China…. tis a strange place and even stranger looking back on it as we are now in easy breezy Vietnam where it seems like a completely different and much more comprehensive universe.
We decided to cut our journey time in China short as it was experiencing its worst winter in 50 years and call us wimps but this is our holiday and we only had 359 days left of it and so we wanted to enjoy it in the warm (and we had just been across Siberia. And I lost my hat and gloves in Beijing).
two minutes later there was a queue of people wanting their photo taken with us!
So any way we headed south - first getting a night train from Beijing to Guilin and then a train from Guilin to Nanning to get our visas for Vietnam. We had a few days in Nanning waiting for the visa and the bus out of there, along with loads of other cold travellers with the same mission!
China surprised us in many ways and we found at times quite challenging to understand what was happening which made for some amusing situations. It was amazing how popular we were as foreign tourists. We were constantly asked to be in people’s photos, stared at for up to 10 minutes at a time and even got asked for our autographs. Although it was quite amusing living the life of a z-list celebrity for a week it was also a little weird. We stuck out like a sore thumb outside of Beijing and were the only foreigners on all the trains and buses we used between Beijing and the China/Vietnam border which was both a source of amusement and fascination for all. Though I also have to say that the Chinese are also the loveliest, friendliest people and that we would have been very stuck without the kind help of some people on our bus/trains who made sure we getting on and off the right vehicles at the right times and were telling us how to fill in our visa forms etc
Our main struggle in China though (apart from the scams!) was the food.
Now anyone that knows me well enough knows that I’m a girl who loves her food. I’m also proud of the fact that I’ll try anything strange or unusual (except for roll mop herring ). So I was not expecting to be totally turned off food on our trip – not to the point where my trousers were all too big for me and the only thing I could stomach was a big mac (I don’t really class this as food – I have not been to a MacDonalds in 4 years and yet I managed 3 times in one week in China!).
It all started with some dubious buffet food at the silk street market, some strange tea boiled eggs and chicken sausages from our hotel’s attempt at an English breakfast and things just got progressively worse from there. On our night train from Beijing to Guilin we were encouraged to buy a chicken in a bag by the guy we were sharing our sleeper compartment with. ‘They’re made in my home town’ he says, ‘very tasty’ he says. It’s probably just like those chickens you get from the asda we thought so we bought 2 noodle pots and a chicken in a bag from the trolley in the hope of constructing a Chinese feast for our journey. However, on opening the chicken in a bag we are confronted with a rather strange cat food smell and on further examination of the contents of bag found a jellified, alien baby looking object which we understood to be the chicken. We pulled chunks off and it just broke into crispy bits – Dave was close to gagging by this point and we had to make it look like we had eaten and enjoyed it. It was lucky that our Chinese friend was not in the compartment at the time as we may have caused great offensive to his home town’s contribution to the culinary world!
Our next train journey found us sat opposite 3 teenage girls who were constantly eating on the 5 hour journey from Guilin to Nanning. The train pulled into a station where there were hawkers on the platform and one of the girls got off to grab yet more food. She got back on the train with a stick of dangly objects that I couldn’t make out and handed her 2 friends a stick each. Its only when I noticed the claws that I realised they were sucking chicken feet kebabs and spitting out the claws and putting them onto the tray next to me! I’m ashamed to say I almost vomited there and then and was so relieved where they moved over to another table. It took me about 5 days to get over this – days in which we saw dogs in cages ready for cooking and when we also tried to eat a chicken curry made of bones and little else. Oh and then there were the vacuum packed jellied chicken feet for sale in the snack shop….eeuuughh!
Please don’t worry about me wasting away though as Vietnam is truly a wonderful food heaven and my appetite is well and truly back to normal – along with my pre-China waistline unfortunately!
Laura
We arrived in Moscow with some apprehension due to the various accounts that we had heard of strict officials, corruption and yet more of the dreaded cold. However our first impressions were good – an impressive express train taking us directly to an even more impressive Metro system and a smell of vodka in the air…… so far, so good. We managed to navigate our way to our hostel proudly being able to interpret the Cyrillic signs, which Laura learned how to do on the plane so we had a slight grasp of Russian. For one thing was already apparent, the Moscovites had no interest in speaking anything other than Russian even though its seems that the rest of the world speak English to each other!
St Basils, Red Square
We took in all the sights…Red square, St. Basils, the Kremlin, Gum, and the very cool Trevotsky Gallery (if you go to Moscow go here!). However it got so cold there was only so much time we could spend outdoors and we found ourselves whiling away the afternoon in the cheapest restaurant/bars we could find. Our best place had our favourite waitress who would come over to our table when noticing that we had finished our beer to ask ‘you vould like repeat beer?’ to which we replied ‘da!’ many times. ‘Repeat Beer’ as you can imagine becoming a bit of a catch phrase for our trip.
However, although the city was much nicer than we expected we started to get tired of a few things there. It was a strange place full of OCD levels of cleaniness and fixation on clearing the city of snow. There must have been 20,000 snow shovelers just in the centre of Moscow, all moving the snow from one place to another equally pointless place. Maybe an adage to the old communist ideology of jobs for people. What is most striking about the most expensive City in the world, is that they are not shy in showing off their wealth and style (although 20 years outdated by Western standards). They seem almost brazen in showing it off. The whole of the city centre, and this is not an exaggeration, has been taken over by designer shops with intimidating security staff. If you multiply the size of New Bond Street in London by 1000, then you are somewhere close to Moscow center. Not sure how long this exaggerated wealth can last, surely there are not sufficient amount of rich people in Moscow to sustain these shops?
So we bid farewell to Moscow deciding we were far too poor for the city (even executive David!) and prepared ourselves for our long awaited journey across Siberia to Beijing on the Trans-Mongolian.
The Trans-Mongolian journey was amazing and we think it will most definitely be one of the highlights of our year long trip…. you can read about it on the Trans-Siberian page.
So after 7 days of little contact with any but each other and a few Trans-Siberian travellers, losing all concept of time and routine and forgetting all about the big wide world works we stepped off the train and into Beijing……Within about 5 minutes of being there we became victim to our first scam. Having used 5 different currencies in 13 days and no idea where our booked hostel was we managed to end up spending 150 yuan on a ‘taxi’. Yes we worked this out as being £15 to take us 5 minutes down the road and real fare of £1.40. Nevermind, we though it’s a good lesson to learn and we will learn and we won’t get fooled again!
Anyway our time in Beijing has been great. It’s actually nothing like we thought it would be and although quite polluted with busy traffic it was quite laidback and the people ever so nice. The Chinese people seem to share a very similar sense of humour (which we couldn’t find with the Russians we met). Their mainstream comedy does seem to be strangely slapstick, wacky and 20 years outdated to the Western style. Timmy Mallet would have made a fortune! Although you see Western influences slowly creeping in, mainly due to international students we learned, it is still very state controlled. And we were disappointed to learn that Facebook, Youtube, some Google applications are still blocked following the pro-democratic riots earlier in the year. TV is so censored and cut that I totally lost the plot of Batman (The Dark Knight).
In comparison to Moscow, where the locals appear to have no interest in you (as a tourist does not have enough money) the Chinese are the opposite. The majority tend to view Western tourists as very wealthy and that they can afford to spend (and be scammed in our case!) out of any amounts of money.
We spent our first full day window shopping around the main shopping area on Wangfujing and then checking out lots of other shopping areas looking for some hiking boots for Laura as we had booked our trip out to the Great Wall. We decided on our way back to the hostel to quickly check out Tiananmen Square and this is where we got scammed yet again……..Read about the Beijing Tea Room Scam on our scams age - it’s such a wildly elaborate scam and we think it wont be the last time something like this happens to us so we have created a scams page!
The Great Wall was more beautiful than we expected, and as we signed up for a tough 10k hike from Janshinling to Sameti, and it was certainly a challenge. There are thousands of steep stairways up and down.
On the Great Wall
It was so peaceful and the views from the wall were outstanding. It is a lot more impressive being on the wall and looking out at the miles of seemingly pointless constructed wall that was easily climbed over by every enemy.Also, we learned that you cannot actually see the wall from space, that’s just a lie.
Our last few days were spent holed up in a hotel whilst Laura completed her MSc assignment. Who would have thought that Laura would be the one spending 4 days solid at the laptop whilst David lazed around watching HBO, making full use of the hotels pool and sauna and drinking beer…Laura will get her own back though I’m sure.
Well our last day in Beijing saw the greatest snowfall in 50 years and the place is chaotic (we now understand Moscow’s obsession with shovelling as Beijing is now one big brown sludge of a city) and…… cold! We are done with snow and cold now so heading out on a sleeper train to South China in search of some warmth and a Vietnamese Visa……..
