Litang

31st July Litang, China
So I got another 9 hour bus west.
The landscape is really high and mountainous.
Loads of Yak and Tibetan nomad tents.
Litang is really cool.
Over 4000 meters high it's a bit like the image of the wild west with dusty streets cowboy hats and motorcyles.
This is a tibetan town, no extra permits needed to visit because it's in the provence of Sechuan not Tibet.
Tibetan people dress more often in cool traditional clothes and their houses are much nicer than the chinese with stone construction and lots of colourfull design and decoration.
Litang is on a high flat grassey plane surrounded by hills.
Wandering about the town you get the tibetan greeting all the time and Yak wander freely in the little streets.
People are still interested in my odd appearance and it's quite common for kids to have a go of pulling your arm hair or men stop in their tracks to check out those red hairy legs.
It doesn't take very long to walk out of town and we spent a day walking to the top of the hills overlooking the town and another day walking around the plane.

There is a huge monestary, almost like a miny village.
The temple decoration is imresively colourfull and you get a real sence that it's a place of strong living culture.

There will be a big fesival in town soon and there is a tented village outside of town.

Kangding

So this is the start of the Tibetan world.
There are loads of Tibetan people dressed in traditional clothes and speak Tibetan.
Signs are written in chinnese and tibetan, which has its own writing.
There are Lamisaries, prayer flags, prayer wheels, including handy hand held ones that old women keep spinning all the time.

I am sharing my dorm with some Tibetan monks.
Staring is quite common and you start to get used to it.
Quite often when you are eating people walking by will just stop, stare and drop their jaw.
Still it can be a put offputting when someone stands over your bed and stares at you while you are trying to get to sleep.
At lunch another monk just stood behind us and stared so we offered him a seat.
The equipment that every monk must have is, trendy robes, cool hat, beads for praying and a brand new mobile phone.
This guy showed us a download he had of a pop band to point out that I had the same colour hair as these blond girls.

Kangding sitts squashing into the valley floor where two rivers meet,
the surrounding mountains are pretty cool and I have spent a few days walking in the hills.

Bus to Kangding

22nd July 2006 Kangding ,Sichuan ,China
So time to move on and start putting some bus miles under my belt.
I booked a ticket to Kangding but found that the bus was canceled in the morning.
No problem just two busses then changing at Ya'an turning 8 hours into over 11.
After ya'an you start climbing through valies and gorges and it's quite beutiful.
You start to leave the smoke stacks behind, but it is still misty. There hasn't been clear visibility since I got to Beijing. This has been partly blamed on polution and there are big chimneys pumping out a steady stream of smoke just about everwhere but I think the country is a misty place aswell.
At an altitude of over 2600m this place is plesently cooler.
There is a mix of tibetan people here as well as han chinese (the majority people of china making up over 90%)

Chicken transport,
In indonesia chickens live a pretty free life wandering whereever they please etc.
But when it's time to be transported it's into the huge array of tiny cages build on a custom vehicel. Can't reach the top slots, just chuck the chicken head first and if it bounces off the partition between cages no bother just try again.

Here it's tie them together by the feet in bunches of about 10 and bring them on the roof of the bus, I thought they were dead ones at first but no only nearly.
Then chuck them down to the ground from the roof, ohh look one of them layed an egg in transit, sure you can crack that open and eat it on the spot, nice snack.
Ah it's a chickens life.
Still not turning veggie though!

Pandas and a very big Buddah

So one thing that you "have to do" while in Chengdu is go to see the Panda research center. So I did this. The Panda is exreamly endangered and notoriously hard to breed in captivity so there aren't many places that you can go to see them.
Unfortunately their natural habitat is at altitude above 1000 meters anyway so at this time of year Chengdu is a bit too hot for them. So they stay in their air conditioned indoor cages leaving their lovely outdoor enclosures empty and visitor with a bit of a feeling that it's like a bad zoo. I would have stayed in an air conditioned enclosure all day given the chance it's just that hot.

So next stop is Leshan only two hours away by bus. The big draw here is that is has the biggest Buddah in the world, carved out of a cliff face it is quite impresive.
A nice local fellow met me off the bus wanting to practice his spoken english and treated me to dinner. This happens a fair bit so I've decided to treat people I meet on the bus to dinner for carmas sake.
Other than the Buddah there was a cool market in the morning where you could get anything you might dream of. From live ducks, hens or pidgens killed on demand. To a second hand trowel or a bag of live toads. Yes the chinese eat anything and everthing. Two dishes that I don't think that I've tried yet is dog or mouse but others have. I usually order food by pointing at something someone else is eating or randomly at the menu. It makes a big difference when you are with someone who speaks chinese. Hence more motivation for treating people to dinner.

Hot pot and superstars

19th July Chengdu
A popular and fun way to eat here is the hot pot.
As the name suggests in this type of eatery you get a big cauldren in the middle of the table filled with hot (spicey and temperature) oil and cooking spices, over a gas heater.
You then get up a grab from the vast aray of raw meats and vegetables on sticks,
stick it in the pot to cook, then pick them out and into another bowel of oil in front of you and eat.
Mmmm oil, meat, picking what you want, where can you go wrong,
then the bill is worked out by the amount of stick you have at the end, 1 cent a stick.

Going out in the evening is great fun,
people are really friendly and often love to have a westener at their table and buy you a load of drinks and make loads of toasts telling how great you are.
You definately feel like a superstar.

Chengdu

I spent two days already walking around Chengdu,
It's a big city, but I can't seem to find any old or characterful areas like in Beijing or Xi'an, maybe they were all knocked down to make way for the skyscrapers.

The hostel is nice and really sociable.
We went on one night out on the town, and one night in.
A drink in a nightclub costs 30y, which is two times the price of a dorm bed (expensive)

The price of hostels goes down a you go from north to south in China
1 euro = 10 y about

Beijing dorm 60y first night then 50y
Pingyau 40y single room
Xi'an 25y dorm (most places in town were 50)
Chengdu 15y dorm (many places available for 25y)

Xi'an to Chengdu

My hostel was in a nice old building which had been saved redevelopment (being knocked down) by the fact that it was used by the comunists as a headquaters for resistence during the anti-japonese war (world war two).
There is a plaque which gets a few domestic tourists and I had the pleasure of having my photo taken by people genuinely surprised and pleased to see a westerner,
the last time that happened was in Peru.

I met up an Irish guy in the hostel and we went out for a night out.
This must be the first time for a month, indonesia wasn't the most happening of spots, at least not where I was for the last month.

Well the night life of Xi'an is ultra tendy.
Loads of cool places and fashionable people, blue contact lenses is a fashion at the moment which looks a bit strange.
So a good night was had by all under the pretense of getting tired out for the night train the following day.

The train, as before, was a great experiance.
Everybody sits around on the bottom bunk and shares vast quatities of food.
There's always a peice of watermelon or a snack coming your way.
There were a few people with varying levels of english which helped.
Many people say to me that they are surprised how little english is spoken in china,
I am surprised by how much there is.
I am now in Chengdu

Xi'an

13th July 2006
So I spent the day wandering around Xi'an.
The people here like squating, you know just crouching down like that can be more comfortable then sitting.
They also like to ware a damp towel on their heads,
a good idea as it is about the hotest and sweatiest place that I've been to yet.
Was told by people ariving from Bangkok that this is much sweatier.

There is an interesting muslim quater,
Men with little hats and beards, and the odd woman wares a headscarf.
Lots of interesting buchers streats, cows livers, hearts, carcases, flies, smells,
nice apetite for lunch.
As is often the case was asked where I came from, you can usually guess that this is the question and answer "i-er-lan".
Chinese characters each represent one sylable, so words like this are just matched up as closely as posible to existing characters, e.g. "i-da-li" just won the world cup, but of course each character has a tonal quality, one of five tones, so "i-er-lan" gets a nice down and up cork accent.
In this case next question, is i-er-lan a muslim country?
A little disapointment when we figured that it wasn't but Libiya and Indonesia are so it's ok.

There are a good few religions around, appart from Tauism and Confusism if they are actually religions, Buddhism is quite popular. I was given a nice gold Buddah card from a girl on the train practicing here english, there was another westerner who had learned chinese which made the whole journey much more interesting as communication was possible, a bit. I got a chinese name. This is what they do here get another name to make it easier on you, and give you a chinese one. My one cleverly means "likes to sing" while still being a chinese name.

There are even a few Christians churches and all!

2000 year old army

Xi'an 12th July 2006
So had a bit of a walk across the city while looking for suitable acomadation.
Although Xi'an also has most of it's walls the first impression is of a modern prosperous city. The drum and bell tower in the center are as good or beter then those in Beijing. I settled on a place a bit neared the train station, which is handy, and a bit more of a working mans area, nice hostel.
I spent alot of the first day queueing to buy a train ticket out.
The vast ticket hall being completely full of people queueing and when you finaly find out that there isn't a ticket in the next three days you have to queue up in a different line for tickets more in advance then three days.
I decided not to get the train to Tibet, too much red tape, expense and not enough info.

Walking in China is acompanied by the very frequent sound,
"HacKkkkk tWap, thwewp" the constant spitting isn't as disgusting as the way the maximum noise must be made in producing it.
There are many other ocasions where the maximum noise must be made also, eg tourist attractions, loadspeakers and random shouting are a must.

Today I went to see the Terracota warriors outside of town,
this 8000ish strong (they haven't dug them all up yet) 2000 year old, life sized army, with individual features is quite impresive.
Apperently the chinese invented chrome plating 2000 years before its modern inventors meaning that the weapons were still sharp, cool.

Photos

A few more photos,
Photos 3

All the others

Pingyau

Pingyau was an excelent place to stop for a couple of days.
There are loads of little streets to wander through,
tonnes of temples, tauist a budist.
They both seem like rather different religions or traditions then the ones we are more familiar with.
The name Tauism seems to be given to all kinds of traditional ancestor worship,
god of earth, city god, grain god etc etc. and many of them are ancient guys who actually lived and then became the "god" of war etc.

Tonnes of historic buildings to visit including the first chinese bank.
You can walk the town walls which is cool,

One of the days I cycled to a temple outside of town which was from before the ming dinisty (very very old)

I have decided that chinese is hard to learn,
if you don't understand someone they will often start drawing the chinese character in the air, this is because when chinese have different dialects they still use the same characters so writing can be a kind of universal language, not much good for me though.
I can recognise a handful of characters and it takes about 3000 to get the jist of a newspaper, hmmm.

I got the comments sent to me, thanks dad,
and of course the bad spelling is a deliberate ploy to entertain and evaid the censors.
I might even start throwing in a bit of Chinglish for entertainment,
for example there are signs next to many stairways saying "slip carefully"
or next to a low threshold "knock head" and the spelling can be worse then mine,
eg "no smoling" etc.

I got the night train to Xi an and arrived 11th of July

Pingyau first impressions

7th July 2006, Pingyau
So I spent one more day wandering the hutong of Beijing,
come to Beijing now 'cos it'll be totally different next week,
it looks like it was last week.

Then the overnight train to Pingyao,
it was a bit spooky looking watching the big flames of the oil refinaries light up the sky, out the window at 4am.
So I arrived here just after 5am.
On the way into town you see more signs of poverty then Beijing,
people looking through rubish, a dog tied to a big rock that it could just move etc.

This town is really cool though,
the old walls are still there and the buildings are really old and well preserved without having been turned into a disney land.
Really cool.

End of Beijing

Oh so I forgot to mention the scams.
Well by and large the people are an honest bunch here,
you usually get the correct price for things and people are quite friendly too,
with many speaking english to a reasonable level.
So this means you could be excused for letting your guard down when a student couple wants to practice their english on you, no problem right.
So walking down the road in step chatting with the usual host of questions etc. and then "do you want to stop for some tea". Ah sure why not, it's China, you get endless tea for free with your meals here.
A half dozen minuture cups of different types later and you're landed with an astronomical bill, ahh.

Incedentally I can't access my blog here (in China), I can write it but not read, hmmm, must be something to do with cencorship or something, so all those coments are going unread by me at any rate, so send me an email ...

Beijing Sights and scams

Beijing China,
4th July 2006

So I went to loads more sights,
the summer palace and the temple of heaven for example.
All have the same characteristics of loads of scafolding and the great cultural renovation takes place for the olimpics and loads of domestic and western tourists.

I went to see Mao in his mau-solieam in tienamen square.
Love him or loath him he was a pretty important guy and now he is stuffed and mounted for everyone to queue up and file past if they want.
The official party line is that Mau was 70% right and 30% wrong,
Read a bit about the "great leap forward" and the "cultural revolution" to get an idea of how much that 30% covers.

Great wall

1st July Beijing
Got a bus out to the great wall,
it was cool the way is snakes through the mountains,
way too many tourists though at the section I was on,
queues to get past people,
in new zealand really buisy means that you see someone every 5 minuites,
in China it means that you nearly get trampled be a stampeeding heard of camera clicking flag following tourists, odd.