Warriors, Come Out To Play

I'm in Xi'an, which is a vital chain in my Big City Alphabet.

It's also very cold. No, colder than that. Coming from Yichang to here is the biggest temperature difference I've had since switching from a British winter to a Buenos Aires summer. I got on the train wearing shorts and flip flops; got off the train and was pleased that I'd been carrying superfluous walking boots for the past ten months.

We had about six inches of snow the first night. That's a fun amount of snow. So much fun that it somewhat diminishes the experience of seeing the Terracota Warriors. Really, who wants to see an incomplete archeological site when the alternative is throwing snowballs at strangers?

Weirdest Food: I'm not certain but I think I ate a barbecued testicle last night. The trouble with never knowing what you're eating is that you can't tell people that you've eaten weird stuff.

You're Gorgeous

I've spent the last couple of days on a boat cruising through the Three Gorges on the Yangtze River. I thought it was pretty sunny although the Chinese people on the boat were appalled that we were wearing shorts on what they considered a winter's day. They did teach us how to play Mai Jong so we can't have discusted them that much.

Now I'm in the "small town" of Yichang. Population 1.3 million. That's Leeds and Sheffield combined which, by my humble standards, makes it reasonably big.
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Shouts:
Happy Birthday you. It's a biggy, eeek (and after thinking I couldn't wish you any kind of birthday message I'm now bombarding you, that's the way I roll).

Karst No Shadow

April: "I just can't see a situation where I would join another overland tour."

November: I'm on another overland tour. I've got my reasons but I'm not giving them to you because they'll just sound whiney, and frankly I deserve the stick.

So I'm in China proper now, the land of restricted internet access. We crossed the border into Shenzen, which turned out to be a surprisingly normal town. The only reason you would know you weren't in Manchester is because the buildings are taller. Shenzen also turned out to be a city that's bigger than London that I've never heard of, I have a feeling that that might happen a fair amount over the next couple of weeks.

I'm in Yangshuo now. I feel a bit sorry for Yanshuo, it's surrounded by limestone karsts which a fortnight ago I would have found amazing but in a post-Ha Long Bay world it just seems a bit average. We went "bamboo rafting" to see the karsts. The bamboo raft was neither a raft nor made of bamboo. Guess us tourists wouldn't go for it if it was called "plastic pipe boat".

We went on a bike tour through the karsts too. We hired tandems, unfortunately the guide didn't appreciate that his mountain bike with its suspension, gears and small turning circle was far better suited to offroad tracks than our tandems. Evidentally there's a reason you don't get tandem BMXs.

Watched an old man cormorant fishing last night. That's not the most vegetarian thing I've ever done. Getting picked up in the dark from a back street wall by a boat with no lights put down such a good base-level of weirdness that seeing a man throwing choking cormorants off a boat seemed fairly normal.

And I've just been hot cupped. Which really wasn't that pleasant, apparently the scars go away after a week or so. Which is nice.

Weirdest Food: China 's not disappointed so far - dog, lily flower intestines, bring on the weird.

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Apologies to anyone who's tried to contact me on facebook, I can't get it here. You'll just have to use good old email. How very 2002?

Good Night Viet Nam

So I've left Viet Nam and with it South East Asia. Four months, six long-term travel companions, eight countries and a good, solid base level of weirdness. Probably the bits of the trip I'm most likely to repeat and the bits of the trip I would least like to. Incidentally one of those unpleasant bits Goss is having to do tomorrow, which links those two sentences nicely.

I'm in Hong Kong now. It's a proper city. All HMV and Marks and Spencers. Starbucks and Subway on alternate corners. Kinda like home only with really tall buildings. I mean REALLY tall. Most of the buildings here are quite tall but some are really tall. Four of the World's Top 20 are here. It's got the tallest building I've ever seen and until a few hours ago I was completely unaware of its existence; who needs to know what the fourth tallest building in the world is, anyway?

And they dance. You heard me, the buildings dance. When I heard of the World's best static light show I thought that was a euphemism for how pretty the harbour looked at night. I really wasn't expecting all the lights of all the buildings to be synchronised to music for fifteen minutes. Absolutely ridiculous. Loved it.

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Shouts: Edward T Horncastle, dirty thirty and married. Well grown up.

Energy Sapa

"I'm not sure what I'm going to do, I can't put any weight on my feet."
"You're speaking as though I didn't break my toe yesterday."
"Touche"

I think it's fair to say that neither Goss nor I were especially well prepared for the two day treck in Sapa.

Really it all started when we decided to get the party boat tour of Ha Long Bay (I guess a purist might argue that it all started when I left Dan a few months back, he left with the words "it's a pity we won't meet Goss, weird things happen to Goss", so I had been warned) - incidentally that was the correct decision, most of the other boats we saw (and we got quite close to a few of them) were filled with somewhat older, more Russian couples.
Ha Long Bay is magical. I'd seen pictures before I went but in no way did they do the place justice (obviously I used this as the excuse for not taking my camera out of the bag).

Within the first few hours Goss and Kevin had managed to lose a sea kayak. Kayak's shouldn't sink, right? Fortunately they were within swimming distance of the cave / secret lagoon combo we were visiting.

We spent the first night on a junk on the bay; we tried to round up some of the people from the other boats to join our party but strangely none of the somewhat older, more Russian couples seemed that keen on joining us.

We spent the next day on the beach of a deserted island, which was fairly paradise-esque, or at least it would have been if the rocks and coral hadn't made toast of our feet.

Had a go at night time kayaking (which is obviously sensible), the bay was filled with phosphoresence. Mighty sparkly, I tell you.

From Ha Long Bay we went fairly much straight to Sapa where, dosed with painkillers, we spent two days hiking through the rice terraces. Now each individual rice terrace may be a heap younger and a heap less impressive than those at Batad, but the sheer number of them was incredible. A whole valley filled with big green steps. It must have taken ages.

There's six different hill tribes around these parts and members of each one follow you around trying to sell you pillowcases, which is a little annoying. We stayed in a homestay, allegedly with one of the tribes, but it was about the least homestay-y homestay I've stayed in (five "stay"s in one sentence; is that a record?).

After a few months of jaded cynicism where everything seems to be the same as something I've already seen, two bits of take-your-breath-away scenery in just a few days.

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Best new fact: the Dutch for snail is slugundhaus.

Boots with the Pho

I don't think I can live in Viet Nam, I just don't see noodle soup as an acceptable meal. And they absolutely thrive on that stuff here. they love there phos. I don't even like saying pho. I didn't mind it so much when I thought it was pronounced Po - I mean that sounds like a word - but it's pronounced a bit like fear and a bit like fur. It sounds like you started saying feather but found it was too much effort so stopped.

Another reason I'm not Vietnamese is that I'm just not very good at squatting. They love to squat here, just on the side of the road, squatting away as a comfortable alternative to sitting. If I squat for any length of time I lose feeling in my legs. Sopheak tried to teach me squat Asian style (that's flat footed, none of this Western, on-your-toes nonsense) when I was in Takeo. I fell over.

I'm still in Hanoi. I'm nailing the sites at the moment. Went to my first art gallery since Sydney. I hadn't realised how much I'd missed them. Is that weird, probably, but not as weird as this...

Weirdest Food:
In just about any other blog entry snake spring rolls would be a shoe in for weirdest food. Today it doesn't make the Top Three.

We went to the snake village yesterday (a 4x4 drove into our taxi on the way there, thankfully it didn't play out Shantaram-style), we got given a snake to play with. A small child tried to kick our snake in the face, which Goss thought was unkind, then realised how much of a hypocrite he was about to be proved. The snake had its heart cut out, which was put - beating away - in a shot glass, mixed with blood and rice wine. It had stopped beating by the time I got to drink it, I felt a bit cheated. The twitching snake was then taken away and chopped into a smorgasbord of dishes (sauted snake with lemongrass and ginger was ace, fried snake skin wasn't).

Incidentally, snake bile is surprisingly green and, unsurprisingly, doesn't make rice wine taste any nicer.

Hanoi Rocks!

Hanoi's pretty cool, I tell you, everywhere else is just nowhere. Although that could just be because getting here's been a long trip, it made me flip. Really long. No longer than that. I left you in Hoi An, whinging about the incompetence of travel agents. Well said travel agent proved their incompetence, which resulted in me trekking back to first Nha Trang (with the hope of intercepting Casey there on her way north) then Saigon (where i intercepted Casey).

So that was twenty-four hours of bus rides.

Then I got the train. Managed to get ripped off by a travel agent again (my own fault, I chose to eat my first meal rather than go to the station to get my own ticket), travel agent charged me for a soft sleeper and gave me a hard sleeper. For those of you who don't know, a hard sleeper is a wooden shelf and a pillow. It wasn't all bad, 'though, I got to share my cabin with a Vietnamese family and their chickens. I'd been a bit jealous of other travellers sharing enclosed spaces with livestock but now I've ticked that box. Twenty-nine hours and one Reunification Railway later I was in Hanoi, three hours early ("whoop" you might think, but you'd be wrong 4.30 is a rubbish time to arrive anywhere).

Went to Mo Chi Minh's Mausoleum. I didn't go in because a. I wasn't dressed appropriately and b. Uncle Ho was on holiday. Went to the Temple of Literature instead. More tortoises with doctorates there than most places.
Hanoi doesn't rock as much as it could as I still can't get a Russian Visa. And I hold the City responsible. Still, I didn't want to go to Russia anyway. It'll be really cold. Trans-Siberian, Schmans-Schmiberian. Who wants to spend three weeks on an icy train, hey? Hey?

I've got to get myself an ice cold beer.
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Kudos to anyone who spots what I did for my own amusement in this post. Answers on a postcard marked "I'm Way too Geeky" or "I Can Read too Much into a Two-word Title".