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The Next Chapter Begins

Sunday, June 28th, 2009

For the past two-and-a-half months, we’ve been shuttling ourselves back and forth from Guangzhou to various points around China, done three separate visa runs to Hong Kong or Macau, spent more than 30 nights at the IT World Hotel in Guangzhou, seen places we otherwise probably never would have reached, and been mesmerised by the canyons of Zhanjiajie, the karsts of Dehang, the lakes of Jiuzhaiguo, the Buddhist caves scattered all around Gansu and the architectural beauty of Huangyao and Lijiang.

We suffered a huge letdown when we lost the bid that most affected us (despite winning a separate bid), but within 24 hours we received an equally surprising piece of good news – that Wendy had passed a very competitive and difficult United Nations translator exam she sat four months earlier. This turned our fortunes upside down overnight and we soon realised that on a personal level, losing the bid was the best thing for us. Now, with Guangzhou in the rear-view mirror, we have plenty of options for the future and (most importantly for the purposes of this blog), plenty of freedom for the present.

A long time ago (nearly two-and-a-half years, to be more precise), we sat with a handful of travellers and an atlas on a guesthouse rooftop after the Monday market in Djenne, Mali, and plotted our conquest of Asia – a one-year-or-more sweeping overland journey through Southeast Asia, China and Central Asia, then winding back through the sub-continent and finishing in Nepal. Since November 2007 we have pursued this dream pretty relentlessly, albeit in a broken up form with work stops in Beijing and Guangzhou, by completing Southeast Asia, spending significant time in China, returning to India and Bangladesh, and trekking the Annapurna Circuit and Sanctuary in Nepal. Apart from a return to Pakistan, which has now descended into complete chaos, the only place unvisited from the plan formed that evening in Mali is Central Asia. And with nothing else in our way for now (though that could change at any moment), it seems as good a time as any to finish off the ‘task’ we set ourselves back in March 2007.

To that end, we have arrived in Urumqi, the major city of Chinese Turkestan (or Xinjiang province, to be official) and a city further from any ocean than any other place on earth. We intend to spend about two weeks in Xinjiang before moving west to the former Soviet Republics of Central Asia – “the ‘Stans”– beginning with Krygyzstan and continuing into Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. After that? Who knows…

The Lakes of Jiuzhaiguo

Sunday, June 28th, 2009

According to sort-of-Chinese-Ted, and confirmed by really-Chinese-Ada, the Chinese believe the four most beautiful places in China, and thus the world (given that China is by far the most inward looking country on earth) are: the Great Wall of China, the karst scenery around Guilin and Yangshuo, the Huangshan mountain, and Jiuzhaiguo. Having visited the first two, and with the third not really in our immediate plans, we decided to use a few spare days last week to head to the fourth, Jiuzhaiguo National Park. It’s in the northwest of Sichuan province, and given the current closure of Tibetan areas to foreigners nearby to the park in both Sichuan and Gansu, you can only get there by air anyway, so we figured we might as well fly all the way from Guangzhou.

As the Chinese say: “If you want to see mountains, go to Huangshan; if you want to see water, go to Jiuzhaiguo.” Jiuzhaiguo consists of 114 stunning lakes – many a seemingly impossible blue, a few that are even multi-coloured – that shimmer and reflect the surrounding pine forests, and a few waterfalls as well. We spent two enjoyable days hiking around the park on well-made trails, and had them virtually to ourselves, since Chinese tourists will never walk when they can catch shuttle buses or cable cars, and there were only a handful of foreigners there. (I’m still trying to reconcile this image of the Chinese tourist, who will take a shuttle bus literally 200m from one stop to another rather than walk among the nature that they presumably came all the way here to see, and the Chinese who flock to city parks all over the country every day to use exercise equipment, dance and perform tai chi – how can a single people be so lazy and yet so physically proactive at the same time?)

We liked Jiuzhaiguo quite a lot, but I didn’t think it was quite as good as Zhangjiajie. Jiuzhaiguo is a very pretty place, but the canyons of Zhangjiajie were overwhelming, and had the ‘Wow!’ factor that Jiuzhaiguo was perhaps lacking. Having said that, we bumped into a Greek traveler who said Jiuzhaiguo was the most amazing place he had ever seen in his life. So, the usual rule applies: different people see and enjoy places in different ways, and that’s why we strive to visit them ourselves.

Wowed in Hunan

Saturday, June 6th, 2009

If I intimated in any way in my previous post that we were over karst scenery after seeing it so many times over the past 18 months, I apologise profusely and take it all back, every word. Because for ... [Continue reading this entry]