Us Round The World
…….our travels across the globe

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