Tom's Chinese Adventure

That is the sound of my blowing the cobwebs and accumulated dust from the pages of this BLOG thing I used to update once in a while. Right, I think this much awaited return to the Internet deserves a Batmanny style onomatopaeiamajig:

That's the ticket. So, crikey, WHAT HAVE I BEEN UP TO? In summary: lots. I've eaten noodles, I've spoken Chinese, and the other day I found a hairclip in the back of a taxi! I sat on it and thought it was my phone, but then it turned out to be a big old bitey hairclip which is great for biting things like pieces of paper I don't want any more. OH AND LOTS OF PEOPLE HAVE VISITED ME. And I came back from holiday! Yes, I left my friends back in the real jungle of Yunnan to return to the concrete one I this year call home. So, I reckon that's an appropriate enough place to start telling this chronologically...

I left them asleep in a charming little hostel (with decidedly sub-charming toilet facilities) in the centre of Li Jiang, a town I have since been informed was used for those bits of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon where there are lots of old buildings. This was a nice thing to discover as I myself had, when exploring the town alone and at night, engaged in a little Crouching Tiger fantasy. Anyway, creeping from my hostel bed down to the lobby, I ran into yet another party of British Councillors; those monkeys get everywhere. Then I got a taxi to a bus station and a bus to a Kunming. On the bus I watched White Chicks in Chinese, except I was sat right at the front of the bus, directly under the flat screen television, so these particular White Chicks were disturbingly green.

And then, a short aeroplane journey later I found myself 2000 kilometres further north and 30 degrees less warm in the international airport of this nation's capital, where I just happened to bump into a couple of people who are my mum and dad. How cruel I felt then, showing them the mist-obscured lights and the smog-muffled sounds of Tianjin when I had just days ago been enjoying the very beautiful south. But none to worry, they had come to see where I lived and see where I lived they did.

So what did we do? Well, we monkeyed around in Tianjin, and we went to Ancient Culture street on more than one occasion, being as it is this town's one and only attraction for tourists. My mum spent considerable time organising my house as only a mum can, and I soon found myself with pots, plates and other kitchenalia I never knew I needed, as well as a stack of new towels. Then we went to the Great Wall.

This was my first trip to the wall, so we went on a guided tour from our incredibly expensive hotel. Now, a bus packed full of lao wai is an opportunity no entrepreneurial Chinese can miss, so instead of heading wallwards right away, we went via some "points of interest". The first of these was a Traditional Chinese Medicine hospital where Mr. Mao himself was once a regular visitor. Once there, we were treated to a display of the finest chicanery and charlatanism, as con-men and -women in white coats tried to relieve the Westerners of their wealth. We weren't fooled, but plenty were and many a bag of herbs (or memorably, "'eeeeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrbsa!" from the lunatic head doctor, who's grasp of the English language was quite amusingly loose) changed hands for what I now know to be almost ten times the standard Chinese price.

Anyway, then we went to a jade museum (read 'shop') where I bought myself a miniture jade dragon. I briefly considered buying a stack of the things, and travelling around committing difficult to solve crimes, with naught but a single jade dragon left as a clue. And people would speak in hushed tones, "Awwwww, Jade Dragon has been here!" and wonder...

Anyway, I didn't do that, and eventually we got to the Great Wall. Since it had been snowing we had to go to a different section than planned; one where slipping to our deaths was apparently less likely. And it really was Great! Unlike in ancient China, our bit of wall was rocked by the vibrations of passing HGVs driving along the road parallel. But this spoiled the atmosphere only a little, and in the snow it was a truly spectacular sight. In a minute, a photograph of this wall, but first a picture of my dad being silly:

And now for that picture of the wall. Those dots of colour you can see in the distance are my mum and dad!

Also we went to Tian'anmen Square, and various markets, and probably lots of other things I've forgotten. One of the greatest challenges of the holiday was to keep my mum from starving to death, unimpressed as she was with the sanitary standards of my local restaurants. But she made it home alive, so I will call this trip a success! And we all had a very good time.

ANYWAY guys, there's plenty more stories to tell, but they'll have to wait for a little while. You'll need a while to read this one anyways, plus a day or two to recover from the shock of my actually posting, so, maybe by Wednesday another post? A post about Francesca coming to stay? Maybe? I'm promising nothing, but we'll see. I have a feeling my upgrading to a "pro" account might spur me on to making more regular updates. After all, I'm paying for this now.

Just to finish, here's a picture of that hair clip I told you about earlier. Look how it's biting that piece of paper I don't want any more! It's pretty ace.

Laters,

Tom

Oh do I have some adventures to tell you about! And they are adventures which, as the title suggests, take place mostly in the RAINFOREST! The rainforest is perhaps the most excellent place to have adventures.

So, it all started two days ago, when we decided to follow the advice of our travel bible and strike out for Gan Ban La by bike. After a brief mission around town we eventually found a place with enough mountain bikes for all of us. However, a number of things that aren't interesting to hear about happened, the result of which being that we left the place with one old mountain bike, two brand new ones and a MOTOR BIKE, oh yes. And so with a plan to take turns on the MOTOR BIKE, we set off on the road for Gan Lan Ba.

And so we rode and rode and rode along the road to Gan Lan Ba, and for some of that time it was ME riding on the motor bike. Sorry Francesca, and sorry Mum, but I couldn't resist, and as it turned out it was a lot of fun and I didn't even die. In fact I was riding along, listening to Queen, the wind in my hair... It was awesome, and I think I'm going to have to buy myself a big motorbike right away, and ride it everywhere I go. This will of course bring my life expectancy down to about 25 but who cares? Motor bikes are cool!

Okay so maybe I won't get one, but it was certainly worth doing that one time. Anyway, on with the ADVENTURE. We arrived in Gan Ban La just as it was getting dark, and checked ourselves into the Shitty Somethingorother Hotel. Then essentially we had some food, Steve and I checked out the local DISCO, we all checked out the crazy KTV upstairs in the hotel and then we went to sleep. I thought that after a day of exhausting cycling I would fall asleep instantly, but that wasn't the case. Instead I had a horrible headache and stayed awake for most of the night, freezing my arse off because I hadn't found the duvet in the cupboard at the end of the bed! Fun times.

ANYWAY, then the next day came, and stuff happened and then we got ready to head home. And THAT'S when the real adventure started. Instead of going back the way we came we decided to go back a different route, crossing the river by ferry and cycling back along the more rural looking road we'd seen on the way there. However, without really knowing the way and without having a map we took many a wrong turn, happily taking us on some stunningly beautiful detours. Well, we did this for a bit, and eventually ended up back at the ferry crossing and were faced with a decision: take the ferry back across the river and return the way we came (and knew) or head off down a crazy dirt track. And of course we opted for the latter.

So, down the track we went, me on the motor bike, bouncing along over rocks and stones. After a short while I passed the motor bike on to Jane, who had until then not ridden it herself, but quickly overcame her fear and was soon bouncing down the hill, gradually losing our supply of water as the bottles leapt out of the basket. So, then we cycled for AGES, mountain biking over some propper rugged terrain, with lots of uphill and nowhere near enough downhill for my liking. Plus I don't understand the magical world of mountain bike gears, so uphill was pretty much a killer. So, it was all a lot of fun, and I only wanted to die for about half of the time, but we saw such amazing scenery that it was, all in all, worth the pain.

Anyway, then DISASTER struck, and in hindsight it really would have been a disaster had it not been for the help of one WONDERFUL Chinese log-carrying van driver. As Victoria (on the motor bike) and I cycled away at speed, Steve's seat fell off of his bike. As he and Jane tried to repair it by hand, the aforementioned log-carrying van driver saw that they were in difficulty and pulled up to rescue them. First he fixed Steve's bike, but that wasn't enough for our hero; seeing that Steve and Jane were both exhausted he threw their bikes on top of the van, put them in the cabin and drove down to catch up with Victoria and myself.

SO, then it was getting pretty dark, so it was decided that Victoria and Jane would take the bike back to Gan Ban La (another 24 kilometers away as we were told by Mr Log-Carrying Van Driver) and Steve and I would go in the cabin. So that's what happened. We were merrily driving along at something approaching 5 kilometers an hour (it was many tonnes of truck and trees travelling over what could only just be described as a road, we had to go slow), when about an hour later we spotted in the headlights Jane, Victoria and the bike, stopped by the side of the road. After a few minutes of thinking the thing had broken down, we eventually discovered that it was just out of petrol. So what did our hero do? Did he bail and get back in his truck, intent on making his delivery on time? HELL NO. He got out of his truck and started flagging down passers by, trying to get one of them to give us some petrol. After many failed attempts and more than a few arguments he eventually succeeded, and Steve and Victoria had enough petrol to take the bike on to the next village. Jane and I got back into the cab and we slowly made out way back to Gan Ban La.

So, is that the end of the adventure you ask? Well, nearly. Upon reaching Gan Ban La, this amazing man dropped us off, handed us back our bicycles and said good bye, refusing our offers of money. So, all that was left was for us to get the bikes back to the hire shop, get some food and go to bed. I took the bike through the town, which was a good deal scarier than the mountain riding, but seemed to be going pretty smoothly. HOWEVER, Grace (that is the name of our bike, which I should perhaps have mentioned earlier on) had other ideas, and on a particularly bumpy bit of road got herself a flat tire. Being the inexperienced motorbikalist that I am, I didn't know that this had happened, and cycled along (with great difficulty) for a brief while, before Steve noticed. I then took it to get it fixed, and Steve went to find the girls and more confusion ensued as we all tried to find each other in a part of town we didn't know and we all got quite cross and might have started killing each other had it not been for Jane's intervention.

"I've got a new plan," she announced, "it's called 'I'm fucking starving', let's go and get some food". So we did, and after a delicious meal of spicy rice and sea weed (though they could have served me up a plate of hot soil and I would probably have gobbled it just as quickly) we slowly turned back into human beings.

The rest of the evening passed without incident. After a few beers back at the hostel I had a shower where the water ran brown off of my dirty self and climbed into bed, falling asleep one or two seconds later. Marvellous.

Right, now we're off to a lake somewhere, for some intensive sitting around and doing nothing much. Also I have to stop because I am being attacked by a small girl.

C-c-c-c-ciao for now,

Tom

P.S. There are a whole bunch of truly stunning pictures that I would love to show you, but being as I am in Yunan, and being as Blog.co.uk is staffed by chimps, they'll have to wait. Sorry.

Oh man also I totally didn't write enough about how beautiful the rainforest is. There are trees, lots of trees, but also there's lots of wonderful houses on stilts, made out of bamboo, with pointy Chinese roofs and everything. Oh and hills! And valleys. And there were those rice paddy fields as well, and Chinese people all over the place just doing stuff, living their lives in this tropical paradise. And big red ants! And there were pineapples! And all kinds of strange and wonderful crops growing and I took pictures of them all and I can't wait to show them to you. And everyone who cycled or drove past us on our journey gave us the thumbs up, or shouted hello and smiled! This is a wonderful country!

Hello chumps!

As Matthew so observantly observed, I have not been online for a number of days. However, he was not right in supposing that I had been eaten.

In fact the opposite is true: I on holiday! Being on holiday is the opposite of being eaten, it seems. Anyway, I am on holiday in Spain. Well, it feels like Spain. In actual fact I'm in the South of China, specifically an Internet cafe at the bottom of the stairs that lead up to our rather basic but friendly hostel in a town called Ginghong in Yunan province. Yunan is a province that has rainforest in it! It is close to the equator. Apparently there are also elephants, and monkeys, and perhaps leopards I think, or maybe it's panthers and it has palm trees and sunshine and air you can breath and occasionally silence! All of these Tianjin does not have. Today we went to a botanical garden, and there were plants! But first we tried to break into some other place, having foolishly mistaken it for the botanical gardens. Stupid laowai.

Anyway, Thai food is calling me so I must go. If I find another Internet cafe I might (read "probably won't") update again, but we are headed even further from civilisation, into the rainforest I think! Which should be pretty awesome. If I manage to stay uneaten by big cats for the duration, I will post again upon my return! And if Blog.co.uk have got their act together, there might even be pictures! We can hope.

Anyway,

See you all soon,

Tom

So, yeah, no updates for a while? Well, I have an EXCUSE.

I have run out of SPACE. My 10 Megabytes, generously provided for free from blog.co.uk has been filled up with all my silly pictures, and now I need to UPGRADE if I am to keep you guys entertained with more tales of wacky China. Or, more accurately, if you want to see pictures with those tales, and in my opinion the pictures are the best bit.

Anyway, I'm on the case, but the upgrade payment mechanism is handled by a team of chimps, it seems, and I either can't access their site, or I can but my data "cannot be found in the database" after I've entered it two times already. So, it's making me cross but I am a computer scientist after all so I'm sure it won't defeat me ultimately.

Anyway again, I can assure that there's an amusing little "Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year" post in the pipeline, and it should be with you all pretty soon!

Right, now it's time to put some clothes on and head off to Starbucks to mark a stack of exam papers.

Catch y'all l8r,

Tom

Can it be? A real update? It hardly seems likely, what with this rubbish I've fed you all lately. But we shall see. It's late, I should be in bed but I'm not, so let's do some typing and see how far I get. Right, so, where to start? So many things have happened, so many memories now half forgotten...

Cheng De

Oh my lord, Cheng De! It seems like years ago now, stepping off the overnight train into the freezing Cheng Deian night air, dazed, shivering and confused with no real plan to speak of. Victoria and I would surely have died of exposure right there on the pavement had it not been for a kindly and enterprising Chinese lady who scooped us up into here dirty yet thankfully WARM restaurant. So, we spent some time and ate some food in there, and then after some mangled Chinese we managed to explain that yes, we knew it was five in the morning but no, we did not want somewhere to sleep but in fact wanted to head off to temple no.1 in the hope of finding some real-life monks to gawp at. "Okay," she says, and bundles us into the back of a taxi and sends us on our way - she quite sensibly wants to get back into bed.

For about five minutes, things looked promising. We were happily taxiing along in the dark when BAM, it's time for us to get back out into the cold. We've arrived at the gates to the Cheng De park and we can go no further because it is five in the morning you silly lao wai and the roads are shut. So what did we do? Did we give up and try and find a hostel to rest our weary frozen bones? Like hell we did. I happened to have my torch with me and so we continued our sight-seeing by torchlight. Why let little things like pitch darkness and sub zero temperatures stand in the way of our tourism?

So, we head into the park, joining an increasing number of Chinese people headed mysteriously in the same direction. Anyway, what followed was a pretty surreal experience. Whilst some of the aforementioned Chinese were setting up to practise the ancient art of tai chi, a lot more Chinese were there to practise the more modern and decidiedly more popular art of dancing around like a loony to God-awful Chinese pop music. As morning slowly broke we continued our journey, occasionally getting lost or pausing to take another look at a map, pick by torchlight an arbitrary direction in which to travel.

Anyway, this was all lovely, and would have continued to be so had it not still been COLD and somehow getting COLDER. So, at something approaching seven ay emm we decided to look for shelter. We found yurts, but they wouldn't let us in so we once again had to throw ourselves on the mercy of a taxi driver. "Take us to a hostel," we said, and fifteen minutes later we were in the lobby of an expensive looking hotel. "This is a hotel," we said, but he said no, it was a hostel, and it was the cheapest we would find in all of Cheng De. By this time we were tired, and a bit cross, so we gave in; it was a hostel. I imagine we probably did some haggling but I can't quite remember. What I do remember is heading straight up to the room and climbing into our beds fully clothed in an effort to thaw ourselves out. Then we fell asleep...

...and woke up again about five hours later. With a large chunk of the sight-seeing morning gone, we dashed out to start looking at the TEMPLES. Christ, I've written all this and we haven't even reached the temples yet - I fear this entry might require some serious editing. ANYWAY, the temples.

There's seven of them, or maybe eight, and the interesting thing about them is that they're all designed to look like bulidings from different parts of China, allowing the then emperor to entertain guests in familiar surroundings, in order, so the Lonely Planet says, to "exploit their allegiances". Which is all pretty exciting, in a historical sort of way.

The temples themselves are all something of a blur in my memory. I remember that one temple was very large, and in it I did some incredible haggling - I brought the price of one genuine Qing dynasty coin down from 50 to five kwai, and some worry balls from 80 down to ten. I have developed a rather effective haggling technique which involves me saying a ludicrously low price for something I'm not really interested in buying, then saying that same price over and over again until the item is mine. I also saw a necklace made of skulls, which would have sorted every Halloween/Hawaiian party for the rest of my life, but for reasons I cannot now remember I didn't buy it. In another temple Victoria and I went seriously off piste, exploring various poorly locked buildings and un-fenced-off areas, which was all very exciting. Here is a temple photograph taken from a room which we were not supposed to be inside.

The most interesting experience was of what I am going to call the third and final temple, though the exact chronology now escapes me. Though quite pleasant itself, this temple was surrounded by the most polluted district of any Chinese city I am yet to experience. It was truly astonishing to see life continuing as normal: children returning home from school; markets selling fruit, vegetables, meat, clothes etc. all in air I could barely even see through, never mind breathe. Rather sadly I realised that all those children would most likely be dying long before their time, growing up in such a choking environment. Anyway, that's getting a little too heavy for this blog, so to lighten the mood here's a photograph I took of a pile of (suprisingly Western) toilets. Look, one of them's blue! How odd. Tom's recommendation to you is that if your wallpaper is looking a bit tired, this might make a suitably wacky replacement.

Anyway, lots of other things happened, like I bought myself a giant Chinese Army coat. I later discovered that I had purchased the model with the pimping upgrade - a whole sheep sewn into the lining. Also a mouse helped himself to some of my seeds whilst on the train - eating a small hole through my bag to get to them the little bugger. And there were some very large bells, which Victoria being an American had no qualms about hitting and making a very loud noise. Also Victoria did some anti-praying by rolling all the prayer wheels backwards, and was immediately attacked by a swarm of bees. Spooky stuff! Of course, when I say immediately I mean a few minutes later, and when I say swarm of bees I mean a single bee, but it's still pretty spooky. And I took a photo of a monk using a mobile phone, but I think everyone in China has a photo of a monk on a mobile so I won't bother to post it here. What I will post is a picture of a monk Victoria and I pissed off by taking a photograph of him whilst he was reading from his prayer book.

And other silly things happened! In the evening we wanted to go to a bar, but we couldn't because such things don't exist in China. So, I used some basic Chinese to improvise a bar out of one of the many handy restaurants that was lying about the place. By strange coincidence I had just the vocabulary I required to ask the two important questions: "how much does your beer cost?" and "is it cold?". As you can imagine, the stupid lao wai got a funny look or two for such wacky behaviour, but in general the locals were amused rather than annoyed, it seemed.

Oh! And there was a statue the likes of which I have never before seen! As a regular-sized human being I would have come up to the top of his ankle, I think, if I could have hopped over the barrier without being grabbed by the guards. He was very large, exquisitely carved out of I believe eight different types of wood and had a name that started with an 'A' and was followed by an unlikely sequence of vowels, 'V's, 'K's and 'R's. Anyway, what was in some ways even more exciting than the giant Mr Avekrevikrkiveuuosuarrr was the feng le Chinese man who, after having offered up his oranges to the statue decided to educate Victoria and me in something very important. There was certainly a lot of shouting, a lot of enthusiasm and ample helpings of spit and slobber as he tried in vain to get us to understand whatever it was he was so concerned about. Soon a crowd of sympathetic yet highly amused Chinese grew to watch and laugh at the silly foreigners being harrassed by the loony. Still, it was all good natured and pretty soon we were on our way again. He even let me take a photo.

Additionally, my entire perception of Chinese Buddhism was turned on its head. Far from being the peaceful, minimalist, life-is-an- illusion arrangement I thought I knew, Chinese Buddhism seems obsessed with STUFF, and expensive, violent stuff at that. There was MORE THAN ONE ROOM devoted to mini-statues of angry pig-faced men, standing on bulls which were themselves raping and trampling helpless women.

And on that unpleasant note, I shall go to bed. Editing be damned.

Tom.