The danger of dumplings!

Although there are many adventures I intend to cover during this blog let me first draw your attention to a couple of social observations that I can no longer ignore. Firstly Chinese people spit a lot, no I'm sorry 'spitting' just isn't an accurate description... hacking up great balls of flem from deep within their lungs and propelling it from their mouths at a rate of knots is more like it. Squat toilets I can deal with, crazy traffic I'm getting used to, I can even cope with fruit salad served smothered in salad cream, but never, EVER will I be ok with this social norm.

Secondly, middle aged Chinese men snore a lot! I appreciate you may be a little concerned as to why I know this, but I can assure you these encounters have been entirely Innocent! I am now highly qualified in differentiating between each category of disfunctioning nasal cavities. Firstly there was the sporadic snorer whom we had the pleasure of sharing a dorm room with in Beijing. This kindly gent would wait until you were just drifting off into the land of z's when all of a sudden he'd let out an almighty whistle, just loud enough to startle you back into an uncomfortable conscious state. We were then greeted in our next dorm room in Pingyao with the constant grunter (admittedly he was actually Argentinian but he was in China so he still counts!). This tune persisted all night long and became rather rhythmic after listening to it for 6 hours straight, it sounded rather like there was a small animal trapped inside him, and judging by the size of him, I wouldn't be at all surprised if this was in fact the case. Finally there is the snoring symphony which sounds from every carriage of every night train we ever journey on. This is an amalgamation of around 40 individuals unique squeals, grunts and snorts all cutting through my silent slumber at once, resulting in me having obscure dreams about smothering strangers with pillows.

Perhaps I should now reassure you that we are actually loving china, and have had many positive experiences of Chinese people. Only today Abi and I had the pleasure of taking part in a public aerobics class in the park and then a delightful encounter with two elderly ladies in their 80's who taught us how to ballroom dance. We have also conveened with several young enthusiastic Chinese lads and lasses our own age, a couple of whom even joined us in a rather muddled game of cards, many of the rules were lost in translation! It seems in general that most of the population have one of two responses to our existence in their country, extreme curiosity, or complete refusal to acknowledge our existence, the latter of the two, frustratingly, is normally demonstrated by taxi drivers.

So from Pingyao we headed further in land to Xi-an. The city itself was a little lacking in character to say the least, but it was a destination that simply couldn't be missed as this is the home of the Terracotta Warriors. Of course being one of the greatest archaeological finds of the 20th century this site is naturally very touristy, but regardless of the hoards of people gawping at what essentially is a paranoid tyrant's ego trip, this is the stuff found only in legends, and is quite simply fascinating. In a nut shell in 200BC Emperor Qin Shi Huang ordered a tomb to be made (the largest in the world to date) in preparation for his death. Given that at that time it was commonly believed that you take everything with you to the after life, not only did he surround himself with 8,000 terracotta soldiers, 130 chariots with over 600 horses he also insisted that 1000 of his precious concubines were also burried alive when he went! Thousands of workers dedicated 40 years of their lives to building these figures (no two warriors faces are the same) only to find that thier reward was also to be burried alive! This man was a real meanie but as a result something truly spectacular was created.

While in Xi-an we made the most of our hostel's many free-bees including a class in dumpling making which we then got to eat afterwards! Unfortunately soon after Abi was struck by a mysterious illness which left her incapable of climbing Hua Shan with me, a near by mountain. Like the loyal friend I am I abandoned Abi for one night and replaced her with an English guy called Ali who had not embarked on dumpling making the night before and therefore was fit and healthy! This mountain is twice the height of Snowdon and an absolute killer to climb... in some cases quite literately. Within 20 minutes of setting out at the foot of the mountain Ali and I witnessed a group of men carrying a dead body on a stretcher down from the exact route we were about to embark on. As you may imagine this didn't exactly fill me with confidence, but persevere we did, and besides a sever pain in my gluttonous maximus for several days afterwards, I remain unscathed. The landscape really was breath taking, the contrast of the Autumn leaves and white rock constantly drawing my eyes away from my feet, a dangerous allure! At the summit we had a rather surreal encounter with a black and white domestic cat, which was quite fearless and sat happily on a rock edge staring into an endless abyss, slightly dizzy from the altitude, I did wonder if this moggy was a figment of my imagination, so just in case I took a photo.

We stayed the night at the summit in a very basic hostel and then after much insistance on my behalf we got up bright and early at 5am the following morning to watch the sun rise, only to find that dawn doesn't actually break until 7! I remained as excited as a kid at Christmas for the entire two long, dark, cold hours, which Ali endured through gritted teeth!

From Xi-an we have travelled even further in land to yet another big city called Chengdu. This morning we went to a Panda reserve, which would melt the heart of the coldest of folk, and truly did turn Abi and I to mush. There are only round 1000 giant pandas left in the wild which is mainly due to the fact that copulating takes too much energy! Captive breeding is therefore essential to the survival of this majestic creature. We were privileged to watch pandas from one month old to 20 years of age going about their daily business which involves eating a lot of bamboo, play fighting for the kids and sleeping all day for the adults, what a life!

Today we are off to see the largest buddha in the world and then to climb another mountain, which hopefully will involve no dead bodies!

What a load of pants...

Well we are a fortnight in and all is well. As suspected we are now quite familiar with the feeling of being a foreigner, and we even wave when people 'discreetly' take our photo when walking down the street. We are now more curious when browsing in shops not to appear too interested, as the last time we did that Abi got physically assaulted by a woman who continuously hit her over the head with a bag while shouting 'buy,buy,buy!'. Ironically it had be I who had been enquiring how much the bag cost! We are also aware of the fact that green lights don't mean anything if you are a pedestrian, and therefore tend to get tubes and buses which is no mean feat as the ratio of people to space is entirely different here and people will happily risk losing a limb to squeeze on board. Oh and we have a Chinese sim card! So if any of you fancy chatting to us we suggest you buy a phone card. Our Number is 15010477110 we think the dialling code is 0086, although to be fair you might want to check that out before you call!

We spent the remainder of our time in Beijing completing our whistle stop tour of all the other must see sights including the Olympic stadiums, a collection of art galleries called Factory 798, and an area of town called Bar street which was filled with Chinese business men getting blind drunk after work. Each bar had a different 'show' (not quite like Thailand... I can assure you there were no ping pongs involved), we had the delight of listening to a live act sing Chinese power ballads on a stage draped in gold fabric, which would then switch to techno in between every song! We also spent a day ambling around The Summer Palace which is where The Emperor and all his concubines would retreat to in the heat of the summer. Its set around a stunning lake lined with weeping willows and was a perfect escape from the hustle and bustle of the city. Then there was the Wall, which I'm afraid requires a whole paragraph all to itself!

In order for you to fully appreciate how immense The Great Wall really is, the geek in me must first provide you with a few brief facts! Firstly parts of it are over 2000 years old, secondly rumour has it that one of the building materials used was the bones of deceased workers, and thirdly it took over a hundred years to build. Abi and I decided to visit an unrestored section of the wall to avoid the tourist-orientated areas. We booked ourselves on a tour with 8 other adventure seeking travellers from the hostel and set off early in a rickety but functioning mini bus with a driver who spoke not a word of English. Two hours later we stopped at the side of a deserted road and a random old man hoped on board (we later found out he was 72). A few miles down the road the driver stopped, ushered us all out of the vehicle and proceeded to drive off. The old man then said 'ni hao', and with a smile begun wondering into the wilderness! Luckily one of our group spoke Chinese and was therefore able to inform us that this was in fact our guide. This man was half the size of Abi, with legs the width of my fore-arm and wrinkles so deep you could barely make out his facial features, yet while the rest of us struggled up the mountain side, red faced and out of breath, he appeared to glide, with not a bead of sweat on his brow... I was in awe! He even offered to carry one girls bag when he saw that she was struggling. We ascended from an altitude of 675 feet to just over 1000, with the climb providing breath taking views of the wall snaking across the land scape every step of the way. Once we reached the Wall there was not another person to be seen for the rest of the three hour trek, except for a loan man of similar age to our guide who was situated at one of the highest points of the wall selling a random selection of souvenirs, I'm not sure I'll ever be able to complain about my journey to work again! I cannot explain how exhilarating this experience was, and best of all it ended with a Chinese feast in a local village which was definitely well earned.

The only other experience we had in Beijing worth mentioning was a slightly surreal one to say the least. But first, some background information. One of the main reasons we are in China is because Abi is fascinated with factories and mass production, from an artistic perspective. Abi's sister makes knickers. Abi's sister is so talented that a Chinese company that mass produces underwear emailed her shortly before we left with a business proposal. Abi's sister is not remotely interested in pursuing getting her underwear made in China and therefore had not bothered replying to the email. Abi then took advantage of this situation and emailed them back to say that she was coming to china on behalf of said underwear label and would like to arrange a visit to one of their factories. I had questioned Abi as to whether or not the story she had told the companies representative was a little fictitious, but she assured me she had just 'bent the truth' slightly. Personally I would suggest that being told to say that I am a research assistant for a London underwear label, was not really bending the truth as such, but in fact a complete lie! Given that my knowledge of knickers starts and ends with putting on a fresh pair of primark specials each day you might like to conclude I was a little nervous at this point. So the following occurred... we were picked up by a driver in a car with blacked out windows, taken to their board room, and spent the best part of an hour talking pants. Our business associates brought out a range of packaging they can produce and a selection of catalogues demonstrating their work. One of which entitled 'alternative costumes' had a picture of a male model donning an black outfit embroidered with the word 'coroner' zipping up a girl in an all in one body bag outfit! After asking a number of questions she had scribbled down the night before, Abi then turned to me and asked if I had anything to add!! Funnily enough I felt she'd pretty much covered everything! We were then taken by the departments manager personally to another part of town to have a look around their factory, at which point one of our hosts took the opportunity to quiz me about my role in the company, which resulted in me telling her some bullshit story about only working for the label a month and therefore being a bit new to it all while going a deep shade of scarlet! Our tour finally ended with them taking us to a plush new restaurant and plying us with gifts. Admittedly by the time we were finally dropped off I'd got quite into my new role and even found myself saying 'we'll be in touch' while making a phone gesture with my hand. After a few minutes of walking in silence Abi said, 'I feel like a bad person now'.

We have since travelled in land and are now currently residing in an ancient walled city called Pingyao. We took a 12 hour over night sleeper train to get here, which is a less than desirable experience but necessary as the country is so huge. Today we intend to hire bikes and cycle to a near by temple, so lets hope the traffic here isn't quite as crazy as Beijing or we might end up being served up as road kill to some unsuspecting tourists!

Beginning in Beijing

All good adventures start with a journey, and therefore I will start ours right at the beginning with the flight from Heathrow to Beijing. Ours began with an introduction to Chinese culture by watching Kung fu Panda and ended with having a beer and a curry at 6am... nothing is more disorientating than a forced time change, and being light weights anyway, any alcohol consumption at a great altitude is destined for trouble... thankfully our light heads seemed to disappear as we hit the ground!

When we finally arrived in Beijing we managed to navigate our way to the city centre by bus, but once we arrived and realised quite how manic the city really is, particularly on a public holiday, we decided to take a taxi to our hostel. This was our first introduction to the Beijing traffic system, and one I will never forget. After receiving a blank expression from several taxi drivers as we tried to pronounce our destination we finally managed to find a man who understood us (actually to be perfectly honest we resorted to showing him our lonely planet!). The centre of Beijing mainly has four lanes of traffic running in each direction which is intimidating itself, let alone the lack of seat belts and sporadic lane changing. To add to the stress of this drive our taxi driver decided halfway through that he was heading in the wrong direction and without any warning tried to do a u-turn across all 4 lanes!! He then got stopped my a police-man, who he then proceeded to have a fully fledged argument with in mandarin. Finally 24 hours after we left our homes we arrived, all limbs in tact.

A little dazed and confused we checked into our hostel, situated in one of the Hutongs in the centre of the city, only to find that we were in different dorms. This wouldn't have been a problem, however I have a terrible tendency to sleep talk... a lot... particularly in unfamiliar places, and I was counting on Abi to poke me if this situation were to occur. Luckily I no longer sleep walk, as the last time I did this I meandered down to the kitchen and proceeded to pee in the bin (I was only 5 at the time but I live in fear that one day this may happen again!).

So Beijing is a complete attack on the senses. It will be of no surprise when I say that the food often appears quite alien and we are still mastering the art of eating every meal with chopsticks. There are all sorts of weird and wonderful options that are sold on every street to tease the taste buds, including crazy mini toffee apples, chestnuts, corn on the cobs and live scorpions! Many of these delights we found at a night market, but very few have we been brave enough to try. One of the most amusing observations to be made is the translation of mandarin into English. This evening we had the following choices from our menu: 'explode the belly' 'the brilliant colours chokes the vegetables' or 'slightly fries of pond' .... brilliant!

There are endless sights to see in Beijing, so in fear of boring you, I will only talk about them very briefly. On our first full day here we visited The Temple of Heaven, mainly because it had a park which we could sleep in, and with a 7 hour time difference we needed to have the option to crash and burn at any point. When envisioning our visits to such locations I suggest you cast your minds back to Mulan the Disney movie (for those of you that haven't seen it I strongly suggest you do), this will give you a pretty good idea of the type of architecture we are fortunate enough to be feasting our eyes on daily. Within The Temple of Heaven, and in fact many of the parks we have visited, it is common for the older generations to 'hang out' partaking in card playing, dancing, singing and generally having themselves a gay old time! Yesterday we met with a Chinese girl called Chen Qi (who we met through Couchsurfing). She took us to a park which contained a small exercise area with various obstacles. Here we witnessed a woman in her 80s doing chin ups and a man of similar age lift his leg above his head... sprightly just isn't the word!

Meeting up with Chen Qi was very useful, as we were able to ask her all sorts of questions we are unable to ask fellow backpackers, such as why do all children under 2 have a huge split in there pants showing their bare bums and why do the lamp posts play music?! After quizzing her half to death during a pleasant peddle boat ride across a lake, to our delight she offered to take us for dinner in a traditional Beijing restaurant. To our horror she ordered Abi Cows stomach soup. This came with a selection of other Chinese delicacies which to be perfectly frank were disgusting. I have never been more grateful to be a vegetarian in my life, and couldn't help but smile as Abi politely sipped her way through various tubes and bones!

Other than that most of our experiences probably don't differ from any other tourist, lucky enough to visit this enchanted city, with necessary stops to Tiananmen Square, The Forbidden City and a flea market, where you are never entirely sure if you are paying the right price or not. We have got to know a couple of other backpackers, one of which projectile vomited within a few hours of our company, but luckily (touch wood) we have not been struck by illness ourselves as of yet. The air pollution seems to vary greatly from day to day and generally this city is a bizarre mix of modernity and tradition. Being a minority once again is a strange feeling, but one I'm sure we will acclimatise to.

We have a budget of 15 pounds per day and 15 kilos to carry on our backs... wish us luck!

Jaz and Abi x x x