World's fastest train

[Sorry the big photos are the only ones that still format correctly so that's all I'm going to use until it's fixed]

After the previous night's free beer and cheap Schofferhofer we were up a little later than planned, but we were still on time for the full-speed maglev. When we waited longer than expected for our train, it seemed like our return journey was probably going to be at the slower speed, but at least we were going to get one journey at 430km/h. It was absolutely fantastic! And the highest speed according to the display was actualy 431km/h which it hovered around for about half of the journey before starting to decellerate again. China really is the future, unlike India. And it blew away Japan's puny Nozomi! Everything in China is bigger, cheaper, better, and faster than Japan. During the acceleration phase I felt my stomach rising up into my throat. It was so smooth but noticeably extremely fast: cars on the motorway below us whooshed backwards past us.

Waiting to go

Full speed!

The world whizzing by

When we arrived at the airport 30km away just seven minutes later, we just got off the train and straight back on for the slower return journey. The timing is clearly a bit grey because the return journey was actually at full speed as well. I can't explain how much I enjoyed it. It's exactly the sort of thing I would love as a child, so I've obviously not changed much. Afterwards Joanne seemed quite excited too and admitted that she had surprised herself by really enjoying it too.

The French Concession

Next up was the French Concession. The guide book said it was like being in France, but that was quite an exaggeration. It did seem more European, but the Bund had already seemed quite European, and I'm sure both districts have large ex-pat communities as there are plenty of drinking venues that look like ex-pat places. The most French thing I saw were the trees lining most of the streets in the area, which I thought looked like the sort of tree they might us to line an avenue in France. There were lots of art shops, but that's not exactly French is it? We had hoped to find a cheese shop, but had no luck there.

Kittens outside the hostel

Back at the hostel we prepared for our night out, but some more detailed searching online revealed that the drink-all-you-can deals only run on certain nights and our last night in Shanghai was probably the one with the worst choice of all the nights we stayed there. The choice came down to a place offering five free drinks to women (it was ladies' night in many places) and 100 Yuan for men to drink as much as they want, versus a night called “Cheap Enough For You?” where the drinks were all 10 Yuan all night. The first choice would have won out easily, but it was also a hip hop night and we didn't think we'd be able to get drunk fast enough to tolerate the music longer than about ten minutes, so we settled for the second option as our big night our in Shanghai. It was a small place in the French Concession and clearly an ex-pat crowd who all knew each other. We succeeded in getting drunk, but it really wasn't the big night out I'd been hoping for. It was too quiet and everyone else there obviously went every Tuesday.

The In Crowd at "Cheap Enough For You?"

The following morning we made one last trip to the Bund to use the last two free beer vouchers to help soothe our hangovers. Pleased that we got full value from the bizarre two-for-one offer we headed off to catch the train to Hangzhou.

Another amusing sign

written by  The Happy Couple on July 29, 2009 from Shanghai, China
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
Send a Compliment

---

comment on this...

In the taxi, the driver clearly did not believe that he had it right, or saw an opportunity to make some commission. He said what I am pretty sure was Chinese for “zoo”, looking rather confused, then he stopped briefly and put his hands next to his face in an imitation of sleep. Yes, I thought, he has grasped that our hostel is next to the zoo, but he soon pulled up outside quite an expensive looking hotel. I tried saying the word for zoo, but it didn't seem to work, so finally it occurred to me to say the name of the street that the zoo and our hostel are on. This did work and he set off again, retracing the entire route we had already taken, stopping only once to turn around and repeat the word for zoo, then going “grrrr” and making a claw, like a lion I guess. The zoo was about the same distance in the opposite direction from where he had first taken us, but at least we got there. It seems the further from Beijing you get, the harder China becomes. It was a bit annoying having to pay the double fare, but I was pleased the stress was over, saved by the lion gestures.

The hostel was really lovely and much cheaper than where we had stayed in Beijing and Shanghai. There was lots of barbecue food lying around, but it had been abandoned due to the rain which was now fairly persistent.

One of the sights you're supposed to enjoy at the lake

The next morning it was still raining and it wasn't really a day for walking around outside, however Hangzhou's main attraction is the West Lake, apparently the “best West Lake” in China and the one that all the other West Lakes in China are based on. We were only staying there one more night and leaving early the next day, so we had to see it that day. We started walking to the bank next to the lake because we also needed to draw money, but the rain just got worse and worse. Soon we had to take shelter along with all the other people out for a walk by the lake, and the wind blew stronger. By the time we reached the ATM it was proper storm weather and the idea of having a nice walk around the lake was ridiculous, so we had to admit defeat and take the bus home.

Lovely weather at West Lake

We arrived back at the hostel too early for food. The other places had been able to provide food all day, so we were a bit miffed. And hungry. We tried out on the street near the hostel but the first restaurant had no English menus and the useless phrase book let me down again. We left with no food and tried another. This time they did have an English menu which seemed to be only a small subset of the whole menu, featuring interesting sounding dishes like “Sauce Explodes the Pork” but, trying to save a bit of money, we settled for noodles for which we were overcharged, but that's what you get when you can't speak the language.

Lovely weather at West Lake

Back in the hostel I took a photo of Joanne's toes since so many people had been asking how they had been since the Nepal trek. Not too good!

Joanne's toes: no big toenails!

written by  The Happy Couple on July 30, 2009 from Hangzhou, China
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
Send a Compliment

---

comment on this...

We left the hostel and caught the bus for the train station, from where plenty of trains for Suzhou leave, according to our hostel, just as the hostel in Shanghai had told us there was no need to book. On the bus we suffered a crisis of confidence and got off when we were sure we must have already gone way past the train station without realising it; because we hadn't caught the bus from the station, we weren't sure how close the bus would actually pass. No idea where we were, we had to resort to flagging a taxi again, but this time I was able to show the driver the Chinese for “train station” using the dictionary I had downloaded to my phone the previous day. The taxi continued in the direction the bus had been going for only a couple of hundred yards before arriving at the station. If only we'd kept our nerve!

At the train station we had difficulty being understood again, but I was becoming quite practised in copying Chinese character and I wrote out where and when we wanted to go. I had read that the dialect in Hangzhou is quite unusual, and people from neighbouring towns can't understand each other, but I was still surprised that saying “Suzhou” or “Shanghai” was not enough for them to understand where we wanted to go. After a few attempts I established that the next train to Suzhou was hours away and it was full, and the next train had only standing room remaining. Finally there was a sleeper that costs much more and got us in too late. Even the Shanghai train was full and the next one had only one seat free. So much for not needing to book because there are plenty of trains! We phoned the hostel from a kiosk to ask them to translate that we wanted the girl working at the kiosk to write down “Please take us to the East Bus Station” where we thought we could get a Suzhou bus. The girl at the hostel could not understand why we weren't getting a train and, very annoyingly continued to insist that there were plenty of trains. Nonetheless she did as we asked and we were soon armed with the necessary written request for a taxi.

The next bit went without a hitch and we got a taxi then a bus to Suzhou without any delay. Our arrival in Suzhou was met by lots of pushy taxi drivers, trying to charge us 40 Yuan to the hostel. But we had good directions to the hostel and, swatting the taxi drivers aside, we got to the bus stop where we only had to pay 1 Yuan to get us to the hostel. Of course, on the bus we were in the position again of not being sure how we would know we were in the right place, but then we noticed that the bus stops were named and, although we couldn't read it, we were starting to become quite good at recognising Chinese characters and were quite pleased when we successfully got off at the right stop. China was becoming a bit easier.

At the hostel it all fell apart again: they had given our room away. The booking form on hostels.com, through whom we had been booking most of our accommodation, had a drop-down box for approximate arrival time, which I filled in sometimes, but Joanne had always been leaving at the default, which is 11am. Apparently they had given our room away at midday and it was now 7pm. Joanne was furious: nowhere else had they paid any attention to that information and, after all, our booking was for that night and we had paid a 10% deposit online and you forfeit the whole first night's fee if you don't turn up, so they would have been paid twice for the room. The receptionist just kept insisting “but you are very late”, finally grudgingly saying that they had a single room we could have instead and I followed her to look at it. The bed was actually as big as some doubles we had slept in and this room was ensuite, whereas our room was with shared facilities. I started to cheer up, but when I insisted that we would not pay any more as I felt they should not have given our room away, suddenly everything changed: the manager appeared and apparently phoned the woman who had been given our room, then they explained that she had agreed to take the single room since she hadn't paid any deposit but we had. “You are very lucky” the manager said to us, patronisingly. I'd have thought getting your room when you've paid a deposit was more to do with rights than luck!

Our room in Suzhou

It wasn't a good start to Suzhou and we were very grumpy when we discovered that the cafe attached to the hostel was very expensive, and the street outside our room was very noisy at night. However the room itself was very nice, with a big four-poster bed.

Boating down the canal

Staying in Hangzhou only one night and all the stressful travelling we had done over the last few days had taken its toll. It felt like we had been trying to do too much in China and we couldn't really be bothered doing anything at all in Suzhou. We needed a rest after the terrible time we had in Japan, but China was nearly as difficult and we were just getting a bit sick of everything being so hard. We hadn't been spending enough time in one place so I'd had no time to read, little time to blog and I was far behind, and we'd had no time to play cards or backgammon.

Big pagoda

We forced ourselves to visit a pagoda not too far away but we didn't really want to and the ones we'd seen in Vietnam were much nicer. Again the shadow of the Cultural Revolution was visible in the pagoda: China has clearly not been valuing history and the pagoda was in a terrible state, yet it is one of the tallest in China and much bigger (of course) than anything Japan had to offer. Although Suzhou is promoted as the “Venice of the East” it is impressively ugly from above so the view was more like insult to injury rather than the reward you expect for climbing nine storeys. At the foot of the pagoda, though, was quite a pretty garden. Suzhou is known for its canals, hence the Venice comparison, and also its gardens.

Garden visible from the pagoda

The rest of Suzhou from the pagoda

Inside the pagoda

Incense. Everything is bigger and better in China.

The gardens next to the pagoda

[Sorry about this - I'd have made some of them thumbnails if it still worked]

Resident in the gardens

The gardens

A breather

We agreed not to try to hard and just rest a bit in Suzhou. While we were in the supermarket looking to save money on food, it started to rain. We felt pretty depressed and the walk back was treacherous: we first noticed it Bangkok when it was raining, but all over Asia the use paving stones for the pavements rather than tarmac. It looks very nice, but wet they become incredibly slippy, especially in flip-flops, which it typically what one wears in these countries. Since then we had spent many a walk cursing the stupidity of using such a material. It seemed only a matter of time until one of us sustained a flip-flops and paving related injury.

The fish counter at the supermarket. It's a tank.

The meat counter at the supermarket

Deadly paving stones

That evening we walked around our area discovering that it really is quite pretty. Venice is pushing it a bit, but it is nice.

Suzhou at night

The next day we chose one of the famous gardens to visit: Garden of the Master of the Nets. It is actually more of a stately home, incorporating a garden complex. There are loads of small buildings, each for a different mood or season, each looking out onto a different garden. The place is relatively small, but such a maze that we spent quite a lot of time there. Some of the gardens were beautiful, but many of them contained mostly rockeries. I had noticed these first in the garden in the Forbidden City; Chinese garden seem to feature quite a lot of rocks, but not interspersed with flowers as I would think of a rockery: just piles of stone, serving a function more like that of statue in a western garden.

Garden of the Master of the Nets

Funny stones in a part of the Garden of the Master of the Nets

The Spring Drawing Room (or something...)

Bonsai!

We finished off the day by wandering around the canals near our hostel to see what it looks like during the day. Our hostel was actually in a really nice area and we regretted not staying longer in Suzhou, probably missing our Hangzhou to give us the extra time. But instead, we had to leave, catching a bus to the train station in time for the sleeper train to Xi'an.

Suzhou's attempt at Venice

More Venicey stuff. Sort of.

Public toilets in Suzhou

Suzhou's Rialto Bridge?

An hour later we returned to the ticket office and there was already a long queue, and it was pouring with rain. We got our tickets to Lanzhou but realised later in the day that we had forgotten to ask for the top bunk so we had been given the bottom bunk which is the most expensive and, by all accounts, the worst.

In keeping with our plan to relax a bit more, we did not rush out to do anything touristy, although our hostel was just next to the city walls and one of the city gates. Instead I did a bit of blogging.

The next day we tried to change our train tickets to the top bunk but all the trains to Xi'an that day were completely sold out, so we were very lucky. We were both starting badly running out of clothes due to wear and tear, items going missing when we do laundry, and also we anticipated needing some warmer clothes when we arrive in New Zealand. We had asked at the hostel for a cheap place to buy clothes but the market we were sent to did not seem to exists, or else it wasn't on that day, or else we had got on the wrong bus. After that we went to the cheap high street shops we had been recommended but they were all out of our price range. I don't understand how clothes made in China for sale in Primark in Glasgow can cost less than supposedly cheap shops on the Chinese high street. Eventually we returned to the hostel exhausted but empty-handed.

Our plan had been to take a short break at the hostel then head out again to the market stalls in the Muslim area, but I was so knackered I didn't think I'd be able to face going out again. We walked through the reception into a little sitting area on the way to our room and just sitting there, leaning against a table in that room was a plastic bag with the words “Free clothing! Enjoy” written on it. There is a god! We picked it up and took it back to our room for a closer look. Inside were a couple of Nepal tourist tee-shirts (“Never End Peace And Love”), one pair of North Face walking trousers (presumably Nepali copies), some thick socks, other things we didn't want, and a Ganesh tee-shirt, so there is a god: Ganesh!

God provides

We had been planning to make our own way to the Terracotta Army but, discussing our plan, we soon admitted to each other that we were tired of everything being difficult and never doing things the slightly dearer, easy way. To begin with I had really enjoyed the challenges, but six months of Asia had worn me down a bit and Japan completely finished me off. So we booked a tour through the hostel. China outside Beijing and Shanghai is not as easy, so we couldn't be bothered with trying to do it ourselves.

Ooh looks quite nice. Maybe we picked well this time...

When we went out for dinner ordering was quite difficult too. Most of the time Chinese food just isn't very nice. It's always the meat that ruins the dish though. The problem seems to be that they don't have butchers in China; either that or they are all axe-wielding maniacs. They don't seem to have the concept of cuts of meat, in fact I don't know what they do with all the bits we would call meat, because the food always seems to be made from assorted grisly bits. The dish we ordered looked quite nice to begin with but, after a couple of fork-fulls, serving yourself was like dredging the canal for body parts. Probably the nicest animal product was horrible wobbly stuff, possibly gelatine flavoured with stock, but at least it wasn't all bone and skin like the rest of the meat. Soon, eating became, in practice, dredging bones from the dish and transferring them directly to the disposal dish.

Horrible wobbly bits were the best part

Mostly untouched "meat". The clean bone didn't start with flesh.

written by  The Happy Couple on August 4, 2009 from Xi'an, China
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
Send a Compliment

---

comment on this...

Pit 2

At the real thing, we were taken first into pit two. I was really disappointed. I had an image of thousands of complete warriors all neatly lined up, but here was half-dug site, littered with bits of broken pottery. At least it was a bit more than a series of small walls, but not much. This was the second biggest of the three finds, and the newest. It seemed to be more about demonstrating the archaeology process, but I was looking for the wow-awe experience I had expected. Next up was pit three, which was the smallest, but much more assembled that the previous one had been. This pit contains mostly higher ranking warriors: generals. It was also a bit underwhelming, but I felt a little rush of expectation with the rising tension.

Bits of broken warriors and horses in pit 2

Pit 3

The finale was pit one. This pit was also a work in process, but much bigger than the other two. Clearly this is where all my ideas of the Terracotta Army had come from but, we were told, it's archaeologically less interesting because the warriors are lower-ranking. It was certainly more impressive, but I wasn't blown away like I expected to be; for one thing it's not as complete as I thought, and for another, there just aren't as many of the warriors as I expected. After walking around for a bit I really started to appreciated the detail on the warriors, though: each of the warriors is individually made and they are all carefully crafted, rather than mass-produced despite the fact there are quite a lot of them.

Woo! Pit 1.

Semi-assembled warriors

Warriors facing the original entrance

You're all individuals

Yes, we're all different

I'm not

We managed not to be last out of pit one where we were informed that next on the agenda was sampling some real Chinese food. We had already had our fill of “real Chinese food” and suspected the lunch would be very expensive, but we followed along anyway just in case it was included. They were herding everyone to the tables, but had still not said anything about cost, so we asked our guide when we were assigned a table. It was going to cost about the same as our big splash-out Beijing Duck night had cost; just for lunch, and not including drinks, either! The food did look really nice: a westernised version of various Chinese dishes, but at this point we made our excuses and left, finding nourishment from the barbecued sweet potato stalls and others, along with all the Chinese tourists. In the restaurant there had been literally no Chinese people apart from staff and guides. That had been our first clue that we should do a runner. This is yet another reason, I remembered, for never ever going on tours: they try to railroad you into spending money at every turn, but we had won by denying them their commission!

We had wanted to get back home straight after the Warriors so, finally back at the hostel, we immediately escaped and headed out again to the Muslim quarter. The traffic in Xi'an was terrible and I saw why so much of Beijing was fenced off with underpasses: nobody pays any attention to green men and it is very hard to find a break in the traffic. But when we got to the Muslim quarter it all changed: there were occasional mopeds going up the road, but it was mostly stalls and people. I loved it. It had the kind of exciting market atmosphere completely missing from the UK and Japan. You get similar markets on mainland Europe but, for some reason, nothing so lively happens at home or in Japan. I sought a local speciality recommended in the guide book and found it, but it was mostly sheep guts I think, although the liquor was delicious and the way you eat it is to break one whole local bread into the broth. So we just soaked up all the juice and left the ugly bits. Stupidly, I had not asked for a price before we sat down, because I was a bit too excited at having found a place doing this dish. When we were leaving she showed me two fingers, which I thought was excellent value, but when her face filled with (feigned I think) horror and she began jabbering excitedly to her husband I realised she meant twenty Yuan. Not exactly a bargain, but not quite a total rip-off. I think it probably should have cost less than ten.

Market in Muslim Quarter

Tasty lamb guts soup speciality

The bread to break into the soup

The resulting bready soup

On the way home I saw a couple of leather wallets I liked and, bearing in mind advice we had received, planned to purchase some decoy wallets for South America. I entered into bartering but we could not agree on a price; after the food I was determined not to be ripped off again, but the girl on the stall would not lower her price beyond a certain point.
We were close though: I was determined not to go above 25 for a wallet and she wouldn't go below 30.

Chinese men do this when they are hot

Lamb leg stall

Some black stuff I drank, but have no idea what it was

Excellent stuffed bread stall

Moon over the Bell Tower

The South Gate at night

The next day we worked on our New Zealand plan and booked a flight from Queenstown to Auckland in time for our flight on to Chile. We sent loads of Couchsurfing requests off to Auckland, where we were arriving. We also finished off our organisation of China, booking a hotel in Lanzhou, where we were staying one night before our flight out of Hong Kong; this was not easy as many hotel in Lanzhou do not accept foreigners and the ones that do, don't speak any English. We also spent a lot of time researching everything we would have to do to get from Lanzhou to Hong Kong in time for our flight. It was quite an intimidating prospect as there were several stages to the journey. All this took almost the whole day.

South gate in the day

Building very near our hostel

That done, we headed out to the Muslim area again. Joanne finally found some shoes but didn't follow the haggling instruction I was whispering to her, so paid 50% more than I would have done :-p and I gave in to the woman selling 30 Yuan wallets, but also bought another pair of “designer” wallets from the same stall as Joanne's shoes. Hopefully we won't be robbed as enough times to need all the wallets, but at least we'll be prepared! On the way back I couldn't help buying more lovely Muslim food. Muslims always seem to have excellent cuisine.

Excellent quail eggs, chili sauce and tahini.

A quail egg stall

Kitted up, it was off to the train station for another overnight train, this time to Lanzhou.

written by  The Happy Couple on August 6, 2009 from Xi'an, China
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
Send a Compliment

---

1 comment...

Not really having properly prepared our plan for our arrival in Lanzhou, I had been texting John to ask him to look stuff up online for us. There are two bus stations in Lanzhou and John had assured us we could get a bus to Linxia, which was our next destination, from either one. Our final destination was Xiàhé but, as this is in a Tibetan autonomous prefecture, the Chinese authorities had made it quite difficult to get to: we had seen online that it is not possible to buy a ticket for the bus which goes directly to Xiàhé from Lanzhou, but it should be possible to get a bus from Linxia, so we had to get there first. Our guide book told us which bus to catch to each station, but not where we go from them so we just trusted John and went to the easiest to get to bus station: West Bus Station. Confidently, knowing that we weren't trying to do anything controversial like go to Xiàhé, I walked up to the ticket desk and said Linxia, but the response was lots of head shaking and waving. Seeing that I didn't understand, she very helpfully wrote it down in Chinese. This is quite a common response in China; it seems generally understood that not everyone speaks their language, but widely believed that everyone can read Chinese, after all people speaking different dialects and languages within China all write the same, and even people from outside China like Japanese, Korean, and some others, can understand most commonly used Chinese characters. At least I could make a guess at one possible response and checked what she had written again the characters for South Bus Station matching the characters in question among the unintelligible squiggles.

They weren't too far apart, so we opted to walk between stations, although the weight of Joanne's bag nearly caused her to mutiny and flag down a taxi. At the South Bus Station I tried again to get a ticket to Linxia, getting pretty much the same response but this time, rather than writing anything, the woman said passport copy in English, so we dug around in our luggage to retrieve our last remaining copies and I took them up to the desk. The woman shook her head and sighed a lot, waving me away again. Luckily there were some other lăowài [foreigners] in the bus station who were able to tell us that we need a copy of our Chinese visa as well as the passport copy, and that there was a copy shop just across the road. I decided to get three copies each instead of one, since I thought we might need another one to get to Xiàhé and you can never have too many copies of your passport when travelling. This time the woman looked like she was in total despair with me and said two. Lucky I'd got the extra ones, and this time she finally nodded, put the copies to the side, and wrote down a time before waving me away again with the money I had offered. One of the other lăowài, an Israeli, could speak Mandarin and was following much better. Apparently we weren't allowed to get our tickets until just before the bus left; the time she had written down was five minutes before the departure, which I thought was leaving it a bit fine, considering the pushy crowd at the desk, but it all went OK and we got on the bus.

The Israeli and his mother, it turned out his companion was, were wearing masks. It is very common to see orientals wearing masks in China (you are expected to every time you are ill and many people working with the public do as a precaution), but very unusual to see lăowài wearing them. On the bus he explained to the rest of us that a town near to where they had travelled from was under quarantine because of an epidemic of the black death. I told him that he needn't worry because it is no longer the 12th Century and it is now easily treatable with antibiotics. He retorted that it needed to be treated within 24 hours or it would be fatal, but I think he was just making that up and the masks were probably mostly for show.

Stepping off the bus at Linxia we were met by a bus driver who said we wouldn't be able to get tickets inside, but we could pay him directly to get to Xiàhé. He charged us 30 Yuan, which is a person mark-up for him of ten, but it was probably worth it, since there are reports of people having a lot of difficulty at the ticket desk, including being hounded by loads of taxi-driving touts. So there we were, right onto the next bus and heading into a sometimes-controlled Tibetan autonomous zone. The Israeli guy coached us all that we should have our story straight in case the police questioned us; that we should say we thought we were going to some other place and it was all a big mix up, but nobody else seemed particularly worried and we had read online that it was in fact open to foreigners again, although I was less sure of that having seen the hoops we had to jump through to get there; in retrospect it was just the authorities making it difficult, while being able to say it was open.

Xiàhé main street

Xiàhé wasn't really what we were expecting. The guide book had described it as a mountain village or something similarly romantic sounding, so we were expecting something similar to the little mountain town in Nepal, or the rather larger town of Macleodganj in India. It was a much bigger town, looking like a scruffy frontier town and it was flat; OK, there were some hills around the town, but in no way were there mountains visible. It was a massive let-down; even Marty and Jochem had recommended it, saying that there was no need to go to Tibet proper when you could just go Xiàhé instead. If this was like Tibet, then it seemed to me you are better off going to India and Nepal for Tibetan culture. The one obvious similarity, though, was that it was very cold. We all agreed to meet later and go for food together before heading off in different directions to get accommodation. As soon we got to our room we changed into our thermals, which had been packed away unused since the trek in Nepal. Reitse from Friesland in the Netherlands had been unable to find his intended hostel and ended up in the same dorm room as us at the Oversees Tibetan Hostel. Joanne was not at all impressed with the hostel and neither was Reitse, so we went out to look at the other options but returned after deciding that not only was ours cheaper, but the toilets smelled less than any of the alternatives!

Street sweepers causing a cloud of dust

When we returned the Israeli guy from the bus had taken the last bed in our dorm and his mum had taken the room next door. Apparently he had been studying Mandarin for the last nine months somewhere quite near and his mum was over to visit him before he went off to Varanasi to study Hindi. Nice life! The two of them left and did not turn up at the agreed time for food, so the rest of us went across the road to a Tibetan restaurant. The momos were not at all up to the standard of those we had in Nepal, but Reitse and the American couple from the bus both enjoyed them. We also shared a yak hot pot, which was delicious, and some other yak meat dish. Here at least was one aspect of Tibetan culture not suppressed by the Chinese but, ironically, suppressed in their countries of exile: yak is close enough to a cow for it to be illegal to kill in India and Nepal, where buffalo had taken its place in food; in China they eat everything.

Momos in Xiàhé

After our meal everyone else was going to bed, tired after a long day's travelling, but I wanted to go into Tara's Guesthouse next door to our hostel for a drink; it had received all the best reviews online (but had smelly toilets). It wasn't at all lively inside as I had hoped, the only other customers being robed monks, who talked incessantly on mobile phones whose ring volumes were all set far too high.

written by  The Happy Couple on August 7, 2009 from Xiàhé, China
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
Send a Compliment

---

1 comment...