The flight from Guilin (closest airport to Yangshuo) to Shenzhen didn’t leave until 11:15pm, so we had some time to kill in Guilin. Ryan originally wanted to go to the airport and chill there for 7 hours, but I convinced him we should do the 4 mile walking tour of the center city instead. We stored our bags at the bus station and headed off.

Two things occurred in Guilin that we had been warned/told about but had yet to encounter.
1) We were celebrities! The stares were unwavering. People would turn their heads as they passed to continue looking. 3 people asked to take pictures with us, and countless others snapped pictures more discreetly. The girl in the picture below gave me a big hug after snapping the photo.

2) A man on a street corner chatted us up in very proficient English and then invited us to a tea ceremony at his home, which we politely declined.

Guilin was a very pleasant stopover, known for its water features, as the city with 2 rivers and 4 lakes, and many hills that pop up out of nowhere in the city. The walk took us through parks and along the water, past groups of people playing cards, the two pagodas in Fir Lake, boats, people fishing and swimming, and others singing in the pedestrian tunnels under the bridges.
            

(Oops, forgot to log out as Ryan again).

Wednesday 2 October, our third day in Yangshuo, went like this:

1. Woke up and ascended to the rooftop of the retreat for an 80 minute massage ($24). Views from the rooftop were one of a kind. We tried to beat the heat by going at 9am, but I was in a full sweat by the end. The baby oil they used also magnified the burning effects of the sun on my tender, pale skin.
2. Ate breakfast on the outdoor patio (including a mystery fruit the size of Nicole’s head): 
3. Meandered through the local country roads on a scooter for a few hours, with gorgeous views of the intricately farmed landscape. In the process, I skipped sunscreen application on my arms and got nicely burned:  
4. Eventually found ourselves at the 7 Stars Tea Plantation (once Nicole the navigator learned how to recognize Chinese letters), took a private tour through the fields, and enjoyed a tea tasting ceremony (we drank 4 cups of tea in the process) followed by a late lunch. We learned when picking tea leaves/buds that no leaves (only buds) are used for green tea, one leaf is for oolong tea, two leaves is for black tea, and matured leaves is for black tea for old people (more of a digestive aid):  
5. Scootered back to the retreat and then into town.  We stopped at a German bierhaus to drink Hofbrau dunkel on a balcony and peer out at the throngs of tourists browsing the local goods. We found ourselves playing “Gringo bingo” — a simple game of who can spot the non-asians first. It actually took over a minute at one point. We had learned that 90% of tourists in China are Chinese…but I think that number should be higher. We also had a great view of some of the local/colorful foods being prepared streetside.

In the balcony photo, you can get a fun taste of all the different cultures at once: German Bierhaus, Texan cactus, Chinese flags, and Yangshuo karst mountain scenery.

Overall, Yangshuo was a great town in the Guangxi province with lots of Western influence. Our Village retreat was owned by some Belgians named Jenny and Tripper, and they dutifully populated their beer menu with Belgian beers. Great service, and a fully English-speaking staff made this stop on our adventure a true pleasure.

Other than the Beijing hot pots, we had not entered China with any grand culinary expectations. In the 1980′s, Yangshuo was known as one of very few places in China where one could get bread, jam, fried eggs, and pizza.  Nonetheless, we signed up for a half-day Chinese cooking class, starting with a guided trip through the local government run market with our instructor.

This place was straight-from-the-farm fresh, and very colorful. Nicole looked like a kid (or me) in a candy shop. Here you could pick up anything from frogs, eels, and fish, to garlic stalks, lotus roots, bean curd, and melons (a.k.a. squash) that put our garden’s yield to shame.

A small van then transported us just outside town, where we had biked the day before, to a small establishment with 2 kitchens, each filled with propane tanks, burners, woks, and large butcher knives.

Our instructor walked us through 5 courses that are favorites among the locals: steamed chicken with goji berries + dates, pork dumplings with egg base, roasted eggplant with pickled red pepper + garlic relish, sauteed bok choy, and a pork dish with veggies (the pork dumplings were eaten as an appetizer).

Of our classmates seated around the table, 5 were Jewish (couple from Boston, 2 girls from Israel, and Nicole), and 3 were not (2 from Netherlands — very tall I might add — and me). This was a great mix that lead to interesting conversations about travel and Holland (Michigan), as well as taboo topics like religion and politics.

Note: cooking is great fun when there is service staff cleaning up the kitchen in between each course.

Note2: Nicole considers this one of the best meals she’s had on our trip.  Here’s to hoping she starts cooking more at home because of it

Name the fruits in the pictures below.
- Roman, no guessing on the first one. I know that you know what it is.
- John and Shelley, I’ll leave it to you to abstain if you know them from your trip here.

We have sampled all the fruits unknown to us, including a persimmon and a small spiky yellow fruit not yet identified. It looked like a small horned melon, but with red seeds inside instead of green. There are tons of fruit stands everywhere, a lot of them selling single passion fruits with the tops cut off and a spoon for an immediate snack. Delicious!

October 1st is Chinese National Day and the start of a week long holiday. This is also when the people of China descend on tourist spots and everything (tours, taxis, activities) double in price. For that reason, Ryan and I decided to hit the hot spots in Yangshuo on September 30th. We rented bikes and spent all of Monday biking around the town, through some small neighborhoods, across the Yulong River a few times where bamboo rafts were launching, taking multiple wrong turns, but greatly enjoying the scenery.
     

Eventually, we got ourselves on the correct path and stopped at the Big Banyan Tree and the Gold Water Cave, also called Buddha Cave. The cave is fascinating, with stalactites and stalagmites, but our tour guide focused more on what the formations looked like (ie. buddhas, elephants) rather than the history of the cave and natural formations. Ryan took a mud bath in the cave at the end of the tour. I passed, as the mud, really more liked dirty water, was a bit on the chilly side, but it allowed me to get some great pictures of Ryan.
     

(3 washings of the swim trunks were required to remove the stench of the muddy water).

After the cave, we biked over to Moon Hill, hiked up to the top for picturesque views and watched a few rock climbers. As you can see below, the Chinese are real sticklers for following the rules.

     

At the top, we chatted with a Chinese man and his two sons. The man lived in Austin for 4 years while attending McCombs, and then Chicago for a few more before moving back to Shanghai. Two nice Austrian girls then traded picture taking duties with us.
     

Traffic and driving in China, even in smaller cities like Yangshuo, is crazy. The bike ride back to our hotel was probably one of the most stressful things I have ever done. Ryan tends to disagree. He thought it was pretty easy, cause everyone is going slow and steady, but he’s more comfortable on a bike than I am, and my bike was a little too big for me. I was not too fond of getting squished between another biker on one side and a moped on the other, or trying to go around a huge traffic circle with buses cutting us off, or mopeds weaving in and out around us. Oh yeah, and don’t forget dodging the pedestrians. Stressful! It did help to just be able to follow Ryan though, as he was a good leader. And the scenery outside of town, and even in the town, was beautiful.

A nice shower and dinner at the hotel was followed by the Liu Sanjie Impressions Light Show. On the shuttle to the show, we came across our first Americans in China! A mother and father from Chicago, visiting their son who teaches in Shanghai, and another nice girl from Texas, also teaching in Shanghai. The show was created in 2004 and depicts daily life of the people living around the Li River, with beautiful music. The highlight, though, is the mountains in the background beautifully showcased by the lights. Have I mentioned that the natural scenery here is amazing?

For our last hurrah in Shanghai, we decided to spring for the upgraded transportation option to the airport (something like $8 USD).  Instead of the cheaper 1 hour local subways, we made our way to the Longyang Maglev station to take the magnetic levitation train.  I was looking forward to the smoothest, fastest train ride of my life.

This was an experimental line, just servicing the airport to convince the potential funders of its feasibility and safety.  During peak hours, max speed is listed at 300 km/h (same as the bullet trains we’ve been on), but at a few off hours, it goes up to 430 km/h!  Unfortunately our timing was a little bit off, so we only hit 300.  Total ride time: ~7 minutes.  Smoothness: Oddly, it was as bumpy as a regular train.  Maybe the 90′s style aerodynamics of the train had something to do with it?

The train was only ~25% occupied –> maybe the locals are over the hype and just waiting for the cost to go down at this point?

All of Asia’s fast trains have me wondering why North America does not offer them?  It sure would be convenient to have a high-speed rail service along many of our key metropolitan corridors: Austin-Chicago, Austin-Columbus, Austin-Baltimore, Austin-Scotch Plains, or maybe even DC-Baltimore-Philly-NYC-Boston and San Diego-LA-San Francisco-Portland-Seattle.  Key items needed for this to happen:

• The support of a filthy rich and crafty entrepreneur since our government could never accomplish, let alone afford anything on this scale.
• Ability to reuse existing rail lines.
• Speedy ticketing, security, and boarding procedures.  If it takes as long as an airport, it will fail.
• I’m pretty sure there are some other key things missing from this list

Maybe we’ll just end up skipping the whole high-speed rail phase and go right to pneumatic tube based travel…

Beam me up Scotty.

We arrived in Shanghai Thursday afternoon, at which point Ryan promptly took a nap and I did some laundry.  Ryan doing laundry:3, Nicole doing laundry:1

Dinner was at a very western wine bar (we were hungry, our original Chinese restaurant destination wouldn’t seat us because they closed in 20 minutes, and did I mention we were hungry?), where a big group of friends were celebrating a birthday and gave the entire restaurant slices of birthday cake. Always a good way to start a meal. This was followed by a walk along the Bund to enjoy the Shanghai night skyline.

Shanghai is a huge metropolitan city, and was mostly a spot for us to do a little bit of relaxing and recharging. The city houses some of the tallest buildings in the world, which we enjoyed a view of from the 87th floor bar at the Park Hyatt hotel in the Shanghai World Financial Center building (6th tallest skyscraper in the world). Here we were able to see the Oriental Pearl Tower, the Jinmao Tower (ranked 16th tallest), and the new Shanghai Tower currently being built (to be the 2nd tallest). We ate some delicious Shanghaiese food; dumplings with pork and crab roe, shrimp spring rolls, and pork dumplings, our most expensive meal yet, but it did cover both lunch and dinner. The evening was spent at the acrobatic show in the Shanghai Centre Theatre, some Cirque-like acts, some circus-like acts, a group of girls juggling while on unicycles, overall a fun night.
     
      

Saturday we hopped a train to a bus to Tongli, one of the ancient canal towns outside of Shanghai. The town contains many well preserved buildings from the Ming and Qing Dynasties. I was a little nuts, because we got a later start and the trip took longer than expected, and I didn’t think we’d have enough time to see things in the town. Ryan, the calming influence, convinced me it would all be fine, and it was. We visited Pearl Tower and the Tuisi Garden, a World Cultural Heritage sight.
      

We also visited the Ancient Chinese Sex Culture Museum. (I mean, how could we pass this up?). Smiths, Strevigs, RDB – There was a display with Peruvian art, some of which looked very similar to RDB’s gift from Peru. The museum has an outdoor garden with nice sculptures, though I’m unsure what exactly some of them mean (the second one below?). We also tried some Tongli specialties; sesame cakes (yum) and green dumplings (Ryan says ok, I say not so great).
     

The bus to the train ride home had tired us out, and we were not too hungry after all the sesame cakes, so we decided “When in Rome” . . . and ate instant noodles for dinner. The Chinese really do eat instant noodles on a regular basis is seems. Dessert was green tea Kit Kats Ryan had picked up leaving Tokyo. They are awesome. We should totally import them to the U.S. The noodles look exactly like the picture on the container, right? Ryan spiced his up with some crunchy, spicy bugle-like snacks.
      

Ryan thinks he is finally starting to feel better. He’s had a cold since our second night in Kyoto. What is that? 2 weeks ago? Invariably, he gets sick anytime we travel out of the U.S.

It took a little while to figure out (searching for ‘things on roofs of Chinese houses’ does not yield very good results), but Bing (Google is very slow in China) informed me that the odd structures on top of many Chinese residences are solar water heaters. Very cool and environmentally friendly. The website I was reading talked about how inexpensive they are in China, but how they are very expensive in the U.S.

Oops, just realized Ryan was still logged in, so all this got written under his user. Oh well.

P.S. Congrats Dal on retirement! Enjoy your luncheon, wish we could have been there.

Xi’an is famous for the Terra Cotta Warriors, which is where we headed on Wednesday. My navigating put us on the wrong side of the tracks, literally, at the railway station to catch the bus. The 20 minute walking detour turned out to be interesting, through first the bicycle/moped repair district (shop after shop after shop of parts) and then the LED sign district. As we’ve mentioned before, everything in China is huge, so while it sounds simple to go to the train station and catch a bus, the train station is massive, making it very difficult to actually find the bus stop. We were ushered onto a bus by a pushy bus attendant before having time to figure out the number of the bus. Turns out it would have gotten us to the warriors eventually, but was a local that made lots of stops. Regardless, we didn’t know the number of the bus we had boarded, so we got off the first bus at a later stop and onto another bus we were certain would get us there. The man sitting next to me on the second bus tried to give me 1 yuan; I have absolutely no idea why.

The Terra Cotta Warriors were very impressive. The underground army was built as Emperor Qin’s mausoleum, around 200 BC. The statues themselves were much larger than I expected, life size of a large man. There are currently three pits open for viewing; the third houses the high ranking officers, the second consists of military forces including archers, war chariots, cavalrymen, and infantrymen, and the first, and most impressive, contains the main army. There is still a lot of work being done excavating the area.
            

Along the drive were orchards after orchards of pomegranate trees, with stand after stand of people selling just pomegranates. All the trees had plastic bags around the pomegranates, no idea why, have not had a chance to Google that one yet. I did buy a pomegranate, and it was good. They are always a lot of work for little reward. And what do they do with all those pomegranates? It seems like way to many just to eat. Hard to tell, but here’s a picture of small individual plastic bags over each pomegranate in the orchard.

For dinner we stopped at a restaurant back in Xi’an that advertised ‘welcomes foreigners’, but no one spoke any English. The only reason I mention dinner at all is because Ryan was putting rice on his plate from a bowl, and one of the waitresses decided he wasn’t doing it right, or was doing it too slowly, and came over with chopsticks and scooped rice on his plate for him. Between that and the man offering me money on the bus, it was an entertaining day.

Back at the hostel, we joined the dumpling making party along with a guy from Australia and two sisters from Sweden. Mikki from the hostel taught us how to make the dumplings, rolling the dough, stuffing (veggie ones with egg, chives, and spices for this evening), and then boiling in water. They were pretty delicious, and something easy enough to make at home. Maybe we will start an annual dumpling making party to celebrate Chinese New Year?
     

Side note: We figured out that the relatively horrid smell in Beijing was actually stinky tofu, a common street food! And boy does it stink.

Our late arrival in Xi’an was met warmly by the helpful staff at the hostel and a guy playing guitar in the cafe on the first floor. Our room had a nice king size bed, but was unfortunately not the cleanest. After a coffee and a beer in the cafe, we requested new bedding and proceeded to change the sheets on our bed. (No, this is not the part like the Bellagio).

Tuesday morning brought an early 6am departure for a trip to see pandas at the Shaanxi Wild Animal Rescue and Breeding Center. This center rescues injured animals and also protects animals from extinction. Our tour guide was really good; he has been giving tours of the center for over four years, and has seen the animals come and go, and knew the pandas all by name. We saw two pandas in their indoor/outdoor living habitats, a four year old female YaYa and a similarly aged male Erla. Here are pictures of the two posing for us.
     

We also saw an older brown panda named Qizai, which means superstar. In addition to the pandas, the center houses golden monkeys, golden takin (meaning sheep-ox in Chinese), crested ibis, eagles, vultures, an owl, and small red pandas (whose name means small bear-cat in Chinese). This was a great tour, definitely more than we had expected.
     

After a nap, we walked out to the south gate of the Xi’an City Wall, built by the Ming Dynasty in the 14th century, where we rented bikes to bike around the top of the wall.  We decided to go for the tandem (first time we’ve ever done it), and it was a blast! It was also definitely harder than expected, especially when Ryan is on the back seat. When I’m on the back, I could take pictures, re-arrange my backpack, basically do whatever, I would just help peddle. When Ryan was on the back, every time he pedaled it would totally throw off the balance, and I had to work hard to keep us not running into people.
            

We headed down to the Big Wild Goose Pagoda for dinner and the nightly water show. Craving some ‘normal’ food, Ryan walked into the KFC, but the menu was unrecognizable, so he wound up with Burger King instead. We had talked about the water show being like the Bellagio, totally kidding, but it was actually a whole lot like the Bellagio water show! The fountains turned different colors and swayed back and forth to the music. It was very funny.
     

Monday 9/23, after conceding defeat on my ATM card, we took public transportation back to the Beijing West Railway Station.  I ate a spicy chicken sandwich, two orders of fries, and 2 large gulps of an icy Coca Cola from the McDonald’s before realizing I should not be drinking anything with ice.  Hopefully that one does not come back and bite me.

Here’s a panoramic photo of the hectic train station before we passed through the gates onto the platform.  Newsflash: a lot of people live in China.

With Beijing in our rear view mirror and shrinking fast we finally started to relax.  Just 1100 km in 6 hours (187 mph).  Nicole nodded off while I set to work fixing our Picasa photo album timedate stamps from Japan.

Note: If you want to keep “date picture taken” tags correct relative to where you took them, you need to 1) set your camera time / timezone / daylight saving time correctly, 2) set your computer’s time correctly, and 3) make sure any friends you’re traveling with have done the same if you plan to import their pictures.  Somehow, Kelly’s camera was off by 13 hours, 35 minutes?  And somehow most of our pictures had been imported as duplicates even though the “exclude duplicates” option was set?

Our train ride was very smooth and smoke-free while in motion.  At each of the 8 stops or so along the way, everyone would step outside for a cigarette or two and let that smell carry into the cabin.  There is certainly a tobacco addiction problem in this country.  More so than what we’ve experienced in Europe and in Japan.  Everyone smokes everywhere.  The non-smoking signs in restaurants and subway stations are merely a suggestion.  The non-smoking hostels/hotel rooms seem to be rotated daily.

Some of the scenery along the ride:

Power Plants:

Rice fields:

Construction projects:

The construction projects tended to dominate the landscape.  It went like this: farmland – farmland – incomplete high rise apartment complex – farmland – farmland…  It was very eerie, reminiscent of frontier ghost towns.  Almost every construction project was about the same height, ranging from 4-20 buildings, and the same amount of incompleteness, although at least a few workers and cranes could always be spotted on them.  There were dozens and dozens of these clusters across the rural landscape.  It makes me wonder if much of the housing boom is just a front –> luring investors into grand plans of new cities full of people and marketplaces, just to fall short of being complete.  It could also be that these projects were all started at the same time (within the last 1-2 years) and are progressing well — hard to tell.

For now, I choose to view this rural landscape as being sprinkled with building carcasses.

I don’t think we passed this, but we may as well have: China’s Abandoned Disneyworld Knockoff

PS, Happy Birthday Grandpa!  I hope you enjoy the Corvette I sent you from Japan (picture of) – Maybe they can be picked up at the local Wu-Mart in Beijing too…