actually growing to like beer! it tends to be cheaper than water and soda in restaurants, and since tap water is out of the question, it's good i'm developing a taste for it now. lol!

sorry...this post is out of order...macau was before china...

to escape the throngs of holiday travelers in hong kong, we decided to take a ferry to macau for a couple of days…we booked 2 nights in macau and our next 3 nights in beijing….(the most advance booking of the trip so far!) at the ferry terminal, we scouted out the bus stops and jumped on the number 3 bus headed for our hotel. it took us a good 15 minutes to orient ourselves on the map once the bus got going, by which point we realized we’d ridden well past our stop! so we decided to get off at the next “major” intersection and backtrack…turns out the next major stop was at the chinese border!!! lol! the bus driver yelled at us to get off when we asked for help, so we jumped off and back onto a different number 3 bus headed back towards the ferry terminal. who knew you could ride the bus across the whole country in 30 minutes?? didn’t look that small on our tourist map! the jokes continued when we got back to the ferry terminal, jumped in a taxi and proceeded to try to pantomime & explain our hotel’s address to the chinese driver…macau is an interesting place…it was colonized by the portuguese for years, so all the street names and much of the architecture is portuguese, but 95% of the people are chinese and do not speak or read portuguese! our map with portuguese street names was getting us nowhere! the cab driver kept trying to drop us off at the mandalay hotel (waayyy out of our budget!) until eventually we found a map w/ some chinese writing.
we checked in and walked to the main town square and found some dinner at a little spot on a street straight of a european movie…a bit of a strange feeling…halfway through the meal, we realized we were eating with forks for the first time in weeks, and billy ocean was playing on the radio. lol! it was also interesting to see that macau patacas are tied to the hong kong dollar and they are all used interchangeably! (btw, kb we are collecting for you.)
hot rainy weather put a bit of a damper on our day and a half there, but we made the most of it and did a walking tour through the city, checked out the old fortress and the macau museum, where there was a really great chinese paper cutting exhibit. at the fortress we took about a dozen pictures with about 30 toursists from mainland china who had never seen black people before. jokes! a preview for what’s to come in china, i’m sure!

i think we’ve taken our first and last group-guided tour in china…our trip to the ming tombs and the wall was quite a bit of fun…we had a nice group of 9 people, all of us eager to get to the big attraction…we expected some obligatory touristy stops along the way (anytime the tour package offers an all day tour, you know that includes a couple of side trips to money-spending traps…) before we even got to the ming tombs, we stopped at not one, but two jade carving factories! after 2 lessons on how jade is mined and carved & polished & how to distinguish real jade from fake & half an hour to “take a look around.” we finally made it to the ming tombs…interesting history…it’s where 13 of 16 ming emporers along w/ their wives and concubines are married. It’s a beautiful setting surrounded on 3 sides by mountains so there is only one way in (feng shui is very important here!) the tomb complex is in part a replica of the forbidden city (the city where the emperor lived his earthly life.)
after the tombs, it was on to a cloisonné factory and more hounding us to buy things before lunch…sigh. a quick lunch of chinese food (of course) and it was off to the great wall – finally! we spent a little over 2 hours climbing to the top of a very steep part of the wall in badaling…it took more than an hour to reach the high point of this one small section…i can’t imagine how many people died building this wall!
i think we all wished we could’ve stayed for a couple more hours on the wall at a leisurely pace, but alas, we were hastened off to feign interest in a freshwater pearl factory & hounded mercilessly to “try, try, try…come and have a looky, looky” after the pearls, it was a tea house for more tea tasting…dp and i had had it by that point & were rushing back to make our legend of kung fu show, so we ducked out and jumped in a cab to race back to the hotel.
after an hour of fighting traffic & getting lost and stuck in narrow hutongs (alleyways in old city) our taxi driver got us back 4 minutes late to discover we’d been left behind by our ride to the show! damn all those tourist traps! luckily, the show didn’t actually start until 7:30 and the guy showed back up after dropping the group off & was nice enough to give a ride to the theater after all. the show was fantastic…a mixture of ballet and acrobatics and martial arts. we were so glad we didn’t miss it!

so it turns out the first week in october is the biggest chinese national holiday of the year! we landed in beijing along with about 500,000 chinese tourists on holiday for the week! boy, we are lucking up with these national holidays, aren’t we? the upside is there are lots of festivals and special events going on…the down side is we shared tianamen square and the forbidden city with about 50,000 other people today! tianamen square is enormous. after more than 5 hours of walking and resting a bit to escape the crowds, and at least a dozen more pictures w/ more curious tourists, we turned back towards our hotel w/out even covering the whole of the forbidden city! it is sprawling, and quite magnificent. it’s really remarkable that so much of it remains intact and so well preserved. unlike some of the temples and palaces we’ve seen other places where only one or two buildings remain, the forbidden city remains a true city, and i could actually imagine people living there 400-500 years ago! we stupidly paid 260yaun apiece for a tour to the great wall tomorrow from our hostel without haggling & then discovered a couple places across the street selling the same tour for 90 and 130yuan! (the exchange rate’s about 8yuan to the dollar.) lesson learned! i’m sure the same 50,000 people from tianamen square will be on the wall with us tomorrow!
as we left the forbidden city, we met li and bing from wuhan. they introduced themselves to us as english students and asked if they could talk to us and practice their english. we walked for a while, and they suggested we go have some tea together…i was suspicious that they were part of some fishy scheme, but we went along with it. we “found” a tea house not far from our hostel and went through a whole tea tasting ceremony….there’s a tea festival this week, so we had a private room, with a server who served us 10 kinds of tea and told us the ingredients and history of each. it was really a lot of fun, and something we’d never have found on our own…of course afterwards we were invited to buy some tea, which we declined to do. the tasting itself cost almost $40US apiece!  we’re still not sure if li and bing had an angle, or if they really did just want to practice their english. they paid their part of the bill and bought tea to take home, so who knows…it was fun to meet them in any case.