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Well our last night in Tokyo was a pretty heavy 5am job (thanks to Martin and Chris for that one) but despite predictions to the contrary we did make it to the airport on time!!!
Carrying on from where is left off on the message board we found ourselves in a taxi going from Beijing airport to our hotel… the driver has pulled over on a embankment on the Chinese M25 and starts shouting and pointing at the bushes…. So we are thinking “oh my god, oh my god” we have only been in China for 10 minutes are we are getting abused already… Driver then proceeds to get out of the Taxi pull down his trousers and……….. takes a piss….. I never thought we would be so happy to see a Chinese taxi driver take a piss..
Half and hour later we are in central Beijing, we get out of the taxi and the driver points at what can only be described as a building site…. Driver quickly says “you hotel you hotel” while pointing at the unfinished building and then drives off… for the next 30 minutes we are walking around this building trying to find our actual hotel with no luck… only thing we got out of the locals was some confused looks until a woman took pity on us and tried to help.. Upon giving her the name of the hotel she simply laughed and said “you hotel, you hotel cwosed”…. So we are thinking OH s*** what the hell are we going to do… Eventually we just thought we would take a look at the building site.. through the construction work it looked like the builders had actually finished 2 floor of the hotel and this was to be our home for the next few days..
The first impressions that Pete and I had were not great… we had just arrived from the cleanest and most advanced city we have ever seen into a Beijing that was so polluted that you couldn’t see the sky and locals that spit continuously… that and squat toilets were a bit annoying… On the plus side we met up with our tour group that we would be spending the next 20 days with and they were all awesome…
There was 12 in the group, a Spanish couple, one Mexican, two Swedish girls, one south African and the rest were from the UK (and an Israeli tour guide).. first night we all went out for some introduction drinks and it turned out to be a pretty mad one.. a round of 4 beers and 2 vodka red bulls cost about 3 quid.. so the drinks were flowing pretty quickly and we found ourselves quickly warming up to Beijing..
Next few days were relatively uneventful.. went to see Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City which was really interesting but mainly we were winding down from the manic 10 days in Japan..
After Beijing we all headed for the Great Wall… This was AMAZING… lots of people just get a bus to the Wall, stand on it for 15minutes surrounded by other tourists and then leave.. Our walk started on a section of the wall that was so out of the way and eroded that we did not even realize that it was the Great Wall… we then spent the next four hours walking for 10km along getting to see the most amazing scenery on what was an amazingly clear day.
After the walk we checked into our ridiculously cold guesthouse to ride out the -5 degrees C night… again more drinking ensued that night fueled by the amazingly cheap Chinese beer… Next morning was a 6am start to see the sunrise over the Wall.. Really good, but bloody cold!!!!!
At this point I (unfortunately) have to admit that we got the option to do another 4 hour walk along the wall or go to bed!!!!! I chose to go to bed (ahh the warmth) and Pete did the walk…. About half our group elected to do the walk and all (including Pete) said it was absolutely stunning… and I can quite believe it… again amazing scenery but from a higher vantage point and during sunrise… (this is the last time I get a hang over stop me from doing something)
Next we had to travel on our first overnight “hard sleeper” train from Beijing to Xi’an (16 hours)… Xi’an was great… this used to be the old capital and so had some cool stuff.. Terracotta Warriors being one of them… Little sad, but another highlight was the 14k bike ride around the old city wall.. as you can see in the photos me and Pete decided to get a tandem (for financial reasons and not for immature childish ones)… the five of us that went for the bike ride then proceeded to revert to 8 year olds and tried to see how fast we could go off ramps, down stairs and through gaps… well, we enjoyed it!!!
Only other things of note were trying a thousand year old eggs (actually only two months old) that were really quite unpleasant ….. oh and one other random thing… when we were in a club on our last night there was actually uniformed military personnel stopping us taking photos… maybe you are not supposed to have too much fun under a communist regime!!!!
Another overnight hard sleeper (18 hours) and we arrived in Shanghai…. First look at impressive modern China and it did not disappoint… As per usual in a new city we did the required Temple this and Pagoda that…. And then got ready for some evening entertainment… First night out in Shanghai we were came across some interesting characters.. a sleazy French and Belgium guy who were desperately trying to crack on to the girls in the group and kept pouring whiskey from the near full bottle they had just bought… shortly after they left us (leaving us to finish the whiskey) we had this really fat Chinese guy come over to out table… obviously even more drunk than we were he then started hurling abuse at us… as our guide tried to decipher the slurred mandarin it basically turned out that the bottle of Whiskey (that we had now finished) had actually belonged to him!!!!!!!!! Now getting quite pissed off we get the (English speaking) bouncers to get rind of him… 30 seconds later the fat guy comes back and throws his whiskey glass at us smashing it on the table and covering the people next to us.. fat guy now promptly ejected from club we have quite a good night…
Last night was possibly the best as we had a group Karaoke night…. Very funny stuff.. If you have ever done karaoke in Asia it not like at home when you sing in front of a whole bar of people.. it basically consists of you and your group getting a private room with free reign over the TV and choice of songs… HA HA of course Pete was most defiantly leading the way with his new Essex backing singer (the lovely Grant) but I have to admit I did give it a little go myself and maybe got a little carried away..
Oh forgot to say that seeing Tanner terrified at the top of the pearl tower was also very amusing… (note the absence of a picture of him outside at the top)…. As for the food we discovered a Chicken feet hot pot L nuff said!!!!!!
Yet another overnight train but this was a long one… 28 hours after leaving Shanghai we arrive in the rural area near Guilin, where we also visited Longji and Yangshuo.
We did loads of stuff in this area… Tai Chi, cooking class, kayaking bike riding and hiking..
Best bit of this was probably the Kayaking (scenery was absolutely stunning) and the hike in the rice terraces in Longji (really nice to see very rural Chain for a few days)… unfortunately the visibility on the rice terraces was absolutely zero after about 25 meters due to heavy fog… the odd glimpses we did get through the mist was good though… for this part of the trip we had to ditch our main backpack for small rucksacks for 3days and 2 nights, this was because we were walking between our different accommodations.. this was fine for us but I think some of the girls were not too happy… on the plus side an walk that normally takes 5.5 hours only took 4 as there was no need to stop and take pictures..
Another thing that we did in this area was go to a live food market… this was really disgusting. We did put some pictures on the web but we left most of them out as they were quite disturbing… dried rats was only the start… absolutely everything that Chinese people eat was their both in live, butchered and ready to eat stage… this included live turtles with their shells ripped off.. bags of live frogs, fish kept alive in one inch of water… The worst was defiantly the dogs caged up behind a stall while there was half of a dog sat on the table after it had been cut up… it was a pretty horrible place to be but we came to see China and this is what they do…
Despite the above I can honestly say that the food in China was brilliant…
Next stop was Hong Kong and we will leave that one until we get the pictures up…
We are in Thailand at the moment but we will try to update this as often as we can..
Cheers All
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