China – postcard style.
For those peripheral processors who don’t want to read countless blogs about each and every Chinese adventure, I write this for you. Here I summarize the entire trip. BAM!
As for you central processors, those blogs are coming… with details, facts, humor and mystery. And my poor yet conversational writing style.
Dear Reader,
China was an amazing experience. Could I have been more cliche just now?
I traveled with my friend Justine from South Africa. After more than a year and a half teaching in Korea we were ready to take on the rest of the world. Or at least China.
We flew into Beijing. Did a two day train ride to Tibet. We were in the delightful company of our tour group made up of Laura, UK, Will, Rhode Island, Mirjam, Holland, and Rochelle, Canada/Phillippines. We spent about a week in Tibet seeing the Potola Palace, numerous monasteries, eating yak, bargaining and visiting Everest Base Camp. As our guide Puntsok told us, some people only experience mt. sickness through words. We had the real deal. Let’s hear it for O2 and pain killers.
We trained it back another two days to Beijing where we visited Tien’amen Sq., The Forbidden City, The Temple of Heaven, and The Olympic Bird’s Nest and Aquatic Center (Go Michael Phelps).
We took a cable car up The Great Wall of China, walked around, and rode a tobaggen down.
Riding around the city, Justine fell off her bike and I rode around on a flat. We also ate Peking Duck and saw an acrobatic performance. The rows in front of us were filled with Koreans. Go figure. Happy Dragon hostel had a great atmosphere, the workers are friendly and exteremely helpful.
Then we – you guessed it – took a overnight train down to Xi’an to see the Terracotta Warriors.
Despite storing out backpacks in “left luggage” at the station, one of my two cameras disappeared. Pick pocket paradise. That night we hopped on… very good… a train and spent about 24 hours traveling to Chengdu.
In Chengdu we had Sichuan hot pot, saw a Sichuan opera, visited the Chengdu Panada Breeding Research Center, and stayed overnight at Mt. Emei (Emei Shan). A man on a motorbike tried to rip us off, my boot melted on the exhaust and I was grabbed inappropriately. Good company in the form of Dutch, German and Finnish travelers made up for our shady experience. Mix was another great hostel which I’d recommend in a heart beat.
We then headed to Guilin via TRAIN and arrived the following evening. We went out in search of a bar of European sorts listed in Lonely Planet which was shut down. Pretty much ate dinner, walked around and went to bed. Flowers hostel was pretty crap.
The next day was something new. We traveled by BUS. Guilin was merely a stop over and a storage place for our luggage while we went to see the magical Dragonback Rice Terraces outside of ugly Longshen. It was rainy and cold, our first bad weather day on the whole trip. Our bus led us to a second bus that ended up picking up every villager and their vegetables. We got to our destination village late. We had about an hour to look around before we bussed it back to Guilin in time for our next journey.
That night we hopped another BUS to Yangshuo where we arrived an hour and a half later. We befriended the owner of a reagae bar who led us to our hostel Bamboo House. Bamboo is another lovely one filled with the smell of fresh banana bread. Later we stopped into our new friend’s bar, Kaya, for a quick drink and a thank you.
Yangshuo is absolutely amazing with limestone peaks EVERYWHERE and is located on the Li and Y… Rivers.
We spent our first full day biking in the rain. The rweather for the rest of our stay was more on our side and I even got a sunburn kayaking. We also biked to and hiked Moon Hill, bamboo rafted, witnessed cormorant fishing (ancient art utilizing birds that can’t swallow the big fish), attended a light show directed by the same person responsible for the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Olympic games in Beijing, and enjoyed some delicious cuisine.
After several days we took a NIGHT bus to Macau. I thought it was so cool. Justine was eh about it. After a confusing immigration process the next morning and a lack of accomodation on the islands, we found a hostel on the mainland on the road of happiness where scenes from Indiana Jones Temple of Doom were filmed. We spent the day visiting the Ruins of St. Paul’s College, the first protestant cemetary in Macau, St. Anthony’s Church, The Company of Jesus Square, Mount Fortress, Camies Square, Casa Garden, St. Dominic’s Church and Square as well as Senado Square, my personal fave. We took buses to get around in case you were curious.
Our second day was to for the beach. A detour brought us to the harbor where we had to purchase our ferry tickets for our ride to Hong Kong airport then following day. When we finally reached the beach it was freezing and no one was there. We napped, ate a massive spaggetti dinner at a Portuguese restaurant, flew a kite at St. Paul’s and checked out the casinos.. mainly the Grand Lisboa.
I left around 8:45 am to catch the ferry. So that’s bus to ferry to plane to plane to bus to cab. A couple Korean assholes tried to get me to catch a cab for 100,000 Won and delighted in the fact that I appeared clueless. I told them they were out of their minds. I caught a bus to Jamsil since I missed the last one to Bun Dang. From there I took a cab to Heidi teacher’s apartment and went to sleep.
And that was China. If you have any questions about hard-sleeper or soft-sleeper trains I’m your girl.
XOXO,
Aimee
PS Feel free to ask me anything if you plan to check out China!!
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