9/11 Had the hard sleeper train (finally!) to Kunming. The hard
sleeper is equivalent the to russian 3rd class, except a bit more
squished. There are 6 bunks in a cabin, so 3 on each side. I had the
middle one. To be on the top one you definitely needed to be strong
and flexible, so I could see it could be a problem if you were one of
the older and larger germans also in my carriage who were on a big
german tour group. I ran into in my carriage Richard and Sally, who I
first met in Huang Shan and then later met in Yangshuo. We discovered
that we are doing basically the same tour. They started in St.
Petersburg about a week earlier than I did and did the transiberian to
mongolia. They have been to the same spots in China and are going to
Tibet, then Nepal, and then India and flying from Bombay, the same as
me, during about the same week. They are alright to travel with and
it is nice to have company right now. I actually really like richard,
but sally is quite the complainer and whiner and always getting made
at poor richard. Don't know how he puts up with it! But actually
most the time she is quite pleasant, but she does whine and raise her
voice at richard too much.
9/12 When the train arrived in Kunming, we of course quickly went to
buy our next train tickets to Chengdu since the tickets sell out so
quick as I have mentioned. Kunming was quite the change in weather.
Still cloudy and damp, but very cool as the elevation is above 6,000
ft. After that we went to the bus station to get a bus to Lijiang.
We found out that the gov't bus station no longer runs busses to
Lijiang, so we had to go with a tout on the street dealing with a
private company. We booked for the 12pm bus at about 11:30. We
waited for sometime and no bus. Finally some guy (we still had no
tickets which made us nervous) came and put us in a minivan and we
drove onto the interstate. We figured we must be chasing the bus
down. At one point, we stopped in the middle of the highway and the
guy motioned for us to take all our stuff out and put it in this car
that pulled up and then we piled into that. We were quite confused at
this point, until we drove through a toll station, realizing that the
car was cheaper than the minivan. We finally overtook a bus and
pulled over on the side of the road and then exchanged into the bus.
A quite nice and comfy bus, I might add. After a couple hours we left
the hwy and were two more hours on a winding mountain road when we
came to a dead stop behind an incredibly long line of trucks, busses,
and cars. We waited and waited and waited, but no moving. We were
wondering what was going on, and also quite hungry as we hadn't eaten
all day and it was now almost 7pm. The one neat thing is that we were
stopped up near some rural mountain village, so we got to watch the
villagers go about their daily farming routine in the fields and the
women here wore the most beautiful and bright outfits I have ever
seen. Finally after about 3 hours we started to move again. Turns
out there had been a landslide and it had taken a bit for them to
clear out the mud. So needless to say we arrived into the old town of
Lijiang with its narrow windy streets, quite late. It took us a bit,
but we finally found our hostel. The nice thing about travelling with
Richard and Sally was that we could laugh about the delay and all the
confusion and all that, as opposed to if you are by yourself you tend
to be more worried. Plus when we arrived in Lijiang, we could take a
taxi and share the fare instead of walking the couple km's to the city
center in the drizzle.
9/13 We slept in a bit and then headed out first thing to do our
important errand of the day...extend our visas. We walked to where
the PSB (public security bureau) was according to our book. When we
got there all that was there was a pile of rubble. We were, after
some time, able to find someone that spoke english and told us how to
get to the new PSB by bus. As it was lunch time, we knew it would be
closed, so we grabbed some lunch in the old town and then took the bus
there. It was supposed to open at 2pm, but when we got there we found
out it was supposed to not open until 3pm. Another annoyance. I was
beginning to feel like the day was wasted (I only had budgeted 2 days
in Lijiang). They let us into the waiting room and luckily we saw
that there were some english newspapers from the beijing post.
However, I knew something was peculiar when I read in the sports that
the Denver Broncos, after beating the chargers were now 6 and 0.
Hmm...looked at the paper and saw that it was from Oct of last year.
The big news at this time was that Prez Obama (Obamao as the t-shirts
all over china say) was in town. There was great hope for him and all
the youth of china were very excited. It would be the first president
to come to china (nixon was the first prez to come) that was not here
to shake his finger at china for something (human rights, ecomonics,
nuclear stuff, etc) but was actually here to try and form a better
friendship with China. Everyone was excited and it was obviously the
big news. Finally 3pm hit and we started our visa renewal process.
The brits were first and were asked to pay 160rmb (roughly 25usd)
each. I got up expecting to pay a bit more. Americans are always
charged the most for visas. Every single country I have been to in
all my travels, with the exception of mongolia, americans pay about 20
to 25% more. When it was time to pay he has for 960rmb (150USD)!!!
My jaw dropped. I felt stung! I thought I had heard him wrong.
According to my lonely planet published 2 years ago, I was supposed to
be paying 185rmb. How could it have gone up so much?? I still
couldn't believe that I was hearing him correctly. But I was. I had
no choice though as I had made a deposit to go to tibet and I wanted
to go anyways, so I was stuck paying the 150 for an extension of 30
days, of which I would only actually be using 15. I just couldn't
believe it. A couple israelis in line, couldn't believe it either.
They asked as we were leaving how we had gotten to the PSB as the taxi
was expensive. Richard said we took the bus and it was only 1 RMB. I
told him, unless you are American, then it is 10! I still was feeling
quite upset/mad/shocked by this for a while. Just wasn't expecting
it. And 150 bucks is a lot when you were expecting to pay 30 and you
are living on less than 20 dollars per day. And I never understand
like why the brits or the aussies or the canadians are so different
than us. We are all just people. And what about all the happy stuff
about Obama coming? Hadn't moving on from Bush made countries more
friendly towards americans. I guess they still want our money though!
In the evening we went to the train station to try and get tickets to
kuming for friday, but they were sold out, so we would have to take
the bus again. The train is cheaper and sally got sick on the bus,
which is why we were trying to take the train. That night we went out
to get some food and then explored a bit of lijiangs streets. It's
really a cool, cool old town, and I can't wait to explore it tomorrow.
At night it's full of brightly lit red lanterns and you can hear the
rushing water from all of the canals and waterways. The streets are
super narrow and confusing, and you are walking around lost most of
the time. And it's very old, so it has a cool feel to it.
Some random notes on travel in china:
Lukas, and avid traveller, had told me that China is one of the most
difficult places to travel bc you lack freedom to just move about as
you like. I would agree. You are kind of relegated to going to
certain places bc they are easier to go to than others bc of the
train. For example, going to and from Huang Shan, was extremely
difficult and uncomfortable bc of buying the train tickets. Since you
can only buy train tickets in the town of departure it makes securing
them hard if you are only in a town for a few days. In SE asia, you
could just decide on a whim to go somewhere that day and always find a
bus to go there. China is not like that. First of all bc it's
massive, so travel takes a long time, and 2nd of all bc you really
have to book in advance. Which means you have to be extremely
organized with planning out how long you will stay at a place before
moving on. Not wanting to plan to stay too long at a place and thus
miss out on other places, but no wanting to be there too short and
missing out on things there. So you really, really have to be
organized and know exactly when trains leave and how long they take
and what you will do at certain places, so that you can book tickets
right when you get there. Of course the language barrier also causes
problems. So china's travel isn't as carefree and go when you want or
stay as long as you want as SE asia. But it is still worth it as it
is gorgeous and so unique here.
Domestic travel amonst chinese is huge here. You hardly see any
western travellers. This is why it is so nice that they have hostels
here. I have loved the chinese hostels as they are cheap, nice, and
great places to meet people. SE asia didn't really have hostels, so
meeting people was often more difficult for me. The chinese travel in
huge tour groups and can overwhelm tourist areas with their sheer
numbers. Another funny thing is that the chinese don't care so much
about the pristine nature of things or silence or any of that. They
run around with tour guides blowing whistles and speaking loudly
through megaphones. And they really make some places so touristified.
For example lots of places on the great wall have gondolas going up
to the wall and then like amusement attractions all around and of
course slides coming off of the wall. On the mountain of huang shan,
they had 3 gondolas going up and then fancy hotels and restaurants on
top. Similar to if they built a gondola up to the top of longs peak
and had hotels and such at the boulder field (I think there was a
hotel at the boulder field at one point back in the early 1900's
wasn't there?, but you still had to walk up). Needless to say, it is
quite funny, and at times sad, how much touristified they make places.
They really build them up bc the chinese tourists don't want to do
too much work and they like luxury. And it seems most often that
their sole purpose for going on these tours is to have their picture
taken at famous sites, b/c they are hardly paying attention to the
tour guides or looking at much, just snapping the obligatory photos at
certain places. But it's usually quite easy to avoid them bc, like I
said, they are lazy so don't go far. Just take a hike or bike and you
are away from the hordes of tourists with their megaphone guides. Or
even in a place like lijiang, just go off into the side alleys away
from the few big spots like the waterwheel and you won't see them. It
is quite funny to watch them all though
Of course while in China, talk is big about it's rise to being a super
power. Most people seem to think that China will very shortly be the
world's major super power, and I can see this. Just looking in the
country china is growing so rapidly...building so much stuff and it
just feels like a country on the rise, like maybe america did way back
when. A lot of people say that china is slowly taking over the world
in a smart way. They are not using guns and war. That is old stuff.
The new stuff is with the economy. China has the fastest growing
economy in the world, and is growing in leaps and bounds even in this
economic crisis. I first wondered about China when I was in SE Asia.
Bc in SE asia, china was sending masses of its people to live there.
The chinese are very community oriented. Instead of adopting new
cultures or assimilating, they stay the same and keep their customs
and languages and close ties to china (thus the china towns in our own
country). In SE asia, the chinese were slowly becoming less of a
minority and were linked to china, not to say thailand or malaysia.
And of course in those countries, the majority of the rich were
chinese. In places like Laos and vietnam, china had purchases lots of
land and was also funding projects for these countries like dams and
highways, to eventually benefit china. Paul, the czech american was
telling me how china is buying up lots of things around the world,
waging war economically, and playing it smart. I did notice that when
greece had it's huge economic problem, China bought up a bunch of it's
islands. An economist was telling me how basically China could end
the US right now (of course the guy was european so had some of that
anti americanism to him, so I don't know how true it all was, but
sounded like he knew what he was talking about) b/c we owe China so
much in our debts, that all they would have to do is call the loans,
and of course we couldn't pay them back. He also said that China also
has a huge withholding of US dollars, that at anytime they wanted,
they could flood the markets with US currency, thus basically making
the dollar worthless. And as Lukas said, now adays, as he has
noticed, it is quite important to learn chinese now for business.
English is obviously still the best language to know, but more and
more chinese is also important. It's all quite interesting really
though, and will be intersting to see how things play out.
Tomorrow I'll explore Lijiang, pick up my visa extension and enjoy
some of the tasty food around. Already had some really good Yak meat,
a specialty here. Some interesting fruits I've had here are a thing
they call apple, but really looks like a small but rounder kiwi and
tastes much sweeter. Also something that appears to look like a big
turnip, but tastes like a combination of apple and potato, though more
appley.
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