After caving to the Tibet Tourism Bureau (TTB) travel agency mafia in Zhongdian and paying far too much for a ‘permit,’ I at last found myself in the lounge of the Zhongdian airport waiting to board a plane for the 2 hour flight to Lhasa.  The modernity of the entire experience was a bit surreal after the remoteness of Yubeng. 

I felt a little out of place with my dusty backpack as carefully coiffed, trendily dressed yuppie couples mingled with retired world traveler couples.  Surreality continued as I boarded the spotless China Eastern 737 and flipped through a few glossy inflight magazine articles about the new BMW 335i and some upscale hotel in Switzerland called (what else) The Hotel.

Surreality aside, views from the plane were spectacular and before long we decended onto the surprisingly arid Tibetan plateau.  On the hour-long bus ride to Lhasa, passing one hastily built Chinese building after another, I started to wonder if the cool travelers hadn’t been right after all.  Once I found my way to the old Barkhor district and was caught up in the current of pilgrims circulating the Jokhang Temple, I decided the cool travelers didn’t know what they were talking about.

The devotion of the Tibetan Buddhists is stunning, and on several mornings I’ve visited a favorite smoky, sunlit courtyard to find the same ancient women sitting in the same spots twirling their prayer wheels and chanting quietly. 

Inside the temple itself, the air is palpably thick with incense, and anything that stays there for more than an hour or two soon becomes coated with a layer of oily residue from thousands of yak butter lamps.  The maroon walls have been there for a lot longer than a few hours, and are now almost black with soot.  After visiting three floors of claustrophobic chapels to assorted Buddhist dieties and demons, I climbed stairs onto the roof out of the darkness and was dazzled by sunlit views of fresh snow on the mountains around Lhasa.

Sure, if you venture outside the Barkhor district of Lhasa, signs of the massive influx of Chinese are painfully obvious.  Still, don’t let anyone convince you that Tibet is gone for good…it’s right where they left it, now with a bit more MSG.

 Zhongdian, cool mountain town atmosphere:

The Yubeng Trek near Dequin that I raved about in my last post:

Tiger Leaping Gorge:

Lijiang-touristy, yet pleasantly photogenic:

By popular demand:  pandas!  Amazing to think that one of these guys caused so much commotion at the Washington, DC zoo and I saw 14 panda cubs in one place:

The Leshan Buddha, it’s quite large:

A few last shots of Chengdu:

Granted, my introduction to Yunnan in the form of a 22-cum-24 hour bus ride from Chengdu to Lijiang wasn’t all that great.  The alleged sleeper bus was not, and I found myself in a semi-reclined position for the entire ride.  The driver took our full size bus on a series of smaller and smaller gravel roads in the interest of avoiding tolls on the Chengdu to Panzehua highway, turning a 9 hour leg into a 15 hour one.  

The trip wasn’t all bad, though.  They seated me next to the only other lawai (foreigner) on the bus:  a friendly Aussie girl who made for good company.  I got to see the second half of a kung fu flick I’d started on an earlier bus ride, which starred Jet Li as an assasin with a conscience.  I got to see some pretty out of the way corners of Sichuan province…I’m pretty sure at some point that we actually drove through an active ore mine construction site for example, which made for an interesting distraction.

At any rate, Yunnan has been all uphill from there.

Lijiang is known for being a bit of a tourist trap, and I hadn’t expected much.  The Disneyfied maze of cobblestone streets and endless souvenir shops was suprisingly appealing, atmospheric, and photogenic.

One of the most interesting parts of town is the ‘bar street,’ which is a long strech of two story bars with open windows facing each other across a narrow canal.  Every night the bars are packed with happily inebriated groups of Chinese tourists who compete to serenade each other across the canal.  They end each slurred musical tidbit with a shouted ‘yasu, yasu, ya-ya-su!’  I’m not sure what the prase means, but it always seems to stir the opposing side to new heights of out-of-tune enthusiasm.

After a late night on the bar street, I hopped on a bus early the next morning to hike Tiger Leaping Gorge with a mix of people I’d met in Chengdu, on the bus, and in Lijiang.  At the trailhead, we picked up a solo Chinese hiker named ‘Daisy.’  Pretty much every Chinese person I’ve met who’s studied English has an incongruous English name that they chose the first day of class.  I don’t go around introducing myself as ‘Francois’ to every French speaker I meet…but that’s another story.  In any case, Daisy’s name actually suited her sweet personality quite well.  Daisy was also very helpful in negotiating prices for donkey rides up steeper sections of the trail for a few of our fellow hikers who weren’t feeling too hot.

Tiger Leaping Gorge was every bit as amazing as I’d been led to believe it would be.  Sheer gorge walls reach hundreds of meters towards the sky from raging rapids on the Yangtse below, and above the gorge lip snowcapped mountains shine in the background. 

Hiking in China so far has been a series of well-paved concrete paths and identical stone steps, and finding myself on a rugged dirt path for once was refreshing.  The hike from one end of the gorge to the other only takes about 8 hours, but the friendly Naxi minority guesthouses scattered along the way are a great excuse to break the trip into several days.

After finishing the hike and heading back to Lijiang, our trekking group headed off for different corners of China, and I climbed on the bus to Zhongdian near the Tibetan border.  On the way, I met a few guys who were headed even further north to Dequin for a 4 day trek near the Meili Snow Mountains.  Tagging along with them was probably one of the best decisions I’ve made on the trip, as the Dequin trek was every bit as scenic as Tiger Leaping Gorge, and not even 1/10th as developed for tourism.

A note about roads in Northern Yunnan:  distances that would normally take a few hours take half a day or more in this part of the province due to the intervening valleys and mountain passes.  The trip from Zhongdian to Dequin is allegedly only 71km…but between stopping for the driver to cram roadside snow into the cooling system and crawling up steep inclines it takes a full 8 hours.

Uninspiring Dequin is just a short 20 yuan taxi ride from a cluster of guesthouses perched at 3300m near Feilai Xi temple and offering a fantastic view of the Meili Snow Mountains.  Fantastic, that is, as long as they aren’t completely socked in by fog as they were on the afternoon we arrived.  We spent the night at ‘Watch Out,’ a very laid-back bar/guesthouse which looks like it will be the first real backpacker hangout in town once they finish renovations.

Despite even thicker fog the following morning, we started our trek by descending 1000m on a steep, rocky, 12 km trail deemed ‘dangerous’ by an offiicial looking Dequin prefecture sign at the top.  At the bottom of the trail we crossed an only slightly ‘Indiana Jones’ suspension bridge festooned in prayer flags over the Mekong river below.

Crossing the bridge put us at Baiju temple, where I met a one eyed Tibetan monk named Tso Ren Do Bo.  Between my lacking command of Chinese, and his even more lacking command of English we managed to communicate remarkably well.  Before I left he led me around a circuit of prayer wheels three times, and showed me how to pray to the Buddha inside the temple.

As we continued to the Xidang Hot Springs, we were invited to a free lunch in the village of Yongzong.  I have to say, Tibetan yak butter tea…though it has a cool high-mountain ring to it…is disgustingly rancid.  Every time I’ve been offered the stuff, I force down as much as I can before politely declining a refil.  Tibetan temples and homes tend to smell strongly of the stuff, since the candles are made from the same fat as the tea and I have to admit, I gag a little each time I catch a whiff.

After a long climb to the Xidang hot springs, we met a group of local women heading in the other direction.  They had stopped for dinner on the porch of the one guesthouse at the springs.  They were kind enough to share their steaming pot of potent egg whiskey with us, and I think they got a kick out of watching our reactions as we each gan-bei‘d (Chinese for bottom’s up) our sizable bowls. 

The hot springs themselves could be experienced in a series of small, seriously grotty (to borrow a Rough Guide favorite) shacks.  The friendly guesthouse owner cooked us a tasty dinner in her kichen, though, and we spent a pleasant evening huddled around the houapan (cast iron pan full of warm coals) instead.

The next morning we set off in only slightly improved weather for the top of Nonzongla Pass, a tough 1000m+ climb.  At the top, we got an only slightly cloud-obscured view of some spectacular mountains and drank hot tea with a shopkeeper who has a shack there. 

After a brief break, we decended the other side of the pass to Lower Yubeng Village which sits in a broad, grassy valley in the shadow of the (cloud obscurred) Meili Mountains.  There we found a festival comemorating the anniversary of the founding of the village in progress.  The group of about 40 villagers sat on the grass near a small temple, and offered us candy, cookies, soft drinks, and, of course, baijio (rice whiskey) which we dutifully gulped down. 

On some signal I missed, most of the villagers got up and processed back up to Upper Yubeng Village from where they had come, beating gongs and drums the whole way.  This left us three men sitting with a group of about 15 women and 3 local men.  Surprisingly, the women then began to pick up each of the village guys by their arms and legs in turn and to swing them back and forth.  We pretty much figured we were next, and we weren’t wrong.  After finishing with me, the last male to be swung, the women fell to the ground giggling and breathing hard.

Only slightly drunk, we climbed back to the ‘Hiker Dwelling House’ halfway between Upper and Lower Yubeng.  This guesthouse, with log stools on a stone terrace overlooking the valley, is far more welcoming than the ‘Aqinbu’s Shenpu Lodge’ in Lower Yubeng recommended by Rough Guide and Lonely Planet.

We awoke the next morning at 7 to an oh-my-god view from the window of our room.  The clouds had finally lifted, and the white mountains stood out sharply against the deep blue pre-dawn sky.  We shot some great sunrise pictures before setting off on a 15km day hike up a valley towards the mountains.  As we reached the end of the valley we were forced to leave the trail for the streambed by knee deep snow.  After about half an hour of rock hopping up the stream, the valley opened into a spectacular 180 degree mountain bowl.  We sat and dried our socks in the sun while watching the occasional avalanche cascade down the mountain face before deciding we weren’t equipped to go any further in the deep snow.

We had similarly specatular weather the next day for our hike out, and we chose to make an end run around the valley ridge rather than climb the 1000m back to Nonzongla Pass.  After a few hours of hiking along an increasingly raging mountain stream, we came to what may be the best section of trail I’ve ever hiked. 

Just after the trail crosses the stream on a log bridge, the villagers from downriver Ninong have diverted some of the water for agricultural use.  Their man made canal runs between the gorge wall and the trail.  As the gorge floor drops steeply away, the trail and canal cling to the valley wall, decending gradually.  Soon, you find yourself walking a narrow trail between a vertical rock wall and calmly babbling brook on your left and a sheer drop on your right. 

The effort required to create this several kilometer long canal must have been huge.  It’s amazing to see the canal turn the corner where the gorge meets the Mekong valley and flow 500m above the Mekong and in the opposite direction.  Seeing Ninong high above the Mekong, though, it does make sense…moving water uphill from the Mekong would have been even more difficult than diverting the stream so far out of its way.

We enjoyed a quick lunch in a family home in Ninong, and finished the fantastic 4 days of trekking with a brutally hot 8 km stretch along the Mekong valley back to Yongzong.  There, we chartered a van for the drive back up to Feilai Xi to enjoy a few bottles of Dali Beer as we watched the sun set behind the Meili Mountains. 

There’s a 12 day pilgrimage circuit that runs from Feilai Xi, behind the mountains, and into Tibet.  I think that’s reason enough for me to come back to Yunnan some day…and reason enough for Yunnan to deserve a hearty ‘you should.’

“Do you speak English?”

“Yes”

“Welcome to Chengdu!”

At that, she turned and skated off before I could snap a picture or even say another word.  China is really great sometimes.

I’ve been  in Chengdu for about a week waiting for a visa extension to come through, and I’m glad to say the city has been every bit as relaxing as I’d been led to believe.  The pace of life here seems slower than in the other bustling Chinese cities I’ve passed through, and on the occasions I’ve been up before 7 I’ve noticed that people even seem to sleep later here.

Chengdu was an easy 5 hour bus ride from Chongqing, the endpoint of my Three Gorges trip.  The gorges were fantastic, and though much has been lost as a result of the 100+ meter increase in water level, it’s still some spectacular scenery.  I lucked out, and in the country where there’s never a bus seat to spare I somehow scored an entire 2nd class cabin to myself.  Between the few stops, I made my way through Robinson Crusoe and spent hours staring out my surprisingly large window.

I opted out of most of the expensive tour spots along the river, instead choosing to wander the small towns alone while the Chinese tour group followed their flag-waving guide.  This time alone paid off, and I was given a few free oranges, tasted some great food, and tried to learn the finer points of mah jong by watching some old ladies play at a card table on the street.  I still have no idea how mah jong works, but it’s still fun to watch.

My time on the cruise wasn’t all spent alone, though, and a group of about 14 Chinese tourists from the same commune (at least I think this is what they meant when they said they worked and lived together) sort of adopted me.

The group invited me for dinner in the ship’s dining room one night, treating me to spicy Sechuan chicken and some really foul baijio (Chinese rice whiskey…worse than lao lao if you can believe it).  Since I had no water, it was a ‘lesser of two evils’ choice between burning lips from the chicken, and numb mouth from the baijio.  There were at least 10 other less-spicy dishes on the table, though, and all in all it was a great experience.

With all this extra time in Chengdu, and good internet access at the hostel I finally managed to put up some pictures from the past month in China…and there are a lot of them:

Zhaoqing in Guangdong Province, home of the Seven Star Crags:

Yangshuo, like Vang Vieng in Laos…but better:

Wuhan…two words: street food!

Yichang:

Upriver through the Three Gorges of the Yangtze:

Chongquing and Chengdu:

…and a few more from Chengdu:

I hopped on a bus and did a day trip to see the Giant Buddha at Leshan yesterday.  It was, well, giant.  The China Rough Guide says it’s eyeball alone is 7 meters across, so that should give you some idea of just how big we’re talking here.  Seeing the Buddha was great, and watching the circus of acrophobic Chinese tourists nervously navigate the 9 level ‘cliff road’ connecting the head with the feet was even better.

I don’t know where I’ll post from next, but I hope it will be from somewhere other than Chengdu.  Despite it’s charm, I’m starting to get anxious to get on the road!

An unfortunate side-effect of dam construction, though, has been the permanent flooding of several gorges once legendary for their beauty.  If this sounds vaguely familiar it’s right along the lines of the U.S.’s very own Glen Canyon dam project, completed in 1963.  David Brower, then director of the Sierra Club, described construction of the Glen Canyon Dam as “America’s most regretted environmental mistake” and felt partially responsible for the rest of his life for allowing it to happen .

All facts aside, the dam itself has to be one of the ugliest concrete walls in the middle of a beautiful river I’ve ever seen.  The tourist areas created to allow viewing of the dam have been landscaped nicely enough, but the surrounding area is criss-crossed with power lines in all directions.  The surrounding countryside seems to have been gutted to provide raw materials for the dam project.  In the words of one tourist placard, though, we now have “The Blue of the Yangtse, the Green of Yichang, and the Silver of the Dam.”

On the advice of CITS (Chinese International Travel Service), I decided to wait a few days so I could book a ticket on the first ‘tourist schedule’ ferry of the year.  This ferry costs the same as the regular ferries, but plans its schedule so the gorge scenery won’t drift by in the middle of the night.  Thanks to the helpful CITS agent, I was able to use this extra time to track down more out of the way Yichang attractions including The Chinese Sturgeon Museum.

The Chinese Sturgeon is a unique fish that is born in the waters of the Yangtse, swims to the South and East China Seas to live out its teen years, and returns to the Yangtse to spawn.  Obviously the giant concrete wall in the middle of the river has created some problems for this fish, which can grow to 500 kg and live to be 100 years old.  Chinese scientists are making efforts to preserve its existance, and have conducted several releases of sturgeon bred in captivity below the dam.  The museum dedicated to the Chinese Sturgeon seems a bit unmaintained, but the staff was friendly and they showed me an english version of the informational DVD.  Man, if you’ve never seen video of scientists collecting sperm from a Chinese Sturgeon…you haven’t lived. 

The perpetually rainy weather in Yichang drove me to seek other indoor activities, and I found a very cool little bar/outdoor gear store (yes, you heard me right) called Bar54 down an alley called Peiyuan Lu off the main street of Yunji Lu.  The tiny shop has a pretty good selection of outerwear, tents, and sleeping bags downstairs, while the even tinier loft above houses the bar.

To get in out of the wet one night, I came by for a beer.  I ended up talking with Leo, the owner, for a few hours and he threw in a few cups of Chinese tea for free.  His English wasn’t great, but it’s a lot better than my Chinese, so I can’t complain.  He’s apparently done a fair bit of mountain climbing, some in Tibet.  From what I understood, Leo hurt his knee climbing a few years ago and can’t climb as much now…but still gets out on easier stuff from time to time. 

I flipped through several back issues of the Chinese version of Outside Magazine in the bar, and had Leo write down the Chinese characters for some of the cities that looked particularly interesting from the pictures.  Many of the recommended destinations seem to be in Sechuan Province, where I’ll be at the end of my river cruise…so I’m excited for the next part of the trip.

I have Leo to thank for recommending that I get a Chinese massage from his friend, Huei Ping, down the street.  This was the first massage I’ve received from a 50+ year old Chinese man, so I’m glad to say it felt much more clinical and precice than Thai massage.  For 20 kwai (about 2.5 USD) I got 45 minutes of poking and prodding of pressure points along my various ‘meridians’ which hurt only slightly less than the extreme pressure involved in Thai massage.  At the end of it all, though, I felt great and a nagging cramp in my right quad seemed to have vanished.

On my way out, Huei Ping offered me a cup of Chinese tea.  On seeing my interest, he ended up brewing three or four different teas for me and doing his best to explain (he doesn’t speak a word of english) the different pieces of equipment involved.

Brewing and serving Chinese tea involves a fair amount of sloshing water, and so is performed on a flat wooden box with narrow drainage slots cut to allow the excess water to drain into a pan below.  Boiling water is poured over the small tea pots, the metal filter, and the very delicate ceramic teacups.  Loose tea is placed in the bottom of a small brewing pot, and boiling water is added.  The lid of the brewing pot is then used retain the leaves as the liquid is poured off into a serving pot through a filter.  The tea is poured from the serving pot into the tiny, handleless cups, which are then presented to the guests. 

At no point does the server actually touch the cups, instead using a long set of tweezers to move them around.  All of these steps are carried out at blazing speed, and with all the sloshing, pouring, clinking, and brewing it’s an entertaining sight to see.  Leo, the Bar54 owner, explained to me yesterday that a medium quality tea loses its potency on the 7th brewing, while a really good tea doesn’t produce its best cups until the 10th brewing or so.  Either way, you end up drinking a lot of tea before all is said and done.

After all of this, I was really surprised when Huei Ping told me I didn’t owe him anything for the tea, and even more surprised when he insisted I take a few containers of dry tea with me for later.  Making friends with local people has been the key to the best experiences on this trip, and Yichang proved to be no exception.  Hopefully I’ll make some new friends in my four person 2nd class cabin during the three day cruise up the Yangtse…otherwise it’s going to be a long three days.

On my way to Heng Shan, for example, I had to take a city bus from the train station to the minibus terminal.  From there, I planned to catch a bus to Nanyue at the base of the mountain.  By complete dumb luck and despite all the fumbling with my phrasebook to ask which city bus I needed, where to buy my ticket, and which minibus to get on…I caught the last minibus of the day to Nanyue  (just me, five other passengers, and a rooster in a paper shopping bag that made himself known halfway through the journey).  This good luck saved me spending a night in the not so interesting town of Hengyang.  When I got to Nanyue, I managed to haggle pretty respectably for a great price on a clean room.   None of these things seem impressive, but with the massive communication barrier, doing all of that successfully left me on a high for the rest of the night.

The high continued, as my use of the phrase “What do you recommend?” from my phrasebook when presented with an all Chinese menu (which has produced watery fish rice gruel in the past) landed me with a single-serving clay pot full of tasty fried tofu and pork.  Apparently it’s called Nanyue tofu, and is (obviously) a local specialty.

Having to ask for help so frequently is a humbling experience, but at the same time it’s made me very impressed with the patience and friendliness of the Chinese people.  It’s like I’m being carried along on this trip by all the helpful people I meet, and they always wish me the best before sending me on my way.  The one and only time anyone has tried to rip me off in China was in Changsha, and that was just a case of some cab drivers trying to tell me that their meters were broken.  Lets face it, are the cab drivers in any country trustworthy?

At any rate, Wuhan is a surprisingly comfortable city with a nice downtown walking mall that would look at home anywhere in the west (except for the Chinese characters, of course).  Again, dumb luck prevailed, and I wandered into a clean, cheap hotel right off the main drag that’s located right over an English school.  The ancient hotel owner doesn’t speak a word of English, and looks like he used to be in the Red Army or something…but he’s a really friendly guy who gives me the thumbs up sign every time I come in.

The street food here is honestly the best I’ve seen yet on this entire trip, and that’s saying a lot.  For 1 kwai (1/8 of a US dollar) I can get three deep fried spring rolls. For 4 kwai: seamed dumplings with assorted delicious fillings, and 5 kwai gets me a sort of fried pita wrap with a fried egg and grilled pork.  I feel a little lazy since I’ve eaten on the same ‘food street’ for the last 3 meals…but when it’s so good, so cheap, and so close…why go anywhere else?  I figure a few days will give me enough time to work my way down the entire street…for tonight, I’ve got my eye on the claypot noodle soup.

Now that I’ve located my first Chinese internet cafe, I don’t think I’ll be able to upload any pictures for a while.  Unlike the completely disorganized places in S.E. Asia that offer easy access to USB ports and DVD drives…this place seems to be run by someone who actually knows what they’re doing.  The PC itself is locked in a box, and this whole establishment seems more like a back-alley gambling den than a webcafe.  In a week or so, I should be in Chengdu, which is the next city I’ll hit with an established backpacker/hostel culture.  Hopefully from there I’ll be able to put some images online.  ‘Till then, my action-packed prose will just have to do.

I would imagine one of the reasons there’s so much heavy artillery being detonated is that it’s just so cheap!  A short string of firecrackers goes for 1 kwai (about 1/8 of a US dollar), and even a ‘money tree’ which sends 12 exploding balls high into the sky is only about 5 US dollars.  I should add, too, that these are the inflated prices I could get with my white face and my still developing bargaining skills.  Someone told me once that it was good luck to spend money during Chinese New Year’s, so I’m that much luckier I guess.

I set off a few of my own fireworks on Chinese New Year’s Eve, which I spent
in Yangshuo with an Aussie guy, two Danish girls, a Sweedish girl, and a German girl.  Meeting people while traveling is sort of like putting friendship development in fast forward since everyone is usually so starved for fluent western conversation and there’s just so much to talk about.  It was nice to have a group of friends, even if only for a few days, and we drank a good bit of cheap Chinese beer and baijio (some kind of rice whiskey that tastes much better than lao lao) to ring in the Year of the Pig.

I’ve moved on to Guilin now, and the short lived group of friends has disolved in various directions.  I spent today wandering the ‘Dragon’s Back Rice Terraces’ a few hours bus ride from here, which was really pretty beautiful.  For 50 kwai (about 5 USD) I got to view such rice terrace formations as ‘Two Dragons Fighting over Treasure’ and ‘Moon with Accompanying Seven Stars.’ I can’t say I’ve ever paid admission to a rice terrace before, but that’s just how things go in China.

Tomorrow, I suffer my first experience in ‘hard seat class’ on the Chinese train system.  I’ve heard mixed reviews.  It’s a short 8 hour trip up to Hengyang near the base of Heng Shan Mountain, which I plan to climb.  Shan (Mountain) is my new favorite Chinese word, and even the written character is easy…it pretty much looks like a mountain.

I’m adjusting to life in China, and things have definitely started looking up since the last post!  I wish you all ‘qui chi fa tai’ (Have Lots of Money) in the young year of the Pig.

Consider this example:  The other night I had a very quiet dinner for one in a cavernous ballroom that probably seats several hundred during the high season.  I was, however, in the resort town of Zhaoqing in what is apparently the complete and total low season.  Most of the lights in the huge room were off, and the only other people there were the giggling Chinese servers.  I sat by myself at a large round table set for 20 or so.

I get laughed at quite a bit, but the laughter is generally good-natured and the ones laughing the hardest are usually the most helpful.  The servers at the resort, for example, were kind enough to serve me a simple meal for 15 kwai (a little less than two US dollars) rather than charging me the exorbitant menu prices.

In the Guangdong province of China, I found the level of English spoken by the average person to be about zero.  This is a huge change from South East Asia, where the average level of English spoken is ever so slightly above zero.  Believe it or not, this makes all the difference in the world.  In the other countries I’ve visited on this trip, the most basic bastardized English is understood while here it’s met with blank stares.  Believe it or not, I’ve walked into hotels and had to resort to my phrasebook just to get across the fact that I was looking for a room. I’m not sure what else they think I’d be doing there with my big backpack on my back, but oh well.

This Lonely Planet Mandarin phrasebook has been a lifesaver, incidentally.  Without this thing, I think I’d be completely non-functional.  My tiny Mandarin vocabulary is growing a bit at a time, but in the meantime pointing at the Mandarin text in the little book seems to work just fine.  They have a different system of finger counting here, which makes it possible to count from 1-10 on just one hand.  This, at least, I’ve mastered and it’s been very useful in haggling over prices.

China has a very complete bus and train system, and the choice of possible destinations in every direction has been a little overwhelming.  I’m used to the relatively small countries of South East Asia where there are at most 5 major roads and one major rail line.  The only real travel decision to make is how many hours to move down the road.

In addition to the basic problem of deciding where to go next, is the daunting fact that buses and bus schedules are labeled in Mandarin characters only.  To figure out which bus is mine, I’ve had to get creative in describing the characters in my head.  Yesterday, for example, I took a 9 hour bus ride from ’squiggly thing, two trees’ to ‘b-shape, step ladder.’

Anyway, now that I’ve reached ‘b-shape, step ladder’ (also known as Yangshuo), I seem to be firmly back on the tourist trail.  The backpacker ghetto of endless guest houses and bars with thumping music is all too familiar.  Despite the difficulties of being all alone in Guangdong, I have to say I miss it a bit.  From what I hear, I’m sure there will be more confusion and entertaining language difficulties in my future.

Gia Dinh Park:  This park in the north west of Saigon shows up as really big on the map, and seemed to bump right up against a street with a major bus running down it.  When I hopped off the number 3 bus expecting to see green everywhere, I was surprised to find nothing but traffic and endless one story shops.  After walking 15-20 minutes down the street I was starting to despair that urban growth had swallowed the park whole.  Then, I started to notice the tops of trees poking out from behind the shops on the far side of the street.  I still couldn’t find any way in, though, and had to walk the entire long block to get around to the other side.

The people in the neighborhood were great, though, and were actually asking me to take their pictures.  This was a real change from the Cholon (Chinatown) neighborhood, where I got a surprising number of shaken heads in response to the preemptive gesture I usually make with my camera to imply the question ‘Can I take your picture?”

Once I found the park, though, it ended up being worth the effort.  The park was big, full of dragonflies, and was the best landscaped of any I’ve seen in town.  This would be a great place to escape the tourists, touts, and motorbikes for a quiet afternoon of reading.  I don’t know the cause of the very recent landscaping makeover, but I suspect it had something to do with the many APEC 2006 billboards in the area.

I spent the rest of my afternoon making my way back to familiar territory.  On the way, I found a park with assorted brightly colored dinosaur statues, was approached by a gigling Vietnamese high-school girl who had obviously been dared by her (also giggling) group of about 20 friends to have her picture taken with me, and found an out of the way museum garden full of comunist propaganda and relics of North Vietnamese tanks.  All in all, a day well spent.

I’m headed to Singapore tomorrow afternoon, and I’m definitely looking forward to the change of scenery!

On the photography note, thanks to crazy cheap fares on Tiger Airways (apparently the 2006 Low Cost Airline of the Year, woohoo!) I’m able to swing through Singapore for a few days ‘on the way’ to China for only $65 US more than it would have cost me to get there via northern Vietnam.  The purpose of this brief visit is so I can attend a two day photojournalism workshop with the Objectifs Center for Photography that I found out about last time we passed through Singapore.  I’m hoping the workshop will give me some new ideas…I’ve been feeling a little stale lately.

I wasn’t thrilled with the prospect of having an extra 6 days to kill in Saigon before my flight left for Singapore, and my plan was originally to head for the Mekong Delta or Dalat soon as possible.  Then, I found out about a photography contest Perceptive Travel is hosting in connection with Lonely Planet’s new series of Citiescape Guides.  The 10 cities featured are Mumbai, Delhi, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Ho Chi Minh City/Saigon, Tokyo, Sydney, Kathmandu, Singapore, or Bejing. 

Seeing Saigon on that list with such impressive neighbors made me think I must be missing something here, so I decided to dig deeper.  I sat down with my map of greater Saigon, and circled a bunch of areas that looked interesting, obscure, or out of the way.  So far my targets have included:  little unlabled temple symbols, markets not mentioned in the travel guide, and streets that just don’t seem to line up with the rest.  Over the last few days, I’ve been making use of Saigon’s excellent bus network (man, these fancy green buses go everywhere!) to visit some of these spots with good results. 

Incidentally bus maps areavailable free at the Benh Tanh bus station, but it’s gotta be the best kept secret in town.  I’d been looking for one for a few days when I stopped to look at the map mounted under the glass on this guy’s desk at the bus station.  He wordlessly unlocked his desk drawer, pulled out a map, handed it to me, and went back to eating his lunch.

 So far on my bus-borne adventures, I’ve found some great back alley markets, a lake surrounded by tree-shaded coffee shops, and, as far as I could tell, a wedding theme park.  That last one was a big, nicely landscaped park area with several large buildings.  Each building was pre-decorated for a large wedding reception in a different color scheme complete with plastic flowers, centerpieces, and fancy chair covers.  I think they just leave the decorations up full time, and clean between weddings.  Strange.

I don’t have any of the photographs uploaded from my exploration of Saigon yet, but I do have almost a month’s worth of stuff from Lao and Northern Vietham:

Pictures from Vang Vieng, Luang Prabang, Ponsavanh, Sam Nuea, Vieng Xai…basically all of Lao that we saw that wasn’t Don Det.:

Hanoi, Vietnam:

Hue, Vietnam:

Mui Ne, Vietnam:

Saigon, Vietnam: