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The Happy Couple

242 Blog Entries
3 Trips
3968 Photos

Trips:

Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
Michael's Lonely post-Honeymoon
Joanne's Round the World Honeymoon

Shorthand link:

http://blogabond.com/shedden



Buddy List

Jason Kester
Jason Kester
The Happy Couple
The Happy Couple
Fred Shedden
Fred Shedden



Vietnam Phone number

Hanoi, Vietnam

Number in Vietnam is +841213165515, although it seems that text messages are not getting through -- at least not yet. Maybe they're going to be delivered very late, but there is certainly some sort of problem.

permalink written by  The Happy Couple on February 1, 2009 from Hanoi, Vietnam
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
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Day of Culture in Hanoi

Hanoi, Vietnam

After our day of organisation we leapt into sight-seeing properly. One of the nice things about Lonely Planet guides is that they have suggested "self walking tours" to get you out and seeing the city. We had arranged to meet Russell at 1pm for lunch and then a visit to the Museum of Ethnology, which we reckoned gave us loads of time.

The walking tour was around the Old Quarter, where our hotel was too. It starts at the Den Ngoc Son temple in the middle of Hoan Kie Lake, "Lake of the Restored Sword"; Le Loi, a 15th century Vietnamese hero, had his miraculous sword swallowed by a golden turtle/oise in the lake. There is another small island in the lake known as Tortose Tower, and people apparently still see turtles in the lake from time to time, which is a very auspicious event. The guide says something about taking a respite from the bustle of Hanoi in the peaceful surroundings of the temple. What rubbish! This was certainly the busiest temple I've ever been to. We think it may have been down to it being the last day of the Spring Festival ("Tet" in Vietnam), but I had to fight my way to the kiosk to pay our entrance, then we had to barge our way around the little island to get a glimpse of anything at all of the temple. Children were running wild, Vietnamese people were burning (fake mostly) money all of the place, and the smoke from the incense was unbearably thick. We think the money burning is something to do with sending money to your dead anscestors, but it's defintely got something to do with luck. You can buy $5000 notes on "Fake Street" we discovered later on the walking tour.

Eventually we were able to shove our way back out of the temple and continue through the streets. By now we were getting the hang of the traffic: you just start walking across the road, because there is no point waiting for the lights as they mean nothing to the bikes, and try to maintain a steady pace; this way the mopeds are able to swerve out of your way to which ever side is most convenient to them. At crossroads, they take the same approach and just zigzag past the orthogonal mopeds and cars. The cars seem to be large 4-wheel drives mostly, which seems rather unfair and completely out of place next to all the mopeds. We visited an old restored Chinese Merchant's house, Memorial House, which was lovely and also had lots of lovely arty things for sale. We past one of the old city gates, only standing apparently because the emperor Ly Thai To prayed at a temple we also passed, after the city walls collapsed several times.

We passed a couple of markets and saw the bundles of fake notes for sale for use in Buddhist ceremonies.


A traditional house at the Museum of Ethnology
We didn't have time to finish our tour before we met Russell and headed to the Museum of Ethnology. On the bus on the way there we were joined by another tourist, Laura from England, who realised we were also heading to the Museum. Although this is a big museum, a large tourist attraction there were no signs up for it or anything, and the guide book only had directions as far as the bus stop we had to alight at. After a bit of asking and pointing we found it. The outside area of the museum was quite good fun: they had all sorts of activities engaged in by the various ethnic groups, and a little bit of a historical background to how they arose. We watched people making "clay crackers", which are like large clay ashtrays (still wet), which are then dropped from a height, upsidedown. They pop.

Stick fighting at the Museum of Ethnology
And the one whose cracker spreads the furthest wins. Apparently it's got to do with defending the river against dragons or something, but now it's jsut a bit of fun. There were also reproductions of loads of different dwellings from a variety of ethnic groups, some of them inexplicably populated by on or two school children doing their geometry homework. Then there was the stick fighting, which seemed to be all about children being humilated by their parents urging them to have just one more go with the opponents who have already beaten you three times in a row. And of course, no museum is complete without a swing.
The inside of the museum was incredibly dull. Maybe it was all just a bit too highbrow for us, but it was one of those museums I hated as a child: lifeless artifacts; glass case after glass case. We didn't spend long inside. Even the visiting "Catholicism in Vietnam" exhibition couldn't hold our interests.


Water puppet performance

So on to the Water Puppetry for our final installment of culture. Joanne had decided on this event, so I had really no idea of what it would entail. All I knew was that the name reminded me of "Puppetry of the Penis", which was so successful at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. I hoped it was nothing like that. When it started it was obviously just going to be puppets in the water, which I thought was going to be awful, however it was actually quite good; the puppets were very cleverly made and they were very skillfully brought to life, but best of all was the band who played the sound track of traditional Vietnamese music on traditional Vietnamese instruments.

permalink written by  The Happy Couple on February 1, 2009 from Hanoi, Vietnam
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
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Bia Hoi in Hanoi

Hanoi, Vietnam

On the 31st we decided to take it fairly easy and just get to know our surrounding area. I had one main mission in mind: sample the "Bia Hoi". It's a local speciality, so I had to. Bia Hoi is -- means, I think -- "Fresh Beer", which is drunk on the day it is brewed. Apparently there were Bia Hoi places all round where we were staying but we had failed to find them the previous night.

To try and inject a bit of organisation and high-brow into our trip we decided we first had to book some things: "Water Puppetry", a boat trip from Ha Long Bay to Cat Ba (Island), and also a bus to our next destination, Hue (pronounced like "whey" with an extra "h" at the start -- not Huey). We had planned to get an "open bus" trip all the way to Saigon, meaning we could move on to each next town whenever we wanted, but the prices had apparently "gone up for the holiday". This New Year was determined to continue plaguing us! In fact they bus tickets had doubled in price. Reasoning that the Spring Festival was in fact over now, so the prices would be coming down really soon, we just booked the first stop.


Drinking Bia Hoi (fresh beer)

Eventually we found a Bia Hoi place and sat down on little plastic seats at the street corner. (Disappointingly) it was all tourists there, but we got chatting to a few people and the Bia Hoi was rather pleasant: very light and, yes, fresh tasting. Apparently it's only a couple of percent maximum, so we had several and felt very little effect. But it was so refreshing, we could have sat and drunk it all day... just as a thirst quencher of course. While we were vendors kept walking by with trays full of books. Every now and then one of them would say to me "marijuana? very nice quality". Joanne complained that they never ask her; it must be my hair. We bought a couple of books from different vendors: a Lonely Planet Vietnam guide (haggled down from 340000 dong to 120000) as our Rough Guide to (all of) SE Asia was proving a bit too rough, and a Vietnamese phrase book (haggled down from 200000 to 80000). The books are, of course, copies; scanned and reprinted, judging by the occasional incorrect letter or missing space. The quality is ok, but the pages are a bit thin and some of them a little too faint.

Later in the day we were in a book shop to buy camera batteries and I noticed the same books on the shelves. The price tags were exactly what I had paid for them! Later we would meet some French tourist who had paid more than this and feel slightly smug. We took note of the price for the Cambodia Lonely Planet and moved on.

Encouraged by our new purchase we sought a particularly good restaurant, in fact it was the "Lonely Planet Pick" for budget Vietnamese restaurants. When we arrived the place was JAMMED full with Americans (apparently uniformly -- I didn't hear another accent or see a non-white face) and the prices must have at least doubled since it was listed under the budget section, because it wasn't at all cheap; near the upper limit of our price range in fact. That, of course, is the problem with using a Lonely Planet guide book. We went across the road and had a perfectly pleasant real budget meal.

permalink written by  The Happy Couple on January 31, 2009 from Hanoi, Vietnam
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
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Arriving in Vietnam

Hanoi, Vietnam


The first casualty of the trip
The morning of the 30th I had to admit that my boots had given up the ghost, but at least there would be more space in my bag (for Joanne's stuff)! We caught the bus with no incident and made it through the border, only slightly unperturbed by the long wait for our bus on the other side. In fact it wasn't the same bus; apparently a Vietnamese company had taken over.


Where the scamming bus company dropped us (14km from centre)
We had read in many places that a common scam in Vietnam is they drop you miles outside the town, forcing you to pay a taxi fare to get to where you really wanted to go, but we were prepared for this and determined not to get off the bus unti everyone else did. It was important because we knew the directions to walk from the bus station to our hotel. So we arrived in Hanoi and we stopped in the middle of nowhere. "This is the bus stop" they said. So everyone got off. Except us and an English guy, who was even more determined not to fall for this scam. Sure enough the other people, who were mostly Chinese and not Vietnamese, so as likely as us to fall for this scam we thought, started filling taxis and getting out of there. After a few annoyed words, the driver told us there was a bus stop round the corner if we didn't want to get a taxi. Russell the Englishman was still sitting on the bus ("It's a scam, it's a scam"). We gave up and eventually Russell gave up when they started threatening to drive hime back to China. We were determined not to give them the satisfaction (or kickbacks) of us getting a taxi, so we waddled up the road with our big bags.

A bus appeared and we got on it. Russell was soon engaged in a guerilla English lesson with the conductor on the bus. Russell, it turns out, has just finished a job as an English teacher in China, and seemed quite keen to spread his skills about. We determined that we were not on exactly the right bus, but we could change buses or walk at the end. Economic necessity prevailed. No, it was stinginess; the bus was only 3000 dong, but it seemed like a lot. In fact it is about 10p. The very nice, helpful conductor got off the bus at the terminus to walk some of the way, to make sure we were on track. We walked the remaining 1500m to our hotel. We needed the exercise I reasoned. Coincidence meant that Russell was booked into the same hotel as us. When we arrived, though, they had no double rooms, so we had to make to with a suite! Ok, we were now paying a bit more than Pingxiang, but at 14 quid a night, the further-from-Hong-Kong value-for-money rule seemed to be holding, even if the straightforward cheapness rule had broken down. This room was huge. With a big balcony.

When we had first crossed the border my first impression was that Vietnam was a far more agrarian country than China had appeared. Of course we did not really see much of rural China, but technology and industry seemed to be everywhere; the fact that we did not see any rural area, but we travelled quite far says it all. They are building everywhere! The countryside of Vietnam, though, really had people in tradiational conical hats using sythes in the fields. The pace seemed instantly slower, and the architecture far more charming than the modern, utilitarian towers all over (the wee bit we saw of) China. Some of the architecture has a distinctly collonial appearance, and some of it was reminiscent of Cuba, some of it Cape Town. The next thing to hit home was how easy the language was going to be to handle. Although Vietnamese still has the considerable difficulty that it is also a tonal language, this is lessened by the fact it is written with in romanised characters. It used to be written in chinese-based characters but, thankfully, what the catholic missionaries started in the 17th century, the French completed in the 19th century, and it makes it much easier to read street names, menus, or anything; and also much easier to have a stab at the pronunciation.


Bikes parked outside the "peaceful" temple
The third thing that struck me about Vietnam was the constant beeping apparently required by every vehicle on the road. A short beep seems to mean "I'm here, don't swerve", which is executed every time any vehicle passes any other, or a person; the long beep means "I'm coming through, regardless of any rules of the road. Get out of my way!". There were also a lot of motor bikes on the road. When we hit Hanoi the density of bikes approached critical mass. It's as if the entire city is over-run with Mods who have had a wardrobe malfunction, and lost some of their taste in bikes too. It's just like one huge, continuous biker gang that never ends. Also the pavements are all blocked by parked bikes, so you always have to walk in the road.

Russell Christie
Anyway, the first day we did nothing really, since we arrived so late and were knackered from travelling and lugging our huge bags around, so we just sat on our luxurious balcony and had a wee drink and a chat with Russell.

permalink written by  The Happy Couple on January 30, 2009 from Hanoi, Vietnam
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
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Still leaving China

Pingxiang, China

We arrived in Nanning after a rather nerve-racking bus journey, during which Joanne was constantly re-calculating when we were likely to be arriving in Nanning, and whether this would give us enough time to get across town to the other bus station (oops) to catch the last bus to Hanoi (oops). The journey to Nanning took longer than I had realised and I hadn't done enough research to realise that there were two bus stations.

I was quite relaxed. I knew that there were PLENTY of buses from the same bus station as we arrive at to Pingxiang. Ok, they didn't go all the way to Hanoi, but Pingxiang is right on the border, so we could get a taxi for a couple of dollars to take us to the border, and then we'd be in Vietnam and eveything would be ok. So when we arrived at Nanning bus station after the bus to Hanoi had left (so definitey not enough time to get across town to catch it), I confidently walked up to the ticket office and said "Pingxiang", easily securing us a ticket for a bus which left in less than an hour. Nae bother! But then Joanne started with the calculations again ("the border closes at 7pm"), a little worried about being stuck in a border town with nothing to recommend it apparently; we could find no information in the guide books or online, and even accommodation seemed to be absent from the available information. On the bus, though, we realised that it would all be ok because Vietnam time is one our behind Beijing time, which we were on. So the border "really" closes at 8pm if you're heading south. Only this bus too longer than we expected too.

When we got off the bus we COULD have got a taxi to the border in time, but we had no dong (Vietnamese currency of course) and no way of getting it as you can only get it in the country. In the end we decided we should cut our losses and stay in this nasty wee border town, in case we got into penniless difficulty on the other side. At least our money worked here. After wandering round for a bit we realised that there were NO roman characters in this town at all; a level of difficulty we had not yet been completely exposed to.


Room in Pingxiang (for 60 yuan a night)
So no street name we could decipher, no shop names (is it a hotel? - no they wouldn't have that butchered dog hanging in the window, would they? Or would they?), and certainly no spoken English from anyone we could find. Eventually we passed what looked like it might be a cheap-we-hoped hotel and walked in. Again no English at all. So I took a breath and tried "double room" in Cantonese. Amazingly she understood, whereas previously nobody has understood a single syllable I've uttered in Cantonese. And as if that was not enough reward in itself, the hyroglyphs she pointed to on the wall said "60" next to it, which was far far cheaper than any room we had previously. Obviously it was going to be awful, so we demanded to see it. Ok, I pointed at my eyes and then pointed up the stairs, but it did the trick. In fact the room was our biggest so far, for the least money. It even had a balcony! It was a little bit shabby, but the rule seemed to be holding that the further you are from Hong Kong the less you pay.

Old folks dancing in the square

We wandered out onto the streets, quite cautious, but were met by the noise of a public address system blaring out music over the town square, and the delightful sight of all the old folks (and a few younger ones too) waltzing, or approximating some kind of ballroom dancing. Apparently Joanne had read something about this place: this is how the people of the town take their exercise. The atmosphere was quite festive, the tail end of the New Year apparently giving the place a bit of a buzz. The huge explosions from the fireworks continued (thank goodness we had earplugs for later). Everywhere we went, though, people laughed at us and pointed. Clearly this was not a popular tourist destination. At least not for longer than it takes to catch a taxi to Vietnam. We rounded our evening off with some excellent street food at about 90p for the two of us, and went back to the hotel congratulating ourselves on having chosen the best, cheapest, and fastest option. We would get the early bus to Hanoi the next morning, as we had already bought tickets when we arrived.

permalink written by  The Happy Couple on January 29, 2009 from Pingxiang, China
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
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Leaving China

Yangshuo, China

It occurred to me after our cycle trip that, to my surprise, the only bicycles I had seen in China were those for hire to tourists. What happened to that 1 billion bicycles in China, or whatever the silly song says?

In the evening, after our cycle trip, we found a pub / restaurant that has a microbrewery and sampled some of their beer, which was a definite improvement on the very boring local beer we were becoming used to, although we did have to put up with being terrorised by a naughty Chinese child. Chinese children seem very cute on the whole, but they also seem very badly behaved. We reckon it's down to the one child policy: an entire nation of only children! Can you imagine?


It was cold on the river
The next day, our last day in Yangshuo, we felt we should do a bit more sight-seeing, so we went on a boat ride down the Li River, which many of the restaurants boast they get their fish from. Unfortunately the weather was terrible: very cold and to make matters worse the cloud was almost down to ground level so we could hardly see any of the gorgeous scenery we were on the trip for. We had booked a two hour trip, but after about 10 minutes Joanne was saying "how much longer is it?".

Scenery on the boat trip
What we could see of the scenery was very nice, and I suppose it took on a certain moody quality that was familiar fro Scotland. About half-way through our time we stopped of at this bizarre little collection of stalls and assorted characters, in quite a strange location on the bank of the river, all trying to extract money from the tourists. I'm not sure what they all wanted money for, but I think the bird man charged money to let you hold the stick which the birds feet seemed to be nailed to (pining for the fjords, I expect), and I suppose the ox man let you sit on his beast. I think the guy with the motorbike was just washing it, but who knows?


The food stall

Naturally we bought some food from the kebab lady, but declined all other offers, even the art curios. After a freezing trip, during which we saw very little, we managed to navigate our way to the correct bus and get back to Yangshuo. It being our last night, it was my responsibility to try the local speciality, "Beer Fish".

Beer fish
I'm not sure what attracted me to the dish, but I felt it was my duty. I'd been planning to have it since we arrived there, but it costs about twice what any other dish costs, so I had put it off until we'd found somewhere that charges only 45 Yuan instead of the usual minimum 60 Yuan. Lucy's place it was -- and it was actually delicious. It was only afterwards that I read that, due to the large volume of traffic on it, the Li River (where the fish allegedly came from) is very polluted, and not the sort of place you want to be fishing!

The next day we got the second bus to Nanning (8am seemed a little bit too early), where we would be able to link to Hanoi, so our last day in China! (Until June)

permalink written by  The Happy Couple on January 28, 2009 from Yangshuo, China
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
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Chinese New Year in Yangshuo

Yangshuo, China

I've realised that in the last entry I forgot to mention that, when we went to the Couchsurfing KTV Chinese New Year outing in Guangzhou, Joanne and I both sang Karaoke although there don't seem to be any photos to back this claim up. For the record, Joanne sang "Should I stay or Should I Go" by the Clash, and I was surprised to find a selection of Metallica songs, so I entertained everyone with my rendition of "Battery", a paricularly upbeat piece of music from "Master of Puppets".

We arrived in Yangshuo on the 25th January, totally knackered. Although it had been an overnight bus, it wasn't classed as a "sleeper", so it didn't have the deeply reclining chairs that the sleeper had, and the driver seemed to think that this made it OK to talk really loudly the whole way to all the passengers, especially at the back of the bus judging by the volume of his voice. To make matters worse, the bus stopped at a garage, not at the bus station we had planned the route to the hotel from. We had read about a well known scam where they drop you miles away from where you are meant to be so that they can get kickbacks from the taxi drivers who pick you up. But everyone else got off, so we though it must be OK.


West Lily Hotel in Tangshuo
We did quite quickly find our way, ignoring all of the annoying taxis and rickshaws who kept trailing along next to us as we lugged our huge rucksacks up the pavement. It was about 7am, so we thought we might be able to ditch our bags and go somewhere for coffee until our room was ready. To our delight, the hotel owner gave us a key and said "your room's not ready yet, so you can go to this one to sleep and shower, then come down later to check into yours". He seemed very nice. After a rest we were shown to our room, which was massive. So far, we have paid less in every place we've gone and ended up with better room; it seems the further you get from Hong Kong the cheaper everything is.

Pantao, the main road in Yangshuo

Yangshuo is stunning. The town is surrounded by karst peaks, which are formed when a soluble layer of bedrock is weathered away leaving behind shear peaks of insouluble rock. The scenery all around is peppered with these almost vertical spikes of rock. There are also a couple of rivers through the town which sets it up to be a beautiful tourist attracting town. It was also pretty busy, especially considering the perishing cold. Guangzhou was cold, but now we were wearing everything including our thermals and we were still too cold.

The Yu Long (Dragon River)
It was a welcome change to be in a touristy town having spent a few days in Guangzhou, which is probably the last place most tourists would go. Most of the tourists were from other parts of China, but the town certainly caters for westerners; one of the main streets is called "West Street", having recently changed it's name from "Foreigner Street" (in Chinese).

A family setting fire to things

From when we first ventured out there we fire crackers going off, and as the evening progressed the frequency continued to increase. The Chinese attitude to fireworks seems somewhat different to a western attitude. If I were to sum up what it appears the attitude says it's "fireworks are harmless fun, which couldn't do anyone any harm". I witnessed plenty of children who couldn't have been older than 3 , some definitely under, lighting banger and throwing them at other children; some where lighting rockets and throwing them at people; others were standing holding fireworks which were spitting out volleys of fire.

Two generations apart, lighting bangers
I was of course, horrified when I saw the first few, thinking, "where are their parents, and why aren't they watching them tonight?". Then I saw a parent appear, and show their two year old how to hold the firework at the correct angle, and hold their hand while they lit the touchpaper. Incredibly we didn't see anyone get hurt, but they must suffer thousands of injuries. They must! The whole night was chaos: car alarms going off constantly because of the huge explosions of the biggest fireworks; rockets bouncing along the streets horizontally; grandparents and children ganging up to throw fireworks at the parents simultaneously.

Chaos on Chinese New Year
The whole town was full of smoke all night. The pavement was almost completely covered in the remnants of fire crackers, which sometimes seemed to be set off by the thousand.
Of course the adults behave at least as irresponsibly as the children. Two of the people in this photo are American, but I think they were just getting into the culture.
On the walk back to the hotel we were able to see that Yangshuo is also very pretty at night, although some of the lights must have been for the Spring Festival (which begins with Chinese New Year).


Remainders of EXTREME chili Sichuan chicken dish

Monday, our second day there it rained quite heavily, so we just stayed in and read. It was the first chance we'd had really, because Hong Kong has been so busy, and then the couch surfing in Guangzhou meant we were socialising more; in fact we spent more money there, eventhough we weren't paying for accommodation. We only ventured out to eat. I decided to try something that wasn't a local dish and go for Sichuan Chicken. It was ridiculously full of chilis. Unfortunately it only occurred to me to take a photo after I'd eaten most of it. Now I like hot food. I like really hot food. But this was just a plate of friend chilis with a few bits of chicken through it.

Countryside around Yanshuo

On Tuesday it had stopped raining, although it was still very cold, so we decided to get a bit of exercise and hire a bike to get a better look at the stunning scenery. We decided to have a wee look at "Dragon Bridge" then head off back in the other direction past our starting point, where there were some other places of interest. We just couldn't find it. There were no signs for it, and everywhere we went people were offering to guide us, or give us a trip up the river on a bamboo raft. It was as if they had conspired so that western tourists would get lost and fall prey to these touts.

View from Dragon Bridge

The map seemed useless. I had a compass, but I wasn't at all sure that the top of the map was north and north certainly wasn't marked on the map. We kept bumping other westerners (Australian, Irish, German, French) and nobody knew where they were; about half of them seemed to be looking for Dragon Bridge. Some had given up and turned back, while others had given in to the bamboo pimps. We hooked up with two german girls on the same mission and eventually we got there.
The bridge was not worth finding, but the view was very nice. On the way back I worked out that the map was not to scale; the 0.5 km of the town which was on the map was the same size as the 9 km we had to cycle back (along the main road, rather than the muddy paths we took on the way out).

permalink written by  The Happy Couple on January 27, 2009 from Yangshuo, China
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
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Tipping really isn't a place in China (Guangzhou catch-up and food)

Yangshuo, China

[Sorry about the photo formatting and typos in this. I'll edit it later. And I'll get the hang of it one day]

Ok I finally managed to upload the photos, although I've got such a backlog of blogging to do I think it may be a while before I have time to hook them up to any text, or tag them with useful information like descriptions. I've just wasted another half our on this damn computer in our hotel! This time when I started to type it tried to translate everything I typed into chinese characters assuming I was typing Pinyin. Great software and very useful under the right circumstances but infuriating if you just want to type English.


Joanne warms her hands on Coals

So finally after a reboot I'm sitting typing in the lobby of our hotel with all the clothes on I mentioned previously, as well as my gloves. I may have to take the gloves off soon and sacrifice my fingers to improve my typing speed! The lobby is about as cold as outside. The only thing that keeps the owner at all warm, through the 24/7 he appears to sit here, is the bit pot full of burning coals under him. Ok that's Joanne using the same sort of thing in a restaurant we were in yesterday.

So to the catch-up... and some food bits I missed out.


Squid Lips!!

When we first arrived in Hong Kong the first thing we ate was Indian food. A strange choice I thought, but I let Joanne decide. It turned out to be really quite good, probably because of the large number of Indian immigrants living in Chungking, where our restaurant was. The next day I wanted to be a bit more adventurous, so we had sushi for lunch, which was a bit more extreme than the sushi you get in Glasgow. I didn't get the "Fried Squid Lips" although I really wanted them when I saw that. Unfortunately we'd already just about blown our daily budget, and I'd eaten loads already. I'll make sure I have some when we re-enter Hong Kong. That evening we decided to take it up a notch again and we went into a proper chinese place where there was no English outside. They did have English on the menu
, although it turned out that it was open to misinterpretation. I saw other people eating form huge bowls and assumed that this must be the "big bowl of noodle with all item above stated". When mine arrived it was even bigger.
No way of eating it in one go. So I had to get the remainder as a takeaway an have it for breakfast.

The day that we went up the peak we ticked one of my boxes by getting some dim sum from a street vendor. Dim sum are a Hong Kong speciality, so it would have been unthinkable to miss out. They were very tasty, so I went back to order some other stuff and ended up with fried tripe with curry sauce poured all over it. Actually not too bad apart from the texture. In fact I could see why tripe appears to be popular in Hong Kong (we'd already seen in a couple of places, translated), because the texture, and whole appearance actually, is really very like the charred squid tentacles I'd had the other night in my sushi; since seafood like that is so popular it seems to make sense that tripe is too. The last in the selection were fish balls in curry sauce, which were nice enough for Joanne to bagsy them leaving me with crunchy tripe.


Elevated walkway

Then our last day in Hong Kong, which didn't make it into the blog at the time, we took a tram from one end of Hong Kong Island to the other.
The guide book (SE Asia on a Budget) said that this was as good as any Hong Kong tour you could get, and at only HK$2 per person (20p) it seemed like excellent value. It gave us a pretty good sense of what Hong Kong is about I think. Sky-scrapers.
Lots of Sky-scrapers.
And some rather cool overhead walkways, which you need to go through shops and offices to get to. I suppose the idea is that the cars aren't slowed down by any pesky pedestrians. Anyway, the tram ride convinced me that Hong Kong isn't anywhere I want to live. It's just never-ending characterless city.

Whole smoked ducks (I think) at the market
However when we got to the very end of the tram journey and got off to look for the way back, I spotted an interesting looking market, which we decided to have a wee look around. Just walking through this market was the most fun I'd had since we arrived in Hong Kong: finally a bit of real life instead of nothing but characterless commerce. The things on the right are whole smoked ducks I think. I neglected to take pictures of any of the more exotic things on offer.
Most of the smoked ducks were so whole they still had, not only their feet still on, but their heads as well. There were turtles; live of course. Apparently when something dies at one of these markets it's not fresh any more, so it just gets chucked out. I was a bit upset about the turtles at first because I thought they were endangered, although Pietro later assured me that it's only the giant ones which are endangered. Still, I'm going to look it up before I have turtle soup. The fish were all swimming around, with air bubbling through their containers, making sure they made it through the day. We even say an eel chopped in half; the half that remained was still alive, so I suppose that must have been ok.

That night we went to another chinese place and I ordered something I thought sounded fairly exotic: Congee with Sliced Pork and Pig's Blood. I had no idea what congee was, but the waiter assured me "it's like noodles". My sister, Lorraine, always talks about her favourite dish in Thailand which invoved "pigs blood", in some sort of a jelly-like state, which is apparently very nice. Anyway, it arrived, and the blood part looked very much like Lorraine's descriptions, but congee turned out to be over-cooked rice or rice porridge or something. And the dish has almost no flavour. It was very very dull even after adding soy sauce and chillis, so I decided that exotic didn't necessarily always mean "good".


Sliced pork and pig's blood congee


Pietro's apartment

Then we were in Guangzhou. As I mentioned we were helped by a friendly chinese guy as we failed to order food on arrival there. The food was pretty grim: all bones and gristle, hardly any meat. That night, after arriving at Pietro's fantastic place, I was telling him about this, the congee, and the market, etc. He said that he was surprised we hadn't seen dog at the market we went to, and that the Chinese attitude to what is good on an animal seems to be the opposite to Europeans'. He said that you can go to his local market first thing in the morning and they are selling fish heads for more than the whole of the rest of the fish, and the hooves / knee caps / neck / whatever grim bits are more expensive that the fillet steak, which is on the same animal, at that point whole. Apparently, you can then return later on to find headless, tailess, finless fish; and (cheap) steaks cast aside in favour of nose, testicle, and spleen. It's just meat, who wants that? -- it's boring! Not as much flavour as sinew, tendon, and skin.


A range of drinks, including the infamous "Great Wall"
Anyway, that night we just settled in and drank wine with Pietro, resulting in us getting up late. I got up and did the Guanzhou blog, then we went out for lunch, where we were too late to eat dimsum at the place Pietro had recommended, so we went to the muslim restaurant next door, where we ordered on very nice dish and another "chicken curry" where the meat was grim again, all bone and fat, and ribs looked rather smaller than a chicken's; rat-sized perhaps. Pietro has assured us that rat is often sold locally as chicken, so I didn't mention this until it was finished. That night we walked for ages, failing to find a particular restaurant from an online guide, but found a quite-nice Macanese place instead. When we arrived back, we drank a bottle of Great Wall cabernet sauvignan. Hmm. And some local brandy, which wasn't too bad. Also I had bought some Budweiser, only because I was shocked to find an American product so Chinese-endorsed.
But it wasn't the only one.
That night we drank more with Pietro. He was proving to be a bad influence. The next day we had intended to definitely do touristy things, but woke up late again. So we went for lunch with Pietro to the dimsum place he had recommend, actually it was more like an aquarium-cum-restaurant, where we chalked up another weird food experience: durian pastries. Durian is the large spiky fruit reknowned for smelling like drains or something. It tastes quite nice actually, but not much like a fruit; the pastries tasted like cheese an onion pies. After lunch Pietro took us for a walk round his local market, which was pretty much the same as the last one, except he was there to point out the little dogs faces sitting on the counter, and the dogs legs hanging up above them. That night we went out with all the Guangzhou couchsurfing crowd for "KTV" which is what they call Karaoke in China.
This was their Chinese New Year party, so they thought they should do something Chinese.

Pietro examining his cake at the KTV Night Guangzhou
Pietro had whipped up a couple of cakes to take along as he's a very good cook, apprently. The cakes were nice anyway. Then on to play pool
and then onto a night club.
It was here I realised that China is still behind us after all: they were playing techno from the 90s! Actually I've subsequently thought about it more and the only serious thing I can come up with is the fact the water isn't potable, which is a major thing I suppose, but that is it!

Aivic and Joanne at the flower festival

We had failed to get bus tickets the previous day due to communication problems, so we called up Aivic, who had very kindly offered to help us any time after helping us so muc hthe first day in Guangzhou. He agreed to meet us and help us buy bus tickets to Yangshuo. He didn't want anything; he just wanted to make sure we were ok. Afterwards he took us to the flower market, which appears just before Chinese New Year, as buying flowers for the New Year is traditional. Here's a photo of our good very kind and helpful friend Aivic.

The next day, thanks to Aivic we were off to Yangshuo just in time for Chinese New Year!

Oh yeah -- and you're not expected to tip in China.


permalink written by  The Happy Couple on January 26, 2009 from Yangshuo, China
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
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Weather

Yangshuo, China

I really wanted to write another long entry here to cover all of the missing days, and also cover a topic or two that I've not really given the time they deserve: food for example; but I've just spent an hour trying to work out how I might upload photos, but to no avail! Now I have lost my impetus, and bed beckons. For ages I've not been able to upload because I didn't bring my USB cable, and card readers are not as common as I'd hoped, so I bought one yesterday; however the computer here only speaks chinese and I can't get it to use my card reader!

To give a brief summary for the moment, our experience of China so far has been superb, and any fear of danger is the result of Asians not understanding how dangerous, by comparison, western cities are, or the result of Hong Kongese (?) being a little bit bigoted, I think. Everywhere we've been, our obvious helplessness has (sofartouchwood) not been taken advantage of, but has prompted strangers who do speak english to help us, without which we might not have been able to buy a ticket for the bus, get on the right bus, get off at the right stop, buy a sim card, buy food, etc etc.

The other striking thing about China has been the technological level. As far as I can see, any western talk of China "catching up" is now utter guff. We have so far seen nothing to suggest that they are "behind", and I wonder how long it will be before pundits realise they should be talking about the west "not being left too far behind".

Anyway, that's enough for now... I must go to bed and prepare for a bike tour tomorrow.

Oh yeah! This entry's called "weather" -- it's bloody breezing here! We weren't really prepared for this. I was beginning to wonder if all the warm stuff that was taking up loads of space in my bag was a total waste of space, but I'm glad I didn't send any home from South Africa because I'm wearing it ALL now and I'm indoors! That's thermals, two fleeces, and army socks, on top of what I've been wearing up until now. My basic mistake was to think we arrive in Hong Kong (it never gets too cold there) then we head south to Vietnam, where it never gets cold. Kind of true, but when we decided where was actually worth going in south China, Guangzhou and then Yangshuo, on the way to going south, we've actually gone something like North-West, right into a cold snap. Brrr!

permalink written by  The Happy Couple on January 25, 2009 from Yangshuo, China
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
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Arrived in China!

Guangzhou, China

Well we got our Chinese visas yesterday evening and got the bus from Hong Kong to Guangzhou today. We even did it the brave, cheap, confusing way by getting on the bus at the last minute, at the more Chinese end of town where all the destinations were only in Chinese characters... but only had to pay HK$80 instead HK$190, which we'd have had to pay if we'd booked the more touristy bus in advance.

So far our experience of Guangzhou has been excellent, especially after a few people in Hong Kong warned us what a dangerous place it was. The bus stopped at a bus station outside the town, but our ticket said the stop was Guangdong Guest House, which we thought we had established was in Guangzhou when we bought the ticket at the bus, so we did not get off there. While we were parked and other people we getting off, a woman standing by the bus luggage compartment started to wave at me on the bus, and point to the compartment, shaking her head and waving no to someone. Obviously someone was trying to take my bag off and she recognised it as mine and warned me. By the time I was getting off the bus some other nice people had got involved and rescued the bags. That was nice.

Then there followed a good half hour of anxiety as we worried whether we should have got off there after all, but what little communication we were able to manage seemed to suggest that we were still ok for our stop, but I was imagining that we'd be dropped somewhere well beyond Guangzhou with no way of getting back, since the ticket did not say where the Guest House actually is.

The next stop was Guangdong Guest House where the driver seemed glad that these idiots were finally getting off his bus in the right place. Although it is called a guest house it is in fact a very large and posh looking hotel. Our mission was to get a chinese sim card, contact Pietro, our first couchsurfing host, and somehow work out were we were and how to get to him. We do not have a China guidebook, and oversight we should have corrected in Hong Kong, where all the hostels were selling the guides you can also borrow; this did not occur to me until we were on the bus.

On the grounds of the Guest House, just where the bus had stopped there was a small travel agent, so we tried there for a map. Bingo! A person who can speak a bit of English. We managed to get a map, and rough instructions for getting the metro to the area where Pietro lives. The guy in the travel agency was really helpful, and I was already starting to like Guangzhou people and think that this stuff about it being dangerous was nonsense. So we set off towards the metro, looking for 7/11s on the way, where Pietro had said we should be able to get a sim.

A couple of streets along we spotted one down a side street and headed in. It did not seem like the sort of place where people would speak English so I got out my Cantonese phrase book (almost useless without being able to hear what the different tones should sound like) and practiced. Luckily the tones involved were high-rising, and high -- the two it gives examples where similar sounds are produced in English. I think we communicated. I think she said "no we don't have any sim cards".

So we headed across the street to get some food at a little takeaway / sit-in restaurant. We hadn't yet eaten that day because we'd been in such a hurry to check out then get to the bus, but it was already about 5pm! It wasn't obvious how the eating place worked, where you order, what was on the menu, or anything! So I walked up to a woman sitting at a desk, but it could have been just where you pay when you leave. She sensed my cluelessness and very deliberately ignored me. After a minute of hovering around I gave up and sat down. Amazingly a young guy came up to our table and said "do you need some help?"

He put our order in for us (it was the woman at the desk he gave it to) and then sat and ate with us, speaking about what we were doing and what on earth we are doing in this town where no tourists come, but particularly this area, where they never see tourists. I told him our plan, and he helped us get a sim card, helped us get the metro, gave us his number and said if you ever need a translator just call me and I'll speak to them. What a nice guy!

By this time I'd been in touch with Pietro again, who said we should find our way to the Starbucks near the metro stop as it was halfway to his place; he would be there a bit later as he was giving a cooking lesson at the moment. We found our way there and just sat down for a couple of hours, glad of the rest after a slightly frantic day. Eventually Pietro turned up and took us to his apartment. What a lovely place! It's huge, especially after the little box we were staying in, in Hong Kong. He also seems a very nice guy, very relaxed, and who seems to really enjoy hosting people. On the first shot the couchsurfing has certainly worked out well. More of that to come I think.

Anyway, must go an do something (I'm actually writing this the next day, and we've not yet had our dimsum for breakfast). If anyone wants to call or text, my phone number in China is +8613026893295.

permalink written by  The Happy Couple on January 21, 2009 from Guangzhou, China
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
tagged China, CouchSurfing and Mobile
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