The Obligatory Travel Conversation

It's not long traveling until you realize you've had the same conversation with everyone you've met. Where are you from? Oh, I've been there, [say hello in their language]. Where did you come from? How was it? What's your name? Cool. Where are you going? I've heard that place is a-MA-zing. How long are you traveling for? Oh, I'm traveling for longer (thought silently).

This "conversation" is mandatory, and some people just love it. It bores the hell out of me. It's truly miserable after the hundreth time. You get the same set of answers. I know it's necessary though - you have to start somewhere. You can't just walk up to someone in a foreign land, shake their hands, make creepy eye contact and ask them if they believe in god. Unless you're a Mormon or Jehovah's Witness.

Like I said, some people wallow happily in it like pigs in shit. I try to get it over with as quickly and abruptly as possible, so I can move on to more interesting things. I rely heavily on trolley/surgeon dilemmas just to hear what people say. Not familiar with trolley dilemmas? The bro over at Philosophy Bro can give you the lowdown.

A certain someone I traveled with for four months seemed to put up with the obligatory conversations pretty well. Sorry brosef, but I remember we met someone once, might've been the Swiss girl in the van to Luang Prabang, and as you two were having the Conversation, I just thought, Kill Me Now. By now a seasoned traveler, I know at this point you're regaling all sorts of people with far more dialogs.

Anyway, Adam and I relied heavily on Would You Rathers to entertain each other, and soon employed classics like "Would you rather spend the rest of your life with latex gloves on, or have your fingers perpetually covered in Doritos powder?" to keep other travelers on their toes. There's always Would You Rathers concerning superpowers, but flying always wins, so it's not so interesting.

The Conversation is possible to overcome. Once the basics are laid down, a blunt question is generally acceptable, and you can move on to discussing involuntary organ-harvesting from executed Chinese convicts.

For the record, I support organ-harvesting, but I don't support the death penalty. If you're gonna ice some people though, might as well make use of them. That was a good conversation to have on a rooftop bar below the peaks of Yangshuo, even when a pony-tailed over-the-hill Canadian hippie butted in and started talking about slippery moral slopes and living and dying for ideals, and his younger sidekick really missed the point and started mentioning souls.

One of the best responses I got from one Conversation was from an Australian girl in Hue. At some point early on I asked her where she was from but she seemed not to hear and instead went on talking about the book she read that brought her to this town. About twenty minutes later when there was a break in the conversation, she said, "I'm from Sydney." I asked you that like twenty minutes ago, replied I. "Yeah, I don't really like to get into that stuff so soon."

At least I know I'm not the only one sick of it. Hey, thanks for stopping by.

Travels Soundtrack: East Asia

When I started traveling, early on, somewhere in Russia, I got the entirely novel idea to listen to songs about the places I was traveling through.

The natural choice for Russia is Back in the USSR by the Beatles, but I'm going to use that for all the ex-Soviet states, so instead my selection for Russia is 'Siberian Breaks' by MGMT.

I didn't embed it because I don't actually recommend that you watch the whole video. Like Siberia itself, this song is long and mostly boring. It's not really a great song, despite what hipster contrarians will tell you. The rest of their second album is masterful though.

Next stop Mongolia. This is a NOFX classic from my high school days - 'All Outta Angst'. It's not entirely about Mongolia, but there's a short verse about it. Close enough.



And then China. Good ol' China. I made a point to listen to 'China Girl' by David Bowie. Not really about China, but what the hell, it's a great song, and it beats 'Chinese Democracy' by Guns N Roses.




Rewinding a bit, I don't really know any songs about Korea. I was technically traveling in Korea, although I lived there long enough that I don't really consider it much of traveling any more. Regardless, I'll throw you all a great song that's about a certain neighborhood in Korea. I was going to go with the sublime majesty of Girl's Generation's 'Gee', but instead, you get 'Itaewon Freedom' by M/V, of which, for a long period of time, I just couldn't get enough.




Next installment: southeast Asia.

A Proper Welcome

Border crossings, airports, train stations, etc. all offer a great opportunity to make a good first impression with travelers. I had the good fortune to enter Belgium via the Antwerp train station.

Take a look at that photo (not mine). After gathering my bags, brushing past people in their seats traveling onward, and turning out the door, this sight really impressed the hell out of me. It was Gothic, it was beautiful, it was spacious, it had a lot of high windows.

It did what most cathedrals aim to but often fail to do - it made me stop, catch my breath, crane my neck backwards and stare reverentially upwards saying "ho-ly shit".

And I wasn't the only one. Travelers, people generally keen to get the hell out of a train station, were dropping their bags and snapping pictures all over the place. It's a grand welcome, and great way to set the tone for a visit to a beautiful city.

When I entered China through Laos, the Chinese border control station was almost equally sublime, mainly because of the contrast it represented from Laos. The Chinese surely know how to flaunt their wealth over their poorer, less developed neighbors.

Take a look:



Sure, it's just a normal building right? Don't forget how relative the word "normal" is. Laos doesn't have a single skyscraper in the country. They don't have trains. The lovely capital city might as well be a village.

It took a day an a half on semi-paved roads to get from Vientiane to this border post. In Laos, the "highway" is a two-lane road that winds up and around mountains. Villages along the road were literally along the road: their depth was one house deep and the houses were built on the shoulder. You could see people bathing at the public spigots.

Then you get to China where the roads - fully paved, multi-lane roads - go through mountains instead of around them, where the border post is full of glass, natural light, and swooping roofs. It's a statement.

Great Success!

Contrary to my general opinion on long-distance buses, I enjoyed the ride from Urumqi to Almaty very much.

The best part was that I was leaving China, which I was fed up with, mostly due to unbearable train rides of inconceivable length, the frustrating pursuit of a baffling girl, Kafka-esque visa processes, a long-ignored desire to move westward, and the overwhelming omnipresence of gray sprawls and humanity.

The bus had only two rows of bunks, making each wider and more comfortable than the three-rowed buses I had previously been on in China. The passengers were Kazakh, making them less prone to spitting, screaming on cell phones, and smoking on the bus.

Leaving Urumqi, I felt wonderful, thinking that I had gotten a lot out of the city, and I had nothing to regret about leaving. Reclining on my bed, I watched as a young boy clomped through snow in shoes far too large for him. Two pairs of beautiful Uighur girls approached each other on the street and kissed the others on their cheeks in perfect unison. I said goodbye to Chinese characters, BYDs, and filthy icicles.

I had plenty to read, the 1200 dense pages of Atlas Shrugged, and a headlamp to light up the pages when the sun fell.

Exiting China through their border, I was once again held up, my passport scrutinized, the supervisor called over to clear me. I expected it at this point. Entering Kazakhstan, a guard pulled me aside, filled out my form for me, and had me skip everyone else in line. “Welcome to Kazakhstan!” another said as he waved me through the exit gate.

It seemed like as soon as we got into Kazakhstan, the sky was blue and there were snowy peaks in the distance. We passed untamed open land beyond lines of trucks waiting to clear customs and get into China.

The weather changed from spring warmth, to gusty winds, to rain, and eventually snow.

The people on the bus were nice to me. I stood out, but not as a freak to be gawked at, but as someone to be interested in. People talked to me instead of wordlessly taking my photo, and one guy bought me a meal at a rest stop because I hadn’t changed any money yet.

When we arrived in Almaty, snow had begun falling. I had the phone number of a CouchSurfer, but no address, and no phone on which to call, and no money with which to buy a SIM card. I wandered around in the darkness for a bit before some of the passengers insisted on putting me into a sort of taxi. They threw some luggage into a massive van, and a kid drove me to an ATM, then let me use his phone to call my host, and dropped me off, no charge.

Not a bad welcome into Kazakhstan.

Urumqi - The Good and The Bad

In an interesting dichotomy, Urumqi is the place I found most interesting in all of China and the place where China really pissed me off the most.

Urumqi is interesting because it is probably about as diverse as China gets. It's the capital of Xinjiang (New Frontier) Province, and it's home to the Uighurs They're the region's largest minority, people who have been living in the area for thousands of years. They're largely Muslim and central Asian -looking. In Urumqi and the surrounding areas you can also find Manchu, Mongolian, Hui, Kazakh, Khalkhas, Xibe, Tajik, Russian, Tartar, Daur, and Uzbeks.

According to the Xinjiang Autonomous Region Museum, "Since the modern times, the various nationalities in Xinjiang resited against foreign aggressions together, worked hard for development and unity together, and all these composed deeply-moving patriotic chapters."

In fact, the museum insists on ethnic harmony so often throughout the museum, you know it's a lie. Uighurs generally don't get along with Han Chinese, and for good reason. I met an Italian girl doing human rights research concerning the Chinese and the Uighurs as soon as I arrived in town. The Chinese government flatly denies Uighurs driver's licenses, passports without unpayable collateral, and forces Uighurs to study Chinese, among other things.

Urumqi's most appealing aspect is easy to see: It's the diversity of people. After the general homogenity of the rest of China, stepping off the train into the streets of Urumqi was a feast for the eyes. So many different faces and features from the long history of multi-ethnic land were everywhere. The women were stunning and beautiful in a way I had never seen before. The men seemed to have stories written into their eyes and mustaches that I couldn't even begin to imagine. It was my introduction to people of central Asia, full of enigmatic faces that look somewhere between European and Asian.

The best part about Urumqi was the people I met and the food I ate. The wide range of cultures and ethnicities hugely expanded the choices of food, already amazing as Chinese food is great. I ate a lot of great Uighur food - kebabs, round disks of bread, samosas, all sorts of lamb.

I would've gone crazy in the city for the eight days I spent waiting for my visa if I hadn't met Laura. An Italian, she was staying at my hostel, the only other westerner. She speaks Chinese and introduced me to Eunice, who introduced me to Jane, two Chinese girls who speak near flawless English. I spent time with them singing karaoke, playing Scrabble, dancing, drinking, eating.

I also got to meet Manus, the Irish owner of the only expat bar in town which happens to also be one of the only places to see Uighurs and Chinese coexisting happily. I went there nearly ever night I was in Urumqi. He's got a great corner on the market, there's nowhere else to go. He fleeced me and an British couple in poker one evening. He deserves a bit of pleasure though, he's been in Urumqi for a decade.

What drove me crazy about Urumqi was what had been driving me crazy about China throughout all my travels in the country: too many people, nothing organized, astounding inefficiencies.

I arrived on a Saturday, intending to apply for my Kazakh visa on Monday. I found the visa office Monday morning only to be informed by these helpful signs in Chinese and Uighur that it was closed until Wednesday.

Laura informed me that the offices were closed due to some software upgrades. Fair enough, I thought that might mean some decently paced service when I went back on Wednesday. I think it was actually closed for International Women's Day though, a national holiday in Kazakhstan, falling on Monday.

What a stupid holiday by the way. Now don't get all riled up ladies, I'm for equal rights and treatment for the fairer sex, but isn't giving a group of people a special day completely contrary to the point of equality and acceptance? Laura was incredulous when I said I'd never heard of the holiday before. I think she just wanted some chocolates from me.

Wednesday was worthless. I waited in a frantic crowd of Kazakhs and Uighurs for four hours. Everyone was trying to shove their way to the front of the seething mass of humans and force their way into the steel doors on top of a low cement stoop. The Chinese guards seemed to enjoy screaming and pushing people away. I was told to come back the next day. I demanded to talk to someone in English and at least get my application form, and I was let in briefly. The office was warm and empty and could've fit at least half of the mob outside. I got my application and left.

The next day, Thursday, I came back and the guards let me through after having me wait in the surging crush of humanity just so I knew who was in charge. I guess sometimes it's good sticking out as the only westerner in Asia. You get noticed, but usually it's not for a beneficial reason like skipping the crowds at a visa office.

I was told to come back Monday, which I did. I took a reciept they gave me to a bank, paid, and brought it back and was told to come back at 4PM to recieve my passport back. My bus left for Kazakhstan at 7PM, plenty of time, I thought. I had to get a bus because getting a train ticket to Kazakhstan proved to be as simple as getting the visa. The special ticket office was only open certain times, and none of those times was when I tried to go there. I asked at my hostel about having a travel agent get my ticket. They couldn't even tell me where a travel agent was. Par for the course in China when it comes to simple logistics.

I waited from 4PM to 6PM. No one was at the counter in the office. I knocked on the glass and asked when I could expect my visa. I showed the beautiful office assisstant my bus ticket. She told me that the supervisor wasn't in. When is he coming back? 'I don't know.' Where is he? 'I don't know.' I got it at the last minute. I'd been imagining, to my horror, what it would be like to throw away my bus ticket and spend another night in this city - Laura had left by this point, and I'd said goodbye to my other friends as well.

I made it though, with enough spare time to pick up some food for the trip. I settled into my bunk, happy knowing that I was moving again, that I had gotten a good time out of this city that also harrassed my patience. I felt like I had nothing left to take from it.

Surviving Another Train

Urumqi is the most remote city in the world, by distance from an ocean. It's actually the middle of nowhere. But for some reason 90 trains over 10 days had no sleeping compartments, and no seats. I can't believe I put myself through the hell of standing in hard class again.

I won't linger on that unfortunate experience too much. It was similar to my first terrible train ride. I spent the first night crammed in an aisle of sweaty stinky people, catching no sleep. I went to the dining car in the morning for over 24 hours, paying for food and, in between meal times, paying for the privelege of having a seat, 20 yuan each time. Best three dollars I could've possibly spent at the time.

There were a few notable parts to this ride though. One was that the dining car served no beer. I was able to play some games with Uighurs on the train: the simple game of Sevens with a family in my assigned car, and later in the dining car with some other strangers, plus pente with a young kid who was evenly matched with me, except for his father telling him where to put pieces to beat me.

Something I noticed about Chinese people that really pronounced itself throughout these games is that many Chinese don't possess the concept of waiting turns. You can see it in "lines" at train stations, and each time I played Sevens - a game where players take turns laying down cards - there was at least one guy, usually older, who kept putting cards down out of order, no matter how many times the other players told him how stupid he was for forgetting about turns.

The train cars were the standard scenes: humans crammed without dignity against each other, people sleeping on the filthy floor underneath seats, visible only by their protruding feet, and complete apathy toward any posted restrictions: spitting, smoking, littering.

The greatest abomination of the ride came when we were approaching Urumqi through the vast beautiful wasteland of western China. The train had emptied a fair amount so that most people had seats.

A car attendant began sweeping up all the trash that had accumlated on the ground like revolting leaves in a foul autumn. Processed "sausage" wrappers, greasy foam meal trays, fruit rinds, cigarette butts. The sight made me happy. I appreciate order and cleanliness, and the joy of seeing something wrong made right.

A great mound was forming, and passengers began to help him by sweeping under their own seats. The mountain of trash gradually moved down the car from one end to the other, and the floor became visible.

A warm stench of rot faintly wafted through the air from the old upturned garbage, but I ignored it, preferring to rejoice in the act of cleaning. My pleasure didn't last long. When the trash mountain finally reached the far end of the car, the attendant, with the help of other passengers pushed it into the vestibule and out the open door, scattering two days worth of 100 people's garbage out into the air as the train rushed through the desert.

It was truly revolting. Not just a slovenly passenger throwing a box of trash out of the window, but an employee of the train line, a representative of the government, and a citizen of the land he was polluting had just scattered dozens of pounds of trash across the land, and the same thing was presumably happening in the fifteen other cars of the train, and on the other 90 trains over the next ten days that came this way.

It was the easily the most appaling thing I saw in all of China, and that's no small claim.

XinJiang - Town, Not Province

It wasn't easy convincing the Chinese in Xi'an that this town existed, but I finally found a bus. Everyone thought I meant the province XinJiang. Only in China is a city of more than 300,000 people unworthy to be considered existent.

I made the trip out to the "countryside" to visit a couple Irish lads I met on the horrid bus from Vientiane to Kunming. They got on at Vang Vieng in a state of near-fatal hangover, which is probably the only way the bus ride could have been worse. I think we bonded in shared misery.

I stayed at Mike's place, a large apartment in a teacher's building on the enormous school compound. It overlooked the exercise yard, and every morning the children stomped around the yard in formation, classes forming phalanxes, chanting and yelling like good little communists.

Mike is an enormous man whose size stopped him from climbing to the top of the town's pagoda, one of two sights in the town. He just wouldn't fit. Patrick is a thoroughly Irish looking man: sandy hair with a wide jaw with a big cleft in his chin. I almost expected him to burst out giggling like a leprechaun at times. I hope that's not racist. The two have been friends since grade school and came to XinJiang to teach together, and have been bearing it impressively for nearly two years.

The town itself is truly unremarkable. It consists of a few long streets branching off each other at right angles, lined with clothing shops, cell phone stores, dumpling shops, an arcade market, fruit vendors, and men sitting on the sidewalk with Industrial Revolution-era sewing machines that Patrick claimed "can fix anything".

There's a bridge going out of town, and a hill with the pagoda Mike nearly got stuck in, and the sorta-Catholic church, the town's other attraction. I say sorta-Catholic because Patrick explained that it's run by the Chinese government who decided to just start sainting people at will. The old Pope wasn't cool with that, and cut them off - across all of China, I'm told - but the Chinese people probably don't know, and if they do, they make no distinctions.

Anyway, it's a lovely church that was built by some Dutch missionaries or something like that. I was related the story of Patrick and Mike's Christmas Eve visit. They strolled up the alley leading to the church to find it swamped with Chinese screaming, spitting, yelling, and shooting off fireworks. Traditional Catholic boys, they left disgusted. I must admit, it's not the sort of Christmas Eve ritual I'd expect either.

Patrick and I got lost in tiny hilltop lanes, edged by high walls of mixed earth and clay. It was a small neighborhood with tall wooden doors and bright red frames. We were trying to make our way to the church via a back route and the quiet maze proved to be far more pleasant than the dusty cement streets and crowds down below. We stumbled into a Buddhist altar where sticks of incense as thick and tall as baseball bats were burning.

Waking up after my first night, Patrick and I went downtown and got roped into the beginning of a day long funeral ceremony. We ate some suspicious and unidentifiable food in a smoky restaurant and excused ourselves. Later, I had dinner in a local canteen with one of the other 5 English teachers, a veteran ex-pat Aussie named Guy who said, "I won't discuss politics in a place like this, you never know who's listening" before he started discussing Chinese politics.

XinJiang was a nice break from the massive cities of China, of which it seems I've seen far too many of. It wasn't the countryside exactly, but I think it was as close to it as I'll get in China.

Terracotta Warrors VS Hype

"The Eighth Wonder Of The World!" That's the claim, at least, about the terracotta warriors. I went to see for myself. It was a miserable rainy day in Xi'an, and the bus ride out of the city took about an hour.

I wasn't even sure if I wanted to go see them. Another case of The Dread. I even checked reviews and thoughts of people online and everyone was soaking their pants about how stunning and "worth it" it was. I decided to blow the 110 yuan it takes to get in. That's a small fortune in China, about $17.

The experience starts with a kilometer-long walk through a gauntlet of tourist shops selling obligatory warrior statues, stamps, carvable name seals, postcard, knickknacks, and all sorts of predictable souvenir crap, right down to porcelain figurines of German Shepards. Don't ask me why.

All the shops are in a western-style outdoor mall. There's even a Terracotta Warriors KFC and Subway. It was a real travesty, and to make matters worse, when I got to the gate finally, I was told the ticket office was back down towards the start. "By KFC".

Fortunately there was a ticket hawker who inexplicably gave me one for face value after I refused to pay extra, though he kept asking for a tip, which I probably would've given him if I wasn't already so disenchanted with getting hassled for being a foreigner throughout Asia. He was standing around in the rain, saving me a twenty minute round trip, after all.

So I saw the terracotta warriors, and learned a bit about their history: commissioned by a 13 year old king so he'd have some friends when he died, rank discernable by size and decoration, blah, blah, blah. Just google it if that's what you're really interested in.

The statues are in three pits of varying sizes. The big one, pit A, the medium one, pit B, and the small one, pit C. After being thwarted by horrible sign postings, I went the recommended path, C to B to A, building up for the grand finale.

Sure, the size of the crumbling army is impressive, but who doesn't know that already? Who hasn't seen photos of the cavernous pit A, or close-ups of the faces, or heard that all of the faces are different? Tourists walk around the pit perimeters, looking down into them from a distance. Many warriors are lined up in battle formation, but most are still yet to be excavated, and many others are being patched together, to be ready for presentation.

What I did learn was how superior Chinese civilization of 2,200 years ago was to modern day western civilization: "Some of the unearthed brass weapons bore chrome-plated edges. This technology was discovered by America and Germany in the 1930s, but it was already mastered in China of 2,200 years ago! How impressive!"

Pit B still had a lot of unexcavated statues. They were under the original covering: thatched mats laid over wooden beams, resting on packed earthen walls. The soldiers stand in the corridors between the walls. Like I said, most of the roofing was still up, making the pit look like a field of petrified blankets thrown over wooden ribs.

I'm glad I went just because I would still be wondering if I missed out on anything had I skipped it. But I would recommend anyone else against going, unless you are going for one of the following reasons:

1. you (or your travel companions) have never heard of the "Eighth Wonder Of The World" somehow
2. you really need to see with your own eyes the scale of the pits (one thing that no photos or documentaries can really give you) and appreciate the feeling of space
   
3. unlike me, you're not a dirty traveler burnt out on tourist traps

Xi'an

Xi'an is the end, or the beginning, of the Silk Road. If I had given that any thought I probably would have been more excited to be there. But I arrived to a city of cold, unrelenting, soft rain. The train station spit me out into a crowd of people milling about the city wall.

I trudged through the rain to find a hostel I checked out online. These two things would be the theme of my brief visit to Xi'an: trudging around the city, and cold rain.

I stayed in the 7 Sages Hostel. It's in a beautiful complex of traditional Chinese row houses. There are circular doorways, and clean white-washed walls and gray paving stones. Sadly, because of the dreary, miserable weather, the courtyards and open spaces were unenjoyable.

I heard so many good things about Xi'an when I was passing through China last year. But arriving there, I wasn't very impressed. But to be fair, I didn't really try to explore much. I learned, too late, that it's possible to rent a bicycle on top of the mammoth wall that encircles central Xi'an and spend a couple hours cycling around. I learned, too late, that it has some pretty lively nightlife. I spent my nights at the hostel, in the near-empty bar/restaurant butchering songs on my guitar.

What I did do was slog through the gutters and poke around the train station until I found the tourist bus to the terracotta warriors. Later, I slogged right back to the train station to wait in line to buy an onward ticket to Urumqi, just to be told there was nothing available.

Also, I slogged through the rain to an outlying bus station to pick up tickets to Xin Jiang, a small city I was told doesn't exist by a woman at the local bus station and two people at my hostel. My friends living in the city would be upset to hear their home doesn't exist.

The problem was that people thought I was looking for a bus to Xin Jiang province. No one even heard of the small city - different, obscure characters made it's name, and it's a place so inconsequential that there is no reason to hear of it. I guess I don't blame them. I finally got a ticket to visit my friends for two days.

I also slogged through the rain to hunt down a smaller train ticket office, armed with a piece of paper explaining what I needed in Chinese. I thought there had been some sort of mistake at the station when the clerk told me he couldn't give me what I wanted.

I was willing to try alternate trains and times, but I was to discover, quite clearly after having a hostel staff member translate for me on my cell, that on the 9 trains per day that go from Xi'an to Urumqi, there wasn't a single bed for ten days.

That's 90 trains without a goddamn bed. I wasn't willing to get up first thing the next morning just for the chance to book a bed ten days later. I wanted to get the fuck out of China. All the people on the train to Beijing, my wasted days in the capital, the hordes of humans everywhere, and now this: no beds or even seats to Urumqi, the farthest city in the world from an ocean, literally the middle of nowhere. It was all getting to me.

I figured I'd get it over with. I booked a standing seat in hard class. Another 40 hour ride in a steel tube of sweating humanity. The sooner I was to get out of China, the better.

Goodbye Beijing

Even her friend, who first met me at the subway station since she was busy, gave me the obvious advice, "Never travel anywhere for a girl." He had come to Beijing the previous year to follow his girlfriend, and they broke up, but he wound up staying for lack of anything better to do.

I met Audrey, a Chinese girl, in Phuket as I was vainly trying to find a boat to India. After the first few days searching for the boat I just spent about a week straight with her, and things were great, to make a long story short.

Audrey said she wanted me to come see her in Beijing, a thought that didn't really appeal to me at first, but then I realized I wasn't going to be sailing to India, so why not? Even if things didn't work out - and they didn't - the only way overland to anywhere but Australia was back through China.

Audrey flew back to Beijing. I took a bus from Phuket to Surat Thani, and overnight train to Bangkok, killed a day in Bangkok until my night train to Laos. I spent the weekend in Laos, then rushed my Chinese visa through on a Monday, $160, and got on a bus on Tuesday afternoon.

The bus, as I wrote about, was awful. The train, as I wrote about, was far worse. But all the while, the thought of Audrey kept me cheerful. I figured I'd get to Beijing and things would be rosy, but I guess I forgot that our time in Phuket together, though just part of my normal life at this point, was a vacation for her.

She was busy beyond belief planning some huge press conference for work. I didn't get to see her much except in the evenings, and even then she had to do late work and whatnot. The third night she finally sat down with me and told me things wouldn't work out like they did in Thailand. I wasn't surprised, but I was interested.

Audrey gave me an ever-changing list of reasons why. First excuse: she didn't want her boss or friends to think bad of her for seeing a traveler who might not be around in a month. Lots of ex-pats in China told me that was a very Chinese perspective to take, but she had already told me her boss wanted to meet me and take me to dinner, and I met her when she was with her friends in Phuket.

The last one I got was that she just wasn't over an Italian boy who had treated her like shit before she left for vacation. She'd referred to him many times in Phuket as "that Italian asshole". I guess I should've know if she was referring to him at all, it was a bad sign.

The rejection hurt, but not because I had traveled all the time to get to her. I'm traveling anyway, so it's not a big deal. It was more because I had convinced myself things were going to be great, and I was wrong. I liked her, but it wouldn't be the end of the world. I told myself the worst part was that she didn't even give me a chance to spend time with her once I was in Beijing - we didn't even get a date together. Maybe she was worried about me leaving, but she didn't even see how things would be if I had stayed.

I moved into a hostel for another four days, wondering if we'd get a chance to talk again - everything had been rather hasty and she was still legitimately busy at work- and wondering if I should go straight to Urumqi and Kazakhstan, or if I should try to deal with the cost and hassle of Tibet to get to India.

I gave up on India and got a train to Xi'an, where I'd relax a couple days and visit the two Irish guys I met on the bus to Kunming.

It snowed the last two days I was in Beijing. It was nice to see, but slippery to walk in. I got a lift of spirits from having dinner with a friend from Korea on Saturday night. I bought a 1st class sleeper on Monday morning, and was gone in the evening, wishing it hadn't been such a pathetic visit to the city again, but glad to be moving on.

I Can't Wait to Leave China!

I can't wait to leave China. Things didn't work out with the girl I came to see. I spent a rainy miserable day looking at the terracotta warriors of Xi'an and trying to get bus and train tickets for onward travel. The terracotta warriors were underwhelming, the bus ticket a hassle, and the train ticket a further disappointment - I'm going to be standing for another 30-something hours to Urumqi. More to come on all developments!

The Train!

I actually had a seat for the first couple of hours. I was crammed onto a lightly padded bench with women who kept hocking grotesque loogies into a tissue, and kids who slept like contortionists.

Then the first stop came, and the rightful owners of the seats kicked us all out. They were mostly students, as I had the terrible fortune of traveling during the end of China's Spring Festival. Everyone was going back to Beijing from their hometowns. The population of the car actually doubled at that first stop, as if it wasn't crowded enough. Then at the second stop at midnight, even more people crammed on. It was inhuman.

I recently read an amazing book on India called Bombay: Maximum City. The author mentioned that in India, there are limits to how much livestock may be shipped in one car on a train. There are no such limits for how many humans can cram into a car, and I suspect it's a similar situation in China.

The floor was covered with sunflower seed and peanut shells, and people were squatting in the aisle, nestled up against others doing the same. The "No Smoking" signs were blatantly ignored, and people were constantly shuffling up and down the aisles somehow, picking out patches of floor among the writhing masses.

Even the snack carts came through, with the vendors yelling at everyone to make way which somehow they did. At one point during the sleepless first night, I was offered the corner of a seat as a kind student squished in to his friends to make room for me. It was enough to rest one ass bone on, but not enough to sleep.

Stop after stop during the night, people shuffled on and off. I read Emperor: Gates of Rome almost entirely through. It's a bad book. A pulp, substanceless imagining of Caesar's youth, but it was all I had, and I was grateful for it.

I somehow made it through the first 12 hours, alternating between perching on a seat corner, standing with my hand on the overhead luggage rack to keep from getting knocked over, reading, and listening to music and carefully conserving my battery power while vainly trying to catch some sleep.

Around 11AM I pushed my way through the next car towards the dining car, where I was gambling on sitting down and eating something. It took me about 15 minutes to get through one car, and there were four more to go. I decided to wait for the next stop and walk down the platform, but then a snack cart came through, and I followed in it's wake to the dining car. I was the only foreigner in five cars of Chinese, with probably 150 people in each car.

I'm not trying to brag that I was a foreigner getting a "real" Chinese experience. I want to admit I was the only idiot stupid enough to take a standing ticket during Spring Festival. It was truly miserable.

I did get a seat, after squeezing through the hallway. I ordered a pork and pepper dish, and drank beer for a couple hours until I was too tipsy to stay awake. I thought I should get up because I was taking up space at a table that could be occupied by paying customers, and I did. Then I realized that everyone else at the tables were sleeping, and I sat back down and tried to nap.

I spent about 24 hours in or around the dining car. I knew my luggage would be safe, buried under a mountain of other people's belongings back in car 17. No one was going to run off with it. No one could possibly run.

The closed the dining car for the employees meals, and I stood around the toilets in between cars with everyone else until it opened for dinner. Then I ate with a fat businessman who called himself John Forest, and a woman with her young niece and the grandma. John Forest told me I could sleep in the dining car for 30 yuan. Sounded good, but then he recommended I find another seat - there were none - because his friend was coming to sleep here. I waited for awhile, it was around 9PM at this point, and I was tired. I had finished the book, and a Chinese girl was happily listening to the exotic Western bands I had on my MP3 player, and killing my battery as she ran the video.

The cute little girl I'd been sitting across from finally warmed up to me, a foreign white-devil, and I made faces at her. Then her grandma started clearing out the bags from under the table for some reason. Then the little girl was squatting underneath, pissing right on the dining car floor. John Forest just laughed when I gave him a surprised look. People were still smoking everywhere, even the employees. Earlier I had seen meal attendants loading trays with pre-made meals, just stacking the uncovered cartons on top of each other. God knows where the bottoms of those cartons had been, but they were now resting on food someone would eat. So much for sanitation.

I left big fat John Forest, not entirely sadly. He was really fat and didn't even push all the way over in the seat. I was on the edge, almost like the night before when a student gave me a corner of his seat. I crept into the next car, a sleeper car which was kept clear of the riff-raff of the poor people crowding the area between the cars and sleeping on the floor of the dining car, which don't forget, the adorable little girl had just pissed on.

For some reason, probably because I'm white, they let me into the hallway of the sleeper car, and I sat on a fold down seat until the wee hours of the morning when a car attendant finally told me to get lost. It was cold, and not conducive to sleep, but I had space, along with the crippled guy who was laying down on the floor next to the heater. I think they just felt bad for him so they let him lie.

I had breakfast in the dining car and got out around 8:30AM and made my way back along the platform to car 17, where my bags were. I stood for another three or four hours, watching the grim landscapes roll by, industrial slums fighting for space with highly farmed paddies and terraces. A friendly Chinese student was talking to me, and he was interesting at first - I learned an average salary out in the provinces was 1000 yuan per month, about $150, but as an electrical engineer in Beijing, he was hoping to make 3000 yuan per month - but towards the end of the ride, I had no patience for anyone. I listened to music as my battery finally started dying, and finally arrived into Beijing West Station, glad to step off the train, and walk for really the first time in two days.

Catching The Train

The train ride to Beijing was far worse than I thought.

To start the trip, I missed my train. Five minutes before the train leaves, Chinese railway employees close down the gate to the platform. I arrived four minutes before the train left, thanks to a wonderful traffic jam.

The woman standing by the gate, refusing to let me through, helpfully observed, "The gate is now closed." The train left, and so did my chance of having a seat for the next two days of travel.

I spent about five hours playing Zombie Splatter in a smoky Internet cafe among Chinese gaming geeks and girls watching dramas online. Staring at the screen clicking thousands of zombies to death with shotguns and Desert Eagles was a sort of release for the smoldering rage I felt for missing my train and losing my seat.

I got on the evening train prepared to stand for the next 40 hours. I rushed through the gate along with all the other suckers hoping to get a good spot to camp out. I knew it was going to be bad when I saw people clutching tiny folding seats in the line. There were hordes already prepared to clog the aisles.

I was lucky just to shove my bags up on the overhead luggage shelf. People soon filled in and bags were crammed under seats, on tables and laps and between legs. There were families crammed into the wash cabinets between the cars, and people were squatting in between other people's legs.

It was bad, but it got worse.

More Good News!

In more good transportation news, China seems to be on some sort of nationwide spring holiday. That means that transportation is at a premium. There's a lot of people in China, by the way.

I asked the receptionist at my hostel about train tickets to Beijing. She made a phone call and reported that for the next week, there is only standing room available. Beijing is another two day trip. I was looking forward to a nice comfy bunk to relax in. Now I was being told that I'd be lucky to stand for two days unless I wanted to kick around this town for over a week.

Due to the good grace of my masochistic tendencies, I was about to get a standing room ticket. I fortunately decided to think about it and I wandered to the train station to inquire there, just for shits and giggles.

They had a seat for tomorrow, which I promptly bought. It's a hard seat, the lowest class. It will be for two days with people crowding the aisles, and probably with chickens clucking around under the seats and babies crying and people spitting on the floor, but I guess it beats standing for two days or twiddling my thumbs in Kunming for a week.

I eagerly anticipate more good fortune.

I Was Right!

I hate to admit it, but I was right. Dead right.

The bus from Vientiane to Kunming was miserable. It was about 40 hours over two nights. They call it a "sleeper" bus. I doubt if anyone got a wink of sleep at night.

Bunks are thin and short. Maybe tiny Asians can fit in them, but I can't. At night, it got cold, and condensation built up on the window, which I had to lie against, and a draft came in, despite the windows being as closed as possible.

Besides being cramped, my blanket, though thick and heavy enough, was both too short and too thin for the bunk that was cramming me anyway. The D-shaped railing on the side was necessary to keep me from rolling out of my second tier bunk on the switchbacks all through the Lao hills, but it also was supremely uncomfortable to keep rolling into.

Plus the roads were bumpy, windy, and often just short stretches of dirt.

The good news is that napping was not only possible but almost mandatory during the day. I was so exhausted from tossing and turning in vain to find a comfy position that I did have a couple decent naps.

We stopped to piss in the woods now and then, and food was taken care of at roadside restaurants that served Chinese slop under a cement roof. I've eaten worse though. After crossing into China, we stopped in the sunny and clean border town of Mohan and I ate breakfast with two teachers from Ireland, and a Malaysian guy on business or on holiday. He never cleared up his ambiguity. One Irish guy went into the restroom and came back declaring it "top 5 worst bathrooms, easy." And this is after two years in China and a 6 week holiday through SE Asia.

The claim stood until dinner time at a low dim feeding hall, when he called the former top 5 worst bathroom "Disneyland" compared to the cement shit-trough that passed as a toilet.

It was a quality operation, this transport. We took the small windy roads in China to avoid paying toll fees on the smooth highways, and we sat at a gas station outside of Kunming for 3 hours to avoid getting in at an ungodly early morning hour. When we finally got moving, we got in at 5:30AM.

More Photos

It's always a fucking debacle with public computers and shady interfacing, but I got more photos up. I finished off my album of China, and made one of Vietnam. The links will always be on the right side bar.

Buses Buses Buses

It was time to get out of China. I was in the south and Vietnam was the next logical step. We left Yangshuo at 11:30AM on a bus and got into Nanning, the provincial capitol around 6PM. You wouldn't think it's too hard to find a taxi at a long-distance bus station after a bus gets in - and it wasn't - but it was difficult to get someone to let us into one for some reason.

After collaborating with a British couple we were on the bus with, we got some guy to get some other guy to let us in his van. We all spent the night at an apartment hostel, quite similar to the one I stayed at in Busan on what was technically the first night of this trip. It was run by a talkative Texan named Weston who had questionable but entertaining parenting impulses.

The next morning we had another problem getting a taxi because the massive boulevards were jam-packed with such a torrent of vehicles that it was uncertain whether one would actually be able to stop to pick us up. We did make it though, and boarded a bus to Hanoi, again with the British couple.

Two days on a bus is not my idea of fun. You stop at piss-rank gang bathrooms and can buy only imitation Pringles and shrink-wrapped meat and flat Red Bull to sustain yourself. I guess it could've been worse though.

When we got to the Chinese-Vietnamese border, we were shuttled off the bus to the first processing building on the Chinese side by long covered golf carts. The Chinese official had a hard time believing that the handsome, bearded, long-haired man in my passport was the same handsome, clean-cut, short-haired guy standing in front of him. Just like the offical when entering China. Fortunately his superior came over and waved me through.

We were shuttled to the Vietnamese processing building, breezed through, and were shuttled onto another bus on the Vietnamese side. All in all the border process was like a casual drive through a leafy mountain park, a world away from the penitentiary-like marches on the Mongol/Russian and Mongol/Chinese borders.

The "bus stop" in Hanoi was a wide street even more choked with scooters and traffic than any street I'd seen in China. It was borderline inconceivable how a coach bus like ours could navigate the beat-up alleys full of scooters coming towards us, and even pull U-turns across roads that seem too dense to walk across. I guess if you're big enough, anything will stop for you.

As if two days on a bus weren't enough, Adam insisted on getting the hell out of Hanoi ASAP. He claimed it was just another city, but I thought it was possibly the most interesting city I've ever been to based on the few hours and one night we spent there. I can visit more on the way back.

We took a bus, part of a three-day tour, the next day to Halong Bay, a world-famous climbing destination of thousands of gumdrop karst pinacles towering above turquoise waters. Judging by the tour buses and hordes of tourists, it's also a world-famous tourist trap. Understandably so, as beautiful as it is, but that's another story.

Yangshuo

Adam and I wound up spending about a week in Yangshuo. We arrived in the company of a Spanish woman named Sandra that we ran into after a full day's hike through the rice terraces outside of Longsheng. She was also staying in the same hostel as us in Guilin, and she sort of attached herself to us after the boat trip down to Yangshuo.

We left the town after spending time hanging out with possibly the cheapest person I've ever met, a Polish pianist, and our old Dutch friend Paul from our two-week tour in Mongolia. It's a small world among travelers.

Yangshuo was pretty nice, but even so, I had a more idyllic image of the place in my mind before I arrived. Downtown there are some really pleasant cafes and restaurants lining some good-looking canal ways, and that's next to a gaudy tourist ghetto, which in turn is surrounded by forgettable cement buildings in all directions until you get out of the little city and into the green rounded karst peaks that shoot up from the landscape everywhere.

It's this surrounding landscape, with slow rivers cutting their way through and around that is the only reason Yangshuo has become so well-known, especially among climbers. I was too lazy to climb though. Adam made it out one day.

Apart from the attempted theft, it was a relaxing stay. We had a quiet clean room with high ceilings a short walk away from the center of action in town. We got free meals - amazing dinners - at our guesthouse, and days were generally spent bicycling or hiking through the countryside and along the rivers.

Evenings we spent drinking beer in town, at random restaurants at ground level, or up on a roof-top bar that had amazing views of the peaks encircling the city, which were lit up at night for a ghostly beautiful backdrop.

A highlight for sure was jumping off Dragon Bridge, a 600 year-old steep arching bridge that crosses a small turquoise river north and west of Yangshuo. We got there after a meandering bike ride with Sandra and met some other travelers that we shared lunch on a raft with.

In fact, I think that very raft can be seen on the left side of the above photo, and the background in that photo is what we would have seen jumping off the 25-foot bridge had we not been looking down at the fast-approaching water and wondering why the hell we jumped. Twice.

It would've been easy to stay longer, but I'm sure there will even be nicer places somewhere down the road.

Stop! Thief!

Recently, a lovely afternoon of bike-riding through the idyllic countryside surrounding Yangshuo was marred by a heinous act of crime.

Adam and I were peacefully navigating the tiny cement pathways that wind around farms and fields to the southwest of the city. We had just spent the day cycling out towards Moon Hill, a striking natural stone arch cut out of one of the numerous karst peaks rising out of the greenery.

I was riding in front on rickety one-speeds we rented from our guesthouse. My bike had a sluggish bell on front a makeshift basket on the back. I had my day bag stuffed in the little basket with my camera and journal tucked inside.

Suddenly, in the blink of an eye that seemed too short to contain all that it did, I heard a zooming approach me from behind and shake my bike and produce a sharp ripping sound as a scooter screamed past me and jerked my bike a bit off balance.

Not 'til the two teenage boys on the scooter were about 15 feet past me did I realize what had just happened. The little punk on the back had snatched my bag as his buddy gunned it past me, but had failed to actually steal it thanks to the fact that I had the foresight to wrap the strap around my bicycle seat.

The strap catching produced the ripping sound I heard and the jerking off the bike. I didn't fall over, but stopped when I realized what happened and put my bag back in the basket and screamed threats and obscenities at the kid as he smirked at me as he was fading into the distance.

What really got at me, beyond the fact that a little fucker on a scooter nearly took off with my camera with hundreds of pictures on it and my journal with months worth of thoughts and observations and activies was that look on his face.

It was the look that said it was just a game to him. What would've been a near catastrophic loss to me would've been something fun for him, something funny he did to a stupid foreigner he could laugh about with his pimple-ridden buddies, and the fact that he didn't get away with the bag meant nothing to him and that smirk told me he'd probably just get the next one.

I was irate, I wanted to hunt him down and pulverize his skull with my bare hands. I didn't even realize which way he and his friend went off at the next fork in the road because I was too busy getting my bearings back, but the rest of the ride I thought only of violent fantasies that involved me running into him further down the trail, or me re-working the moments of the actually attempted robbery.

Here are some highlights of my fantasies of vengeance, which quite fortunately for him - and me, as I would've surely wound up in a Chinese prison cell had I gone through with any - didn't come true:

1. My reflexes were like a cat's and I recognized the threat of theft as soon as I heard the buzz of the scooter approaching and before the pair on the scooter can zoom by me I throw my left elbow out and knock the passenger off to the ground. As he is stumbling to his feet with a bloody face I knock his teeth out with a punch and then turn to his buddy, the driver, who by now has turned around to try to help his friend. I pull him off the bike and kick him off the cement path down to the farmland a few feet below.

2. The little punk grabs my bag, but I leap off my bike and grab a nearby rock (or my folding pocket knife) and pelt him square in the back of the skull so he falls off and drops my bag. I retrieve my bag, and then continue to the violence described above.

3. The little punk grabs my bag, but I leap off my bike and snatch the scooter of a local farmer and run them down. The kid sees that I'm crazy enough to be scared of, and throws my bag away hoping it will distract me. I scoop up my bag, and continue chasing them until I can knock the passenger off. Proceed with violence described above.

4. Recognizing the kid in town, on a crowded street where I couldn't just start pounding him, but where I could order a dish with the most peppers I could find, I walk over towards him and "accidently" trip and smash the fiery dish into his eyes, curtly "apologize" and walk away while he is writhing in pain on the cobbled stone sidewalk.

All above instances except for the last one, with other variations that involve me hitting the driver's hand with a rock so he fucks up the steering and crashes, and so on and so on, would naturally end with me ghost-riding his scooter into a ditch or throwing a match into his tank or otherwise wrecking his ride, and spitting in their beaten faces and then taking the money out of their pockets and ripping it to shreds and smothering it into their bloody faces along with the spit.

Of course, the best part of the story is that the little fuckers didn't get away with my shit and none of the above had to happen. I guess I'm lucky I had the foresight to wrap the strap around my seat, though I never really thought anyone would try to steal it.

A lesson learned indeed, almost the hard way.

Pictures of China!

I have finally uploaded a bunch of pictures from China! It took some work getting around the country's firewall, but I did it nonetheless.

You can click the link on the right sidebar, or just follow this link.