Backpacks, Bicycles, Bumps and Bruises

I crossed the border this week into China-proper, and I also proudly became a backpacker-proper. During my trip so far I’ve experienced some different types of travel, from living and working in a foreign city (albeit for a short while)，to the vacuum packed, just-add-tourist tour and the week-long escape to a plush apartment in New Territories, Hong Kong.
I arrived in South China, in a city called Guilin a week ago. Thinking it was time to man-up, I unzipped the straps on my rucksack and discovered just how much my life for the last 2 months weighs. I’d also swapped the pristine power-shower and panoramic Hong Kong views for a Youth Hostel with a flooded bathroom and sink with a bug in it. Oddly my heart did a little glee dance (which I think was more than more than a recovery from carrying my bag up the stairs - but I can't be sure) and I breathed in the smelly, damp air, feeling pretty happy.

China has actually taken me completely by surprise, and I think I might be pretty close to upping-sticks and moving here. If it weren’t for the lure of the Russian borsch, vodka and the seven thousands hours I am going to be spending on a train in snowy Siberia （and that I have a new puppy waiting for me at home）I might just be tempted to marry a Chinese farmer and spend my days making jam, feeding chickens and playing mah jong. Whilst of course, this is a little hyperbolic, I really love this country, and I didn’t expect to. This feeling of being absorbed into and completely enamoured with a country isn’t something I ever experienced in Vietnam. This naturally, may have a lot to do with the type of travel I have/am doing in each country, and perhaps also that no-one here has stolen my passport, but even though parts of the landscape in there area I have been in look very similar, and could very easily be mistaken for being across the southern border, the atmosphere, culture and people are very different.

The history of course, is also very different, and it would be foolish of me to expect to be able to draw direct comparisons between such different countries, but I have found China to be more peaceful and self-assured than it’s southern neighbour, and even without my dazzling language skills (which are currently struggling to transition from Vietnamese to Mandarin), the people are more open and warm and I feel more at ease here than I ever did in Hanoi. I prefer these oranges a little more than I did the previous apples, shall we say?

Third-wheeling around the South

I’ve been really lucky this past week to have met and traveled with two strappingly handsome, intellectually curious and linguistically able German guys called Tammo and Flo. We met on our first morning in Guilin, where they invited me out for lunch. Over noodles (which are different to, and also much tastier than the Vietnamese variety) I learned that they has spent the last 2 months in China and had completed their first year (of four) at the University of Hamburg studying Chinese language and culture. I am still not over how cool this is (and I am pretty jealous of their continuing studentdom). Our first lunch together turned into something of a crash-course for Tamara in Mandarin, which, given it’s complexity and impossible pronunciations, became more of a crash course for the boys in how much of an idiot I am. Nevertheless, it broke the ice, and any illusions of pride I may have had, which I figure is good given my propensity to fall over and do stupid stuff; better to get this out of the way early on.

Guilin has been my first “Chinese” and “Chinese city” experience. I have read that this is a particularly nice city and that the landscape in southern China is uniquely sublime. Besides this, China is such a huge place I don’t anticipate much uniformity. Nonetheless, the boys have been doing this for longer than I and pointed out some trademark staples of Chinese cities. The first of these apparently is the traffic. I am completely un-phased by this having been initiated into Asian motor-etiquette in Hanoi of all places, so fingers crossed, this should be a synch. The second stamp is the inclination to illuminate everything. Especially at night and when this can be done in neon. Thirdly, and I’m sure I’ll be able to add to this as I continue to travel around, everywhere you go you are walking through a light mist of noisy, cheesy Chinese music. It’s still a novelty for me and is nothing compared to my 8-hour Vietnamese culture-bus induction, so thus far, it’s fine. I’ll let you know how the music tolerance holds out.

The landscape in this particular part of southern China is lusciously green and made up almost exclusively, of limestone mountains and sapphire rivers. We climbed a few of these mountains and the view from the top is quite a confused yet happy jumble. Guilin city essentially spreads outwards, much like any city, but is punctuated by spectacular limestone peaks, which the city snakes around, seemingly unconcerned by. Also dotted in amongst this confused jigsaw are a number of lakes and the Li River.

When you have been in Asia a while, and I get this impression also from chatting to other travelers, you get what I like to call “Pagoda Fatigue”. There are a lot of pagodas in Asia. They are all very beautiful, but sadly after pagoda number fivehundredandtwentysix, they are also pretty samey. That is, I would hazard to say, the case except for the two/twin pagodas in the lake in Guilin. These pagodas are silver and gold and respectively represent the moon and the sun. By night they are lit up and we climbed to the top (of the first – the second has a lift) and looked out at the city by night. Whilst this is a nice memory for me, the reason I mention this here without bursting into song about reflections and mountains (how very “Mulan”), is what happened on the way to visiting these two uniquely beautiful pagodas.

As mentioned, Tammo and Flo speak a bit of Chinese. If you ask them, they will tell you that they’re not very good, but they also say this about their near-perfect English, and so they are not to be trusted. They are at least, perfectly adept at asking for directions, which, this evening, they did, to a shop keeper on the way to the pagodas. This shop/stall keeper was wonderfully friendly and chatted (in Chinese, and not to me) for a long time, periodically trying to make a sale. He had on offer a variety of dice; one was a drinking game; one a selection of activities (such as “eat western food”) to help you decide what to do should you find yourself bored with this helpful dice to hand; and one pretty questionable “romance dice”. All the while he had been talking to Tammo and Flo, but then he stopped, spotted me, and handed me a dice “for woman”. The roll of my dice would help me decide whether I wanted to cook, sweep the floor, take out the garbage, buy the groceries, etc. I have this dice, a gift from Tammo, and think it’s brilliant – at least I would do if shop-man hadn’t been quite so sincere about it!

Ecstasy is a glassful of tea…

One thing I really love about China, and perhaps unsurprisingly if you know me at all, is the tea. It’s very different to British tea, and dare I say it, infinitely better and more enjoyable. I was first introduced to my new vice in Hong Kong when I escaped from the rain into a traditional Chinese teahouse. It was a very expensive teahouse, with pots of tea running up to hundreds of HKD, and so I ordered the cheapest on the (extensive) menu and ran to the bathroom to dry my hair beneath the hand-dryer (they have these in Hong Kong and I considered this quite the luxury). When I returned, my tea hadn’t arrived and so I amused myself while my own personal kettle boiled, reading the section in the menu about the tea ritual and traditional importance of Chinese tea.

I learned, and then watched as my tea was prepared for me, that the tea “instruments” are first to be warmed with hot water; the tea is them brewed (for 30 seconds – 4 minutes depending on the type of tea) and then the tea is poured into a small jug for serving in small clay cups. Now that I’ve tasted proper Chinese tea (and this was the cheap stuff!) I am somewhat disillusioned with PG Tips, so much so that I reduced my emergency travel-stash by half – not that this really cut out much weight or made that much more space in my bag, but I’ve got to carry the thing now. I had another tea experience in Guilin. This experience was beautifully serendipitous, but not strictly limited to tea, rather it involved also a lot of beer, and a christening of sorts.

One day in Guilin we hired bikes and cycled around the city. When we returned to the hostel, Flo was talking to a Chinese man who introduced himself by his English name – David. He owned a tea shop and invited us inside to sample some local specialties. My favourite was Osmanthus tea, which is currently in season and is made from the bud of a yellow flower. We had a really nice chat with David, and I ended up, after lustful admiration, buying a beautiful small clay teapot, cups and some Osmanthus tea. I did, momentarily, have grand notions of choosing tea sets especially for each of my friends, but given that each tea pot is handmade, unique and signed by the ‘artist’, they are also quite pricey and so said friends will have to visit me to sample some Osmanthus delights.

We ended up spending the entire evening with David, and later with all the men in his family, drinking beer. It is customary to take beer in a small glass (about 75-100ml) and to fill it to the top as a gesture of good will. The corresponding/responsive gesture of friendship is to drain the cup. If you drink all in one go we are friends. Lucky for me I really like beer and in China it’s like 3%. (I had a Corona the other night and it almost knocked me over). I managed to impress the men at the table by being “good drinker”, for a woman of course, and as much as I would like to do my bit for upholding Britain’s binge reputation, the truth is that these men just couldn’t drink. I have do doubt that they could stomach some hard liquor, but the fizzy was a bit much. My white skin and their beer-goggles meant that I was called “beautiful” a lot that night, and even given a Chinese name with this meaning, but it was decided that seeing how I was going to be a lawyer I must be too clever for a Chinese man to think me a good wife. Bye bye farmer wife dream.

Yangshuo and the Li

From Guilin we traveled by bamboo boat down the Li river to Yangshuo. The day prior to this we had visited the ‘Dragons Backbone’ rice terraces in Ping an. The terraces were much like Sapa, and we walked up and around for a few hours. True to form I slipped and fell – this time down steps of all things (muddy, slippy steps made of mud and slippiness and slate) and I now have the mother of all bruises across my backside, in a perfect purple and green line. Typical. It was worth the slip however, because stepping off the track, we walked down a cleared roadway for about 30 minutes and were met with the most spectacular view of the day. The weather that day wasn’t very clear, and we had huddled under big umbrellas eating lunch waiting for the rain to stop. Whilst this did have an effect on visibility, it also gave the mountains and terraces a mystical, illusive atmosphere, which I really love. The view from the roadside was like standing on the bank of a great lake of mist and out of this lake stood tall, proud and majestic mountains, framed in the foreground by the silhouette of pine trees. It was beautiful, and the beauty was matched only by the quiet and peacefulness – occasionally interrupted by the sound of a car horn from somewhere within the mist.

Our cruise down the Li river (to get us back to Yangshuo) was slightly different in that the scenery was outstandingly beautiful, but there was a distinct lack of stillness or quiet thanks to a ridiculous engine powering us along. I feel pretty smug in reporting that ear plugs did the trick (almost) and there wasn’t anything capable of spoiling such beautiful scenery.

In Yanshuo we spent two nights in the party hostel, mostly playing drinking games (ouch) and then we escaped outside the town to the countryside. Here we spent an idyllic evening under the stars (supplemented by candlelight) playing cards and the following day, less the hangover, we hired mountain bikes! Now, there is a sense of freedom and adventure commonly associated with the notion of “getting off the beaten track”, but for me this does tend to involve some form of injury or embarrassment. On this mountain biking excursion I nearly slid over the edge of a bridge. Before my dad has a heart attack and bungee-jump flash backs, I should say that this ‘bridge’ was about 3ft high and also made of mud and slate (and slippiness) and covered only a muddy stream. I don’t think I could have injured myself if I tried.

Having prefaced this however, you will be pleased to know that when we went rock climbing (something for which Yangshuo is apparently famous) we booked a proper company, guide, equipment: the works. Perhaps ironically I am more battered and bruised after that one morning that I have been the entire trip. My legs are a veritable constellation of bruises, scratches and mosquito bites – super attractive. Apparently, I don’t suck at climbing up rocks, and I really, really enjoyed it! The first climb was hellish, and my bottom-man was less than helpful and I’m convinced he thought my legs were 10ft long (which would have been pretty useful), but the rest were simply awesome. Sadly the spider-girl act was cut short by the rain, but a hot shower and hot chocolate was waiting for me back in the town, so I cant complain really (but of course, I did).

The next leg of the journey for me is still quite uncertain. I arrived in Kunming in Yunnan this morning after a cosy comfortable 18 hour train ride, and I need to make a plan. I have two weeks left, but I have fallen in love with the country and don’t want to leave, so I need to put together a strategy to get the best out of my remaining time here. In case you think the communists have gotten to me and I have been brainwashed into loving China, I do have one bad thing to say. The toilets are, frankly, evil in its purest form. When we were in Vietnam we had a scoring system for toilets according to whether it was (a) western, (b) had toilet paper, (c) had soap or (d) had a towel or hand-dryer (this was rare). Oh golly, if only I had known they were the glory days…