I’m back! (…finally, and well overdue).

It’s strange, I’ve always wondered whether I could attract the ire of a world power. Apparently I can and in China it would seem that I don’t even need to try. Despite wordpress.com working in much of China, as well as the BBC site – which I had been assured was blocked (it was in fact unblocked for the Olympics) – jealousyet refused to load. For the first time in my life, I had been censored!

Not that any of that matters any more. I’m back in England. My travels complete, the backpack headed only up to it’s final resting place on top of the wardrobe. Gone is the ever-present sun and the golden temples. Gone too is the laid-back life of the beaches and the pure carnage of the megacities. No longer will I gaze across fields of rice instead of wheat or barley… and no longer will food be prepared using only ONE pan, regardless of the meal. Alas, Asia feels like a different planet back here in cold England and one that I can’t help but miss.

Not that it’s all bad! Cheese is finally a viable food option once again, bread isn’t made from potatoes and nor does it taste like the baker knocked a bag of sugar into the mixture without noticing. Yes, finally the old English Ploughman’s is mine to savour again!

… Still I digress. Apologies to everyone who missed their travel news fix whilst I was behind the Bamboo Curtain. I know I probably should have found a way to post, but I really was very busy. In just under 28 days I traveled more than 3800 miles by land. Some of these miles were traversed at glorious speed: from Beijing to Hong Kong, around 1225 miles, took less than 24 hours on a high-speed train. Other journeys seemed to stretch on for hours: my first journey in China from Lao Cai in Vietnam to Yuan Yang in the Yunan province, a journey of under 100 miles, took 9 hours along the bumpiest roads I have ever been on. Still, this was China, and I was excited!…

Yuan Yang, Yunnan Province

After wobbling away from the world’s bumpiest bus ride I stumbled out into a different world. Yuan Yang’s old town (the name of which I can’t remember) is small. Exceptionally small by China’s standards I suppose. The hotel listed in the Lonely Planet obviously didn’t exist and the map which I had copied down off another blog was completely useless. No-one spoke English and I couldn’t be sure whether the town was further up or down the hill from where I had been dumped. Still, this was the challenge I had come for and I wasn’t about to shy away from it just yet. After much pointing at Chinese symbols as well as much more pointing in various directions, I walked 10 meters from the bus stop and found the only hostel in town. Sam 1 – 0 China.

Then I looked around. Sam 1 -2 China. What a dive!! Now, I don’t want to sound like a snob, god-knows I stayed in some pretty awful places around Asia, but this place takes the price for worst hotel. At a little over £2 a night it was still good value, but the toilets were the most unspeakable of horrors and as far as I could tell the showers didn’t even exist. Plus Yuan Yang was cold, really cold. Well not really cold, but I was used to the staggering heat of Vietnam and Thailand. The only chills I known over the 7 months preceding my visit to China had come at the top of a very large mountain and even then I soon warmed up again once the trek back down had begun.

The town itself was wonderful. Everything I had imagined (wrongly of course) China to be. Decrepit old Communist blocks of buildings merged seamlessly with the mist hanging over the town. Old men wondered around in mao caps, hands clasped behind their backs, slowing pondering the world’s problems in their best strolling jackets. Half the town also seemed to sitting around a table gambling on various games of chess and tiles, the other half watching (well those that weren’t currently strolling).

After establishing that there was not a lot more to the town than I had already seen on my first cursory glance, I headed for my second proper Chinese meal. Lunch had been a mixed bag, not-bad bean “dish” with some less nice leaves on rice, so my only aim was to do better than lunch. After much internal deliberation I settled on a small restaurant in the town’s square which had a sign advertising “menu english here”. This proved to be no help when my “spare ribs” came in a soup. Accompanied only with chopsticks, the ribs were rendered virtually impossible to eat. My first attempts were an abysmal failure. Using the chopsticks to hold the ribs while tearing the edible fresh off I was only rewarded with the soup sprayed all over my only jumper after slowly losing my grip on the ribs. Other methods were attempted: eating with my hands only burnt them, taking the whole chop into my mouth left problems of what to do with the bones, and the bowl was far too large to drink out of without further risk of spillage. All in all the meal was a bit of a disaster! Still on the ‘morrow I would be seeing the famous rice terraces for which I had suffered an agonising journey in order to see.

Having staggered out of bed half asleep at 5am in order to see sunrise, I was somewhat disappointed to see that the whole of the town lay under thick grey mist. After a few minutes spent deciding whether or not to go back to bed and a few more spent in vain trying to find the non-existent showers,  I was in the minivan I had hired with three other western travelers (a Frenchman, a German and an American) heading towards the paddies. One hour later and it was still dark and grey – spirits were low, and stomachs were growling.

After a quick stop for breakfast and the realisation that sunrise had already occurred and was utterly rubbish we set off for the terraces. Despite the heavy mist, our moods were lifted. The terraces really were spectacular, and even more sensationally, we were completely alone in a tiny farmers village. The days of tourist-filled Vietnam were over, Hurray! (more on this later…)

After we’d had our fill of wandering we headed on to our next stop. This was a bustling market village a few kilometers down the road, where local farmers sell and trade their wares. Wandering round the village was a real treat. Bowls of bright red chilis and peppers of all shapes and sizes mixed with giant blocks of tobacco fromaround China. This was another point of interest. I’ve been to eastern Europe and thought that the men there like to smoke – well if they like to smoke in Europe, they love to smoke in China! Never have I seen so many people smoking in one place! Literally every man had a cigarette in his hand or, more interestingly, was puffing out of a giant bong-like pipe. Most bizarre of all was the fact that many of these pipes had only a normal cigarette as the source of smoke, tiny in relation to the size of these humongous bazooka-like tubes.

After our stop at the market we went back for a mid-day nap and lunch before heading back out to a different spot after lunch. This time we weren’t alone, two other tourists arrived and much to our relief the local tribes women (read vultures) stopped trying to ask us to buy stuff in Chinese and headed over to hassle them instead. The views after lunch were better and although the photos don’t really do the view justice, the sun did come and out and the view was utterly stunning. Here are a few more photos to give you a hint of what the view was like.

Here’s one of the strange pipes. This man probably didn’t take his lips off the end all day.

Barbecued tofu is delicious. Watch out for the sauce though, it could probably burn through steel.

The view from the top.

Hassled for money even on the edge of a cliff. The joys of being a tourist!

Mist…

… continued next week