Tiger Leaping Gorge

Joanna writes:

Well, we've temporarily lost our friend and guide Ian to the lack of reliable anti-malarial drugs in this part of China (he's currently in Thailand sorting that out), but we did get to spend a few days together in and around Kunming. We stayed with his friend Lexi in her Kunming apartment while we explored the city and discovered the wonder of Y20 (about $2.50) hour-long massages, and haircuts where they spend almost half an hour massaging and shampooing your scalp before they even reach for the scissors. (I just got the shampoo, but Ben and Ian came out looking quite sharp.) We also took an overnight trip down to the Stone Forest, a geological anomaly two hours south of the city that's been encompassed in a lovely park.

Though sad to lose Ian, it did give us the chance to travel up to the northern part of the Yunnan Province and hike Tiger Leaping Gorge, a stretch of the Yangzi River that's one of the deepest gorges in the world. It was one of the most wonderful things we've ever done. The gorge is just indescribably beautiful, and we got to spend three whole days hiking the high trail along one side of the mountains, stopping to sleep and eat at the lovely guest houses along the way. We also descended the steep path down to the river, where a spry little old lady led us out over a rickety bridge to the rock where a mythical tiger supposedly leapt the gorge.

Not only is the natural scenery of the gorge spectacular, but the human endeavors there are also quite amazing. Tiny farming villages dot the steep hillsides, and the terraces of crops are both impressive and beautiful. Even the infrastructural elements like telephone wires and water pipes that would normally seem to be a blight are such feats of engineering that they're more of a sight than an eyesore. Though the camera is a vastly inadequate tool for capturing the grandeur of the scenery, we did take a bazillion pictures and, sadly, unless you plan to visit China in the next couple years, that may be the most you'll ever see of the gorge. Despite international protest, China seems to be moving ahead with plans to dam the Yangzi, and that may spell the doom of this place. However, there's a flurry of new construction going on in the gorge, and tourism is booming, so we'll see if perhaps it will be saved in the end.

Right now we're in Zhongdian, a city very close to the Tibetan border. It's really cold, and really beautiful. Today we will visit a large Tibetan Buddhist monastery, and tomorrow we fly south to the lowland tropical city of Jinghong in the region of Xishuangbanna to reacquaint ourselves with heat and humidity. Then the current plan is to cross the border into Laos to meet up with Ian again before we scoot over to Thailand to chatch their new year's festival. Not sure when we'll next be able to update, so be well, everyone!

Beijing is the size of Belgium

Really, no kidding. We're pretty sure that this gigantic figure includes a lot of surrounding countryside, but the point is, it's a huge city.

Joanna writes:

March is not Beijing's most becoming month, but we had relatively good luck with the weather, and managed to enjoy ourselves despite the chill. Our first three days there were sunny, or as sunny as it gets when the wind isn't blowing in the right direction. The pollution there is really quite extreme, and makes the sky seem permanently grey and heavy. It also makes for some neat sunsets.

Our hostel was in one of Beijing's old neighborhoods, called hutongs. They have narrow streets and old, often rundown buildings, and are becoming more rare as they are demolished to make way for modern apartment buildings. It was a cool area to be in, and we spent a lot of time just wandering around. It was also pretty convenient to the central sights, like Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City, where we visted our first day. Unfortunately, Mao's mausoleum is closed for some time (a lot of things are being renovated for the 2008 Olympics), so we didn't get to gawk at the waxy remains of the Chairman. We did get to see the huge portrait of him that hangs on the Gate of Heavenly Peace, the entrance to the Forbidden City. The Forbidden City is a pretty cool place to visit, with lots of beautiful architecture and a huge lovely garden, though it probably would've been cooler when it was still forbidden.

We also took a trip to the Great Wall. It was Great! No, seriously, that thing is amazing, and we also learned some important lessons about tours in China in a relatively painless way. We were initially surprised and delighted by how cheap the tour was, as it included transportation to a faraway part of the wall, a guide for the four-hour hike along the wall to another access point, and lunch. What they didn't tell us was that there were three additional charges for entrance to different parts of the wall. The whole thing was still inexpensive, but it seemed pretty sketchy when they pulled over at a gas station a couple hours out of town and demanded 40Y from each of us for our entrance tickets. So, we now know to always ask if there are additional fees! Our other lesson was that we need to tell people that we're not going to buy anything from them before they waste their time being nice to us. At the beginning of the hike, our little group was joined by about as many Chinese "guides" (we naively thought) as there were of us. Soon a tiny old woman was holding my hand and keeping me from slipping as we climbed up the steep and still icy slope to the wall. I thought, "oh, how nice.“ Well, kind of. Then she got really mad an hour later when I didn't want to buy a book. Anyway,the hike was wonderful, and so was the lunch, so it was a lovely day all told.

Another good experience we had in Beijing was renting bikes for a day. The traffic in Beijing (and Shanghai and Kunming) is pretty crazy and the rules are loose; it's pretty much a might-makes-right situation, with a general hierarchy of buses, then cars, then bikes, then pedestrians, though a sufficiently large herd of the latter two can sometimes overwhelm even the buses. Tons of people still bike in China, and we've seen people carrying all manner of ridiculously huge loads. Most of the bikes are really old, too--it's strange to see immaculately dressed women with high-heeled boots pedalling along on bikes that look like they were built for a nine-year-old boy twenty years ago. There are usually large bike lanes on the main streets, but they're often full of pedestrians, carts, scooters, and sometimes even cars, so you need to keep your wits about you all the time. Luckily everyone goes pretty slowly. So, off we went on our rented bikes into the fray. About five minutes after we set off, my back tire exploded. Ben says it looked pretty cool. Luckily my replacement bike survived the journey, and we had a fun ride.

I think one more sight that deserves note is the Taoist Temple we visited. I think the general impression Americans have of Taoism is that it's basically about chilling out and finding the Way. We do not understand exactly how this idea relates to what we saw, but there is definitely a lot more to Taoism. The temple courtyard was lined with about 50 small rooms, sort of like stalls, that were all labelled as different "departments." Each contained about ten nearly life-sized painted figures illustrating the purpose of the particular department and a judge figure at the back. Some notable deparments were "The Department for Implementing 15 kinds of Violent Death," "The Deparment for Mammal Births," "The Department for River Gods," "The Deparment of Jaundice," "The Department of Petty Officials," and "The Department for the Accumulation of Justifiable Wealth." We don't really get it, but it was a rather surreal experience.

On Saturday night we decided to try to find the local rock scene, and set off for the What? Bar, a destination gleaned from a google search. It was awesome. A tiny little hole in the wall (quite literally, as its door opened into the wall surrounding the Forbidden City）where we saw two Beijing bands rock the house and ran into an acquaintance of Ben's from school (Azalea, for those of you who might know her). We inhaled a lifetime's worth of smoke and partook of the birthday cake served to one of the band members, and had a generally fun time seeing that rock and roll is alive and well here.

So now, after our brief flirtation with our native climate, we've flown down south to Kunming in the Yunnan Province, where it is sunny and 70 degrees and the trees are covered with leaves and flowers are blooming everywhere. It's wonderful！ Tomorrow we meet up with Ben's friend Ian, who speaks Mandarin and is awesome. Hooray!

PS After days of intensive study, we have determined, without a doubt, that the babies here are So F-ing Cute. Especially up north, where they are bundled into 15 layers of adorable clothes and go tottering around with only their faces and bums sticking out (Chinese baby clothes have open bums so they don't have to remove all those layers when the kid needs to wee.) Here in Kunming they have sun hats instead, so the cuteness factor (CF) remains almost as high.

Shanghai: City of Contrasts

Ben writes:
Though today we sit in the Red Lantern House Hostel in Beijing, we are here to tell you about our 72 hours in Shanghai. Seriously, city of contrasts. There is less to do there in the Great Wall / Mao's Tomb kind of way, but instead you get to witness an incredibly burgeoning city. Being in Shanghai lends great credence to the notion that China will, at least economically, be the next world superpower. There is neither time nor space for every astounding detail, but here are some telling moments, at least.
Getting from the airport to the shuttle bus to the subway to our hostel told us less about China than about the fact that we don't speak Chinese. Fortunately, there is a good amount of English on all the important signs in town. But despite this, we spent a lot of time gesturing and repeating simple English phrases while generous kind people did their best to point us on the way. If you stand still and look lost, someone will either say "taxi, hotel, taxi" at you, or actually come over and help. We've gotten a lot of both.
If you do not look lost, you still often get "watch, shoes, ladybag," but we also had the pleasant experience of getting into conversations with Chinese students, one group of whom brought us to a traditional tea ceremony. We barely got to ask them anything, as they were so full of questions about the US, and about us. The tea was great, and we learned a little about tea traditions, too. Good one.
Ok, some burgeoning city stuff. As we rode the shuttle bus in from the sticks, we first went though what one guy we met describes as "rural industrial" Shanghai, which is what it sounds like, and occupies a fair amount of the land outside the urban center. Next came the very tall apartment buildings, in clusters of 3-8 identical buildings. These continue all the way in, but other city things fill in around them.
If you walk on the Bund, the touristy waterfront on the river, you will see on the west coast colonial era office buildings, all stone columns and such. On the east coast are incredible huge postmodern office buildings, bizarrely shaped and lit with neon and gigantic tv screens. None of that was there 15 years ago, we are told.
The urban planning museum has a very impressive scale model of the city, probably 20 meters across. It also has extensive displays on all the development the city is planning. There are many claims of being eco-friendly, and designed with human needs in mind, a contrast to the concrete towers of the Communist era (how Communist is China now? I really don't know. Maybe we'll figure it out). I have never seen a city with such vast ambitions for itself.
We spent one day walking from the French Concession, a pleasant neighborhood with nice trees on the streets and a lot of music stores, to Old Town. Old Town is a decaying mess of streets and alleys packed with fruit vendors, food sellers, restaurants, some book stores, clothes, I don't know what else. There is a lot of demolition, some construction, meat cooling in water buckets on the sidewalk, motorcycles and bikes zipping between people, cars honking through tight passages. It is a lot dirtier than most of Shanghai. It is apparently disappearing to new development, and while part of me wants to say no! it is so special and unique, one should also recognize that it is kind of squalid, and most of it would not be up to code in the US. I'll be interested to see where it goes.
Minutes away from Old Town are vast wide streets with huge pedestrian overpasses, and trendy expensive designers stores around. We got free Bailey's and cheese served by Chinese women at an Ireland tourism promotion thing.
That same day, we passed though several fantastic parks. Shanghai has the best quality+quantity of parks of probably any city I've seen, as evidenced by the fact that people use them! There are brightly colored public exercise machines that everyone is on, people playing cards and what appears to be backgammon, doing movement exercises, sitting and talking. Really good public space.
The public transport is really good, too. In conclusion, Shanghai is a city of contrasts.

Today in Beijing, we split the day between the Forbidden City, and the twisting alley-streets, called hutongs. Tomorrow we're going to the Great Wall!

Australia, Mates

Ben writes:
We got to Australia two weeks ago, and tomorrow we're going to China. How about that.

Our adventures began in the city of Melbourne, a sprawling town of some 4 million (approximately the whole of NZ) in the middle of the southern coast. Our friend Petra's uncle John met us at the airport, holding tiny liscense plates with our names on them. John is a great guy, and a generous host. We spent four days touring around Melbourne and environs with him and his partner Sue.

Inside the city we saw a variety of new and old neighborhoods, ranging from the young and upscale but not too upscale St. Kilda beach, to the terrifying Docklands, where they paved the old wharf and put up gigantic apartment towers. Melbourne is developing at an insane pace, due largely to a boom in the resources economy, as Australia digs up everything that China will buy to fuel its own insane growth. How about that. (Speaking of China, read the weblog of our friend Ian, whom we'll be seeing soon: www.ian-in-shanghai.com).

Outside of town, we took a trip to Montsalvat, an artists' colony established around the turn of the last century by a Swiss architect. The materials were salvaged from various constructions and demolitions in and around Oz (yes, short for Australia) at the time, and the feel of it is right between a medieval village and a medieval castle. My personal favorite was the make-your-own guitar workshop, where classes were in progress. Seeing the room full of raw timber that would become acoustic guitars was pretty amazing.

We also got a driving tour of the bay, including a ferry ride across the channel, and a view of the water from Arthur's Seat, a large hill/small mountain on the east side of the bay. We can not thank John and Sue enough for their wonderful hospitality!

Then Jo and I took off for even more driving, renting a car and checking out the Great Ocean Road, which stretches a few hundred kilometers west of the city. Great, Ocean, and Road pretty well describe it. We stopped at the 12 Apostles, the main tourist attraction on the Road: they are large pieces of rocky land that erosion has separated from the nearby land, standing by the shore. There are only 8 left, as erosion has overdone things a little. However, the really nice stops were the unexpected and less common ones, including a beach with beautiful rock formations that looked like sand drip castles, or petrified roots; clay cliffs with a rainbow of earthtones just below us, and a view of the sea; canoeing in the first Aborignal-owned nature preserve in Victoria, where we saw pelicans, ibises (ibes?), egrets, herons, shags, and more.

Back in Melbourne, we stayed with a guy named Steve, who we found through Hospitality Club (dot org). Our respective schedules meant that we barely got to see Steve, but he lived on a tram line convenient to the Chinese embassy, where we blew a fair amount of time getting our visas, and to the East Brunswick Club, where we got to take in a concert by Love Is All, one of our favorite Swedish bands (definitely see them if you haven't -- so rad!), and Cut Off Your Hands, a pretty solid group from Auckland, NZ (the live show is better than the cd, should you get to hear it). That was a long sentence. Sorry. From what little we did see of Steve, we can confidently report that he is a really nice, cool guy, and we wish we'd seen more of him. Thanks, Steve.

While staying at Steve's, we did some basic city wandering, museums, the botanic garden, the war shrine. It went by pretty quickly, and we got up wicked early (again) for a flight to Alice Springs, a town of 27,000 located right in the middle of the desert. Here we are staying with Ian and Trish, the couple who hosted Joanna in Atherton (in northeastern AU) while she was studying abroad here in college. They moved to Alice a year ago, and so here we are, where it is always over 90 deg F, and often over 100. But it's a dry heat.

We spent the first few days driving over unsealed roads through the desert in their 4x4, stopping at beautiful gorges and waterholes, as well as the former Lutheran Mission of Hermannsburg, now home to an excellent Aboriginal art collection. The proprietor gave us a great talk on what it all meant. You should really look into this stuff.
Then, as in Melbourne, we rented a car for a long trip. This time the destintations were Uluru (Ayer's Rock), Kata Tjuta (the Olgas), and Watarrka (King's Canyon), three of the best things the desert has to offer. Uluru is an astoungingly huge red rock sitting all by itself in the middle of nowhere. It has a lot of significance in Aborignal culture -- disrespectful tourists climb it; respectful tourists walk around it, which we did as the sun was setting. We also got up quite early to come see the sun rise, which was a lovely event, though saturated with other tourists.

Kata Tjuta is a series of smaller rocks domes that we hiked in between (also no climbing!), and Watarrka is a great (smallish) canyon where we did the rim hike. The great surprise there, besides the gorgeousness of it, was the side hike to the Garden of Eden, a swimming hole where we hopped in, and then dried on a sunny rock. The whole area is like but unlike the US South-West.

One noteworthy stop on the way was Stuart's Well, a "town" consisting just of camping and tourism stuff, where we caught a free performance of Dinky the Dingo. Dinky is a wonderful dog that, when someone plays the piano, hops up on the keyboard and "sings" and "plays". Though not exactly "musical" the performance, with Jo on the piano, was "awesome" and "hilarious". Dinky has raised over $11,000 for the Royal Flying Doctors. We took a video.

Now back in Alice, we are relaxing, organizing, and packing for the trip to China. We can not thank Ian and Trish enough for their wonderful hospitality, too! Tonight we're going to see some Aussie rules football in town, and that will be that.