Beijing: Featuring...The Great Wall of China

When I left off last time we had just gone to meet up with the Jacksons. Unfortunately, we forgot to take a picture together so I'm going to cheat and use another picture from a different visit.

On Sunday morning we woke up and had a delicious homemade breakfast with Gary and Danita before we went with them to visit their service. We really enjoyed meeting their friends and visiting with everyone at lunch afterward. We felt so warmly received. From there we went out to see the sights. Stop one was the Temple of Heaven.

Temple of Heaven

This is the temple where the Emperor would make sacrifices to the gods to ensure a good harvest.  It's in the middle of a huge park that had lots of beautiful flowering trees and bushes that were just starting to bloom. Beijing is a beautiful city.

A little Chinese Spring

Next we hit the Olympic Park.  It was fun to see the Bird's Nest in person. I would like to have seen the structures lit up at night, but we didn't feel like waiting, so we snapped a few pictures and headed on our merry way.

I had to hold my fleece behind the camera so we could open our eyes. It was very bright!

Aquatics Center.  goggles, obviously.

Since making the decision to move to Shanghai for a year we knew that we wouldn't be able to come back home without a trip to the Great Wall. How could we face our families? It would be humiliating.  So we reserved our last day in Beijing for our Great Wall hike. Nothing was on our agenda but climbing all those stairs and marveling at this monster of stone climbing the countryside.

One thing I did not anticipate was the absolute terror that came over me as I continued to climb higher and higher up the steps.  Yep, you heard me, I was petrified. You don't realize it before you're on it but those walls are very low, I assure you, you could fall right over the edge.

At times the steps are quite steep. We had our backpacks on because we were headed home when we left the wall, so the mix of feeling a little off balance, the tornado-force winds and being an overall scardey-cat made me more than a little anxious. Ok, I confess- there was some minor hyperventilating on my part, and yes I clutched those rails at every possible opportunity, but I made it.

The climb down, which I was thinking would be easy, was actually the trickiest part because of 1) our backpacks and 2) the crazy youths that were playing some sort of the Fast and the Furious game on foot, knocking over innocent bystanders as they ran all over the Wall in a frenzy.  This old lady would have shaken her fist at them if I'd been able to spare one from my death grips on the knee-height rail and Joel's hand, respectively.  I said everything I needed to say with my eyes. Miscreants.

Despite being fully convinced of my eminent death, I managed to have a delightful time. The views were beautiful everywhere you turned. Even in the winter before the grass and trees had all woken up it was a lovely thing to see the wall stretching and meandering across the horizon.

We gave the whole Beijing experience a big two thumbs up. Fun parting aside: You may remember from a previous post that we have been assigned minor celebrity status on occasion in Shanghai, but it's rare. It came as a surprise but in Beijing, we were quite a spectacle. It was a common to see people grab for their cell phones and take pictures of us or with us if they were bold enough to ask. It happened too many times to count: in Tienanmen, on the subway, in the Forbidden City, on the Wall, at local eateries for lunch, they couldn't get enough...and all I could think to myself was didn't you host the Olympics? Shouldn't you be over this by now? Not that I minded, of course.  The population everyone is worried about taking over the world get excited and sheepish when they run into me on the street. I think it's precious. 

Beijing Trip: Forbidden City

I truly make an effort to be a culturally sensitive person.  I always try to be polite when dealing with things that are foreign to me, even when I dislike them. Daily instances: being shoved, being cut in line, having a huge loogey spit on the sidewalk right where you were about to walk. I try to make allowances.

I say this in the hope that you'll forgive me because I'm sure that what I'm about to say is very rude.

The source of my rudeness: Tomb Sweeping Holiday.  Catchy name, am I right?

The tradition is what really gets me though. You go and eat lunch, preferably picnic style, at [read:with] the graves of your ancestors. And then you clean them. You actually clean the tombs. That's the holiday.

Why this one thing sticks out to me as absurd when any number of not normal things have worked themselves into my new-normal routine is beyond my grasp right now, but I mention it because it brought us to Beijing. That's right, Tomb Sweeping Holiday is four day weekend. (I guess that's how long it takes to finish sweeping all the tombs?)

So I had a lot of firsts.

First time to take the train in China. 

Shiny

First time to show up at the wrong train station and have to run through the station to exchange/buy new tickets fifteen minutes before the train departed. If you are thinking, idiots, who shows up at the wrong train station? Didn't they check? I say to you: I always check! I just, this once, had a tiny, um, mishap brought about by the fact that I can't read Chinese characters.

First time in the super nice sleeping cars! [=mistake rewarded]

There were built in TVs at the foot of each bed. We had the top bunks.

First time to visit the Forbidden City.

For Luck

Reflections

It was both bigger and smaller than I had anticipated.

Bigger in the sense that everything was very spread out and thus occupied a vast amount of space as a whole. Smaller in the sense that it was less grand than I had pictured.

But it was still amazing.

This slight disappointment I own completely to the fact that I had been reading too much historical fiction about the Forbidden City in the height of it's glory in the months leading up to our visit (misplaced modifier-the reading was in the months before the visit, not the glory).

Ceramics

It would have been much cooler had it been full of emperors and concubines all shuffling about in their ostentatious silken outfits delicately plotting each others murders in the shadows of their immaculately kept rock gardens. I wanted to see the parade of a hundred dishes coming to the Empress' pavilion for her nightly dinner. I pictured it being like the "Be Our Guest" scene from Beauty and the Beast, only with the added benefit of being sinister and Chinese.

 

Tourists are considerably less interesting. Oh well, I have only myself to blame. Antiquity aside, it really was a lovely place to visit, and our geeky audioguides that we rented gave enough snipits of palace intrigue to keep me appeased.

These guys were everywhere. My audioguide probably told me about them, but I forgot.

We spent a few hours visiting all the palaces inside before heading across the street to visit Tienanmen Square.  Since Mao wasn't accepting visitors in the afternoon we just snapped a few pictures and left to go and meet our delightful hosts, the Jacksons and go out for a fabulous dinner of Peking Duck.

Our volunteer photographer insisted on crouching down on his knees to get the maximum possible up angle that the Chinese love for pictures and Americans hate because of the inevitable "fat face." After the overnight train ride and no small number of hours sightseeing around the city, we weren't in a frame of mind to care.

I'll save the Temple of Heaven and the Great Wall for next time.

Vang Vieng Vientiane...Va Va Voom

Alternate Title: Miserable Bus Rides and Disappointing Cities

If that doesn't make you want to jump right in I don't know what will. But honestly, there's still a tale to be told and I intend to tell it.

We left Luang Prabang, jewel of Laos, all abuzz with excitement about the idyllic city we were about to encounter: Vang Vieng (VV). Everyone we met said it was the best thing since sliced bread. "It's like Luang Prabang, only so much better!"  And Luang Prabang had captivated our hearts so majestically, we eagerly went to get our bus tickets and be on our merry way. When we reached the travel agency we found what we knew was an amazing deal-- for only a dollar more each we could cut our drive time down from nine hours to five...and..AND we would have air conditioning and ample space in the roomy minivan (also notable: we would have less chance of breaking down on the road). 

So, we took the minivan.

HUGE mistake. MASSIVE. 

It did go faster, it's true, but it was the most terrible five or six hours any of the nine passengers had endured so far by means of bus travel. The trip was an endless succession of snaking paths along the edges of the mountains, the excitement of which was heightened by passing of the larger buses in what could only be inches of space from the rim of the cliff's we were skirting, the dodging of pedestrians and moterbikes alike, and of course the livestock. Goats in the street. Roosters everywhere. It was like a bad videogame. It's the same route by bus or minivan, to be sure. But the bus is so big it has to go much slower through all those hairpin turns. The minivan just blazes his own trail, completely impervious to the nausea and fright of his passengers. We finally made it to VV and not a moment to soon. We found a nice little guesthouse and tried very hard to forget all about the day's trip.

Vang Vieng:

Now strictly speaking, I think VV is in my top five most beautiful places I've ever been to. 

And yet I never want to go back.

It's just a travesty, that's why. The whole city is one sad heap of natural beauty and culture that Westerners just threw up all over (in many cases, literally). VV is a river town in Laos whose main attraction is a simple one. You rent an innertube for one day and spend what should be a very pleasant three or four hours floating down the river, staring up into the magnificent glory of the mountains all around you.

But no. It's anything but peaceful. The town has become the eternal city of Spring Break, but it's not fun, it's pathetic. Everyone but us was drunk and high and walking around in their underwear at all hours of the day. In Laos, where women cover their shoulders to the elbow and legs to the ankle regardless of the weather, it's just plain blasphemous to see them bending over backwards to get them another beer and give the best prices on Whiskey buckets to make ends meet. Praying people will come in their bar (which is really just a bamboo stool outside a mudhut where they keep a pale of ice, some of the nicest establishments are pictured above) and cursing their existence in the same breath. 

The whole river is lined with these makeshift bars that blare music so loudly you can't even think. People start drinking at breakfast.  You couldn't find anywhere to go that wasn't geared towards the sketchy tourist outfit. Consequently, the food was absolutely terrible.  They didn't serve Lao cuisine, just "Western" dishes made with whatever they had on hand. Oh it was gross. We couldn't get out of there fast enough. So we fled to the capital...Vientiane.

Although we opted for the full-sized bus for this trip we didn't think to try out our driver before hand. I think it was his first time using pedals. Have you ever ridden with someone who doesn't know how to accelerate smoothly, so instead they just surge the gas every three seconds? That was our drive for five hours into Vientiane.  I am proud to say that I did not get sick on the bus. I willed myself not to get sick the whole way there, but I couldn't help getting a little whiplash.

So Vientiane- the capital city.  It has some good points. The people seemed to be friendly there and less disgusted by travelers (with good reason). We saw some things. The city was very walkable. We saw the Royal Palace, but only from the outside, no tours allowed and whatnot.  There were temples galore, of course. My personal favorite thing was a concrete structure that served as a roundabout stationed just a few meters from the American Embassy. Apparently it's created soley out of concrete that had been donated to Laos by the US for the purpose of making or improving an airplane runway. That...structure was their symbol of defiance.  Well done Laos, very impressive. And how are those runways, hmm? Pity.

In front of the Royal Palace

"I should have been a runway."

 We ate dinner at this street cafe on our last night in Vientiane.  Overall we were underwhelmed by the "V" cities of Laos. When the time came we were ready to go to Thailand.

To the left, dinner. To the right, "weary."

Crossing the border was a much easier process leaving Laos than entering had been.  Although I've yet to forgive the man, I think he was Danish, anyway, who accosted us in line and tried to convince Joel to leave me- yes, right in front of me- explaining that he could find him five Lao girls in a snap to choose from to replace me. Joel isn't very good at understanding accents, so he had no idea what the man was saying, I, on the other hand, was outraged.  Yet, there we were, stuck in line together at the border to cross customs. 

This marks the end of our days in Laos and the beginning of our adventures in Thailand, that's right, home of the elephants and tigers.

Charmed, I'm Sure.

The night we spent in Luang Namtha, Laos wasn't particularly special. They have a lovely little night market there where everyone sets up a food kiosk and you eat at picnicesque tables in the middle and try all the diffferent varieties of skewered meats and the omnipresent "Lao sandwich" (which is just a baguette, one triangle of Laughing Cow cheese and various fillings covered with sweet chili sauce). We met a fun American couple.  Since we never exchanged names with them we called her Jane and him Mr. Jane, because I promise you she was the spitting image of Jane Lynch. She acted and moved just like her. It was borderline creepy.

We left the next morning for Luang Prabang, Laos.  It took almost nine hours by bus, but the scenery was so beautiful I didn't even mind. I was enrapt with the green vistas out my window.

 

Luang Prabang was everything we had hoped it would be. It was the quintessential charming mountainside town. Totally walkable. Street vendors selling mango fruitshakes and banana and nutella crepes at every turn. A constant parade of brightly colored monks. A night market that made me go weak at the knees for all its splendor. You really should visit if you get a chance.

 

We went to the Royal Ballet one night. It was a fun experience, but I'm pretty sure I could have performed in the next show after watching it once. They don't dance, that is to say... they don't move around. If you can turn very slowly in a circle, and you can move your wrists around while you point your fingers... you're a shew-in for the lead. But they did have fun costumes.

We stayed in Luang Prabang for four or five days, I lose track. Near the end of our stay we made an afternoon excursion to one of the most beautiful things I've beheld, the Tad Sae Waterfall. The water looked like cascading pools of glimmering aquamarines. It really had that ethereal blue lagoon quality to it. Joel and I had come in our swim suits fully prepared to dive in to this liquid perfection but one toe's dip into the pools assured me I would be just as happy observing the waters as I would be swimming in them. It was icey cold. I waded out to just above my knees before water-skating spiders corralled me back to the shore.

Joel, however, insisted on going in the waterfall, declaring that the experience wasn't fulfilled without swimming. He then spent the next several hours condescending to me (though chattering teeth) about how much more fun he'd had than me, and how worried he (with the blue lips) was that I would regret not swimming in the waterfall for the rest of my life. (And yes, I did take care of him when he caught a fever and had to stay in bed for two days.)

And for the record, I'm still perfectly content with my decision not to swim.  Water and I have never really been the best of friends. I like to hear the ocean, not swim in it. If I can't touch the bottom of a swimming pool on my tip toes I assume that the depths harbor sharks, so I avoid them (you can laugh, but I know you've thought about it before too). Lakes with murky water should be seen and never swum in. Ferries are a mode of transport I wouldn't wish on my enemies. Speed boats are the only form of nautical travel that I can endorse, so there you go.

If I knew how to make a blogging label for this series I would entitle it "Why We Came." This stop in Luang Prabang landed us just past the one week mark on a 21 day trek through Laos and Thailand, with time to spare for cities we'd never ever heard of before we moved to Shanghai.  This is it. These travel opportunities, these experiences are, in the end, what made us say, "let's do it." Let's give this life a shot. Was it worth giving up central heat, an oven and good Mexican food for a year?  At this point I have to say, definitely.

As Good as it Gets

Not quite a full two weeks after returning to Shanghai from my trip to Memphis we were leaving our apartment again with backpacks loaded for a three week trip through SE Asia. Even on the day of our flight out we weren't quite sure how or where we would spend all of that time. The only thing we knew for certain was that we couldn't meet up with Cliff, Craig and Ashley in Vietnam because they had chosen to vacation on the only country we were considering visiting that no longer issues land visas (meaning, we would have to trade the $12 bus tickets for $300 flights. one way. each. plus the visas). So we shook our fists at Vietnam and made plans to exit Laos to the west instead of the east.

If you've read this far you deserve a pretty picture. 

Our first stop was in Kuming, China. The plan was to fly there, then take a series of buses until we ended up in Laos several days later. Kuming was nothing more than a dot on a map to us when we were making our plans, but during our 24 hours there we really enjoyed ourselves. Reason number one: we were celebrities.

This picture was taken at lunch. We'd been wandering around for hours trying to find a place to eat and stumbled on this place. They had the best fried rice I've ever had- it wasn't actually fried, so maybe that's what was so great about it. Just big steaming bowls full of rice with vegetables stirred in. Also- my state of near starvation was probably a factor in the high marks. Anyway, after we sat down at our table, a parade of people came up to approach us. They looked very sheepish and just stood there for a long time before saying, "May we chat with you?" Soon they were all pulling up chairs around us and trying their best to use every ounce of English they'd learned (which wasn't much- and two of the three were getting college degrees in English. Couldn't string together a sentence to save your life) but we had a great visit. We talked as slowly as we could. They giggled their way through every attempt at a sentence. People kept coming up to get their pictures taken. They really wanted to be our friends- they tried to teach us as much Chinese as they could in the twenty minutes they were at our table. I have a notebook full of random vocabulary words that consisted of any object that could be seen from our room. Chop sticks. Framed picture of vegetables. Desk. They were very sad when we announced we had to go. They wanted to show us around Kuming. It was very sweet. People never take a bit of interest in us in Shanghai. Well, except kids....

I have a mystical dominion over all the children of Shanghai. It's true. Just a few weeks ago when I was running errands for this trip I heard a little boy screaming and crying with all his might a few aisles over in Carrefour. I peeked my head around the corner at him and smiled and sure enough, he stopped crying. Not only that, but he wrestled himself free of his parents and came running at me as fast as he could, arms outstretched the entire time as he waddled his way over awkwardly encumbered by the marshmellow layers of clothes they strap around children here in the winter. And when he finally made it he just stared up at me with teary brown eyes arms as far above his head as would reach pleading in universal child language "Hold me! Hold me!" His parents were as dumbstruck as I was. I don't know what the rules are about picking up someone else's child here so I just smiled at him while his parents scurried over to retrieve him saying, "Ohhhhh he liiiikes yuuuh!" A child would never do that to me in the states, but here. It happens all the time. Maybe I should adopt one.

So about Kuming. We made our way over to a park we heard would be a nice place to sit and people watch and boy were we surprised by the sights.  I'm not sure what we were expecting but it wasn't a huge lake full of white birds that swirled above your heads in perfect synchronized dances and thousands of people all clustering about to learn dances together or perform their latest lipsynch routine or dress up in whatever traditional garb they had in their house and make up a dance to show off in the park. There was ice cream, and people were making cotton candy on the backs of their bikes (which of course I had to try- who doesn't love cotton candy!) It was crazy! And ever so much fun.

We finally had to pack up and head to the bus station where we boarded our first overnight bus in China. There were three narrow rows of little beds that you lay down in to sleep until you arrived. Man of man was that ever an experience.

I think the road from Kuming to Jinghong must be the curviest most death defying drive on the face of the planet. I couldn't sleep from being tossed from one side of the bus to the other. But we made it! From Jinghong we took a few more buses into Luang Namtha, Laos, which is where I will pick up next time. Thanks for stopping by!

The one with the beach from The Beach.

For the record, I hate ferries, or boats of any kind, really. It always happens that just enough time passes between the ferry trips of my life that I forget this fact only to realize it when I'm already out at sea where I have no option but to suffer through the trip til we reach land.

So in the future, if it comes up, remind me that I don't want to take the ferry. I'll be thankful.

Upon disembarking from our ferry, we arrive in Ko Phi Phi late in the afternoon with no place to stay, so our first task is to find a hotel. We'd scoped a few out online, but we have no clue how to get to them on the island. We see a free longtail boat at the pier to take us to one of our prospective places, so we decide to check it out first. After a brief inspection, I give hotel "A" the thumbs down, and we set off back towards town in search of a new place.

Since we arrived at our location by boat, we had no option but to follow the coastline back toward the pier. Unfortunately, the beach was only nice and sandy for about half of the journey and a series of rocky entrapments for the other half--if you're picturing giant, slippery rocks with no handholds and tons of terrifying looking black creatures scurrying in and out around your feet you'd be dead on. J and I were both wearing our big backpacks and balancing our carry ons as best we could while we climbed. We were slipping and sliding our way across the rocks when the inevitable happened, J's feet went out from under him as he attempted to cross a particularly treacherous rock. Backpacks and carry on went in separate directions, as did his left foot, which struck one of the large rocks, and the rock hit back. Hard.

Poor J still had to walk a really long way to get into town, through the saltwater and the sand, which isn't fun on an open wound. He left a nice trail of blood behind us, like Hansel and Grettle, vampire edition.  We finally found a hotel to settle into that was located two doors down from the island clinic, and the doctor there was wonderful. He was so friendly, and we assume he had some kind of medical background.

He's splinting the toe. Very official.

Even though J wasn't supposed to get his foot wet, we still went snorkeling on the last day of our stay. We rigged up this high tech system to block out the Andaman sea.

It didn't work, obviously, but at least we tried.

Joel was quite a celebrity during our stay in Ko Phi Phi. I tried to get him to tell people that the bandages were from a shark attack, but he wouldn't. Anyway, on our snorkeling trip we went out for about 5 hours on a little longtail boat and saw all these beautiful islands and bays, including Maya Bay, the island paradise where they filmed "The Beach" (with Leo Dicaprio).

The Beach

Panorama from the beach looking out on the bay. In the movie it looks like those rwo rock cliffs close in the bay, but they don't.

Views from the boat...

We flew back through Bangkok (after a second installment of the dreaded ferry) on our way home and spent the night at a hotel close to the airport for convenience. Little did we know there was an all-out bazaar waiting for us in the parking lot. I'm happy to report that we were the only Caucasian people in premises, and that people gleefully and openly laughed when they saw us walking through the stalls. We amassed a feast for our dinner from about eight different vendors who all seemed delighted to have us as patrons. We arrived home very late on Saturday night, and have been enjoying being here in what's starting to feel more like a home, since then.