Streaking on the Great Wall

If you've ever thought about streaking on the Great Wall, you can see here how its done. In the middle of winter too, and believe me its damn cold in Beijing in winter.
Actually, just as an aside my stepsister just told me to put an apostrophe into previous sentence, and I've already uploaded some of these photos, she is really not distracted. Mind you they're her photos and she's already had a chance to laugh.
So last week Lisa arrived and the first couple of nights she and Jane went out on the town (Monday and Tuesday nights are happening here apparently). They met two guys, Greg and Jason, who just got off the set of Mission Impossible 3 - they had just finished 6 months filming and were having a week off to look around. So on Wednesday night they all got on the train for Beijing (soft sleeper, nice). They had a wild time, as you can see. The nude boy in the photo is Greg. The naked streaker took my sister Lisa to a massage parlour in Beijing, swearing it would be legit. It was all looking a bit dodgy when they turned up at an apartment with no signs, and double beds instead of massage tables. The mini towels (ie facewashers) didn't help the situation. Lisa was feeling dodgy and so searched through all the drawers while the massage lady was away. She found her evidence....condoms!! and so left immediately as it all got to be a bit too much.

There is a stack of shopping at the Great Wall, they all line up alone the entrances and you can buy all sorts of stuff. Actually its hard to get away from them. Jane was writing an article on earmuffs for one of her jobs and she went around Bejing and Shanghai for a few days taking pictures of people with earmuffs on. In Shanghai she had to bribe people to wear them because everyone's too cool for school here. The rabbit earmuffs you see her wearing she got in Alaska, but unfortunately she left them in a cab. Anyway Beijing all ended up in debauchery with hookahs and pashes.

On the way out to the train station they caught a cab without a meter, when they got there the driver upped the price they had agreed on to rip them off. They argued and finally agreed on 80RMB. They gave the driver a 100 to get 20 RMB change, but he wouldn't give them the change. he stood next to the car, lit up a cigarette and laughed at them, especially Jane who was trying to communicate her frustration in Chinese. So Jane took a different tack - she took the keys from the cab and waved them around in front of the driver. He knew he was trumped, so he laughed and gave them the 20RMB. I reckon Jane should have asked for 50.

Our new acting careers

The thing about being a westerner in Shanghai is you can get an acting job really easily. Jane has been doing the rounds with the casting agencies and has done a few TV commercial already. Her first job was for an exercise bike, and she had to say she lost 30 pounds in 4 weeks. They took before and after pictures. If you've ever seen my sister she's pretty skinny. She had to stick her stomach out for the before shot so it still wasn't good enough so they said they'd photo shop it. She did another ad for an exercise trampoline and she got some photos from that one so here they are (I have her reluctant permission to put these up!).


Anyway, stay tuned, Jane and I have a gig on New Year's Eve - she's playing Alice in Wonderland and I'm the Queen of Hearts at some advertising party. We're getting our costumes fitted this week.

Yunnan Day 5 - Dali to Lijiang

In the morning we wandered around Dali Old Town and did some shopping, then we went back to the hotel to wait for the minibus to pick us up to take us to the bus to Lijiang. Just before we were due to leave, a bunch of Oxfam Challenge cyclists from Australia arrived at the hotel. They were all very stoked, I think they had just finished the last cycling leg of their tour around Yunnan, during which they rode more than 400km. They had to each raise $5000 to go on the trip.

The bus ride to Lijiang was interesting, there was a gradual change in soil type and agriculture as we drove higher through the mountains. The train trip from Kunming to Dali had stayed at approximately the same altitude, but the bus went up and down over the mountains. The roads were quite narrow at times and there was not much distance between the wheels and great gulping rivines. However, the driver was actually very good, and seemed to know when it was a good time to do blind passes of slower vehicles (!!##).

We went to a Naxi restaurant for dinner. The Naxi are the local minority here. Fried cheese was again a specialty.

Yunnan Day 3 - Kunming to Dali by train

Thanks to my mum for all the photos here. I kind of relied on her photo taking this trip.

We took the 8.14am train from Kunming to Dali today. We took hard seats as soft seat was sold out when we bought the tickets a few days before. They were only 35RMB each ($6AUS) for a 5 hour ride, but the hotel charged us 20RMB each for the service fee! It was a fairly nice hotel which explains it, they have worked out that foreigners will pay this for the convenience, since its really not that much when converted back to home currency.

We did a few seat swaps once on the train, since we never seem to all be sitting in the same spot despite out seat numbers being consecutive. The 'stare at the foreigner' thing was going strong, its starting to get to me a bit. The last few months its hasn't bothered me too much, I've just ignored it, but the constant blank-faced staring, even when I do a blank-faced stare straight back, is getting a bit annoying. Not that everyone does this, just some people. Lots of people also smile and are very friendly (and offer to swap seats around with us!). We went through something like 120 tunnels during the five hour ride, no idea of the number of bridges. This train line was only opened in 1999 and you can see why. The sheer engineering effort must have been astronomical, and the amount of manpower used amazing. The snowy mountain scheme pales in comparison.

The train took us to Xiaguan, which is the Dali new city. We got a local bus to Dali old city, about 1/2 hour drive (for 1RMB each! I just can't get over it). We were surrounded by women as soon as we got off the bus, touting different hotels, so they could take us there for a commission. They were very annoyed when we got in a taxi without any of them.

We stayed in the MCA guesthouse, just outside the old city walls and about a 10 minute walk to the centre of town. A very nice guesthouse and very convenient to everything. We had dinner at the Bamboo Cafe, which served us local Bai food, we had fried Dali cheese, local Dali beer (or so we were told), chicken and pineapple, shredded beef and curry vegetables.

Walking through the main street of Dali makes you realize that this town has been reconstructed with tourism as its central objective. Dali used to be

Yunnan Day 4 - Dali

Had a fairly lazy morning, took our time getting ready and having breakfast, then set off around 11.30 to walk to Er hai lake, about 3-4 km from Dali Old City. It was a fantastic walk. Once we'd crossed the north south high way we were walking through fields of small plots growing all sorts of vegies and greens. There were people working in the fields, pooring some terrible smelling liquid onto the crops, which I'm sure makes them grow very well. All the work was being done by hand, there was not much in the way of tools or animals being used. We're not sure how they do their ploughing at that time of the year, but on the train from Kunming to Dali we saw some ploughing being done using water buffalo. We certainly haven't seen any tractors being used at all. There was a little village beside the lake called CuiCan, with small lane ways and not much traffic. The lanes were only wide enough for a small track and the buildings came right up to the edge of the road, no footpath. There were lots of bikes and motorbike being used, and one or two cylinder trucks, some with the engines exposed (Rob was giving us a lesson on how they work). We walked through the village to the lake, it was very misty and visibility was poor, it was a fairly drizzly day. No taxis, so we walked back.

In the evening we went to a Tibetan restaurant. My parents had some delicious lamb dishes and fried Dali cheese ( a local specialty). I capitulated and had a beef burger but it wasn't quite like the real thing - the patty was deep fried and a bit crusty. Tasted pretty good though.

Yunnan Day 1 - Shanghai to Kunming

Today, I set off with my parents on a new trip today to Yunnan Province, in the south west of China. Yunnan has a population of 42 million people, twice that of Australia. It has borders with Sichuan, Guizhou, and Guangxi Provinces, and also borders with Tibet, Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam. So the South east asian culture and environment can be seen a little here. It is 394,000 sq km, compared with Australia at 7,617,930 sq km. The lonely planet says "Yunnan is without doubt one of the most alluring destinations in China.... If you only get to one province in China, this might as well be it."

My parents are visiting for about a month so we set off to Yunnan for 9 days. Today we travelled to Kunming, Yunnan's capital, by plane (3 hours). We checked into a hotel and then spent the day wandering around the city. It's a fairly industrial city (pop 4 million) and pretty standard for a large Chinese city, I didn't find anything there too unusual. One thing worth mentioning is there there seem to be heaps of solar hot water systems on the roofs of many of the buildings. Whoever got the contract for that would have made a killing because they're everywhere. Easy to tell which way is south as they all face in the that direction.

My parents are still getting used to the culture so they were happy to wander the city. We had some lamb kebabs from a street stall - Muslim style, with chilli, and some other spices, maybe cumin and tumeric. Absolutely delicious, and haven't had any problems with street food so far (only with Western food...). We walked through a shopping mall, and you could have been anywhere in the world, all the same. We saw a shop where you can get laser eye surgery. Not sure how much it costs or what the success rate is....

We also wandered through some more grassroots markets. The picture of the meat stall is a common image all around China, I feel a little cautious about buying meat from these places because its just sitting out in the open for hours on end. This market also had live chickens and we all baulked a bit as we walked through since supposedly bird flu can be contracted from dust infected with bird faeces in these markets. The vegie and fruit stalls are also a common site and I have to say the fruit I have here on a regular basis (including from the local 'wet' market in Shanghai - ie meat, seafood, fruit and vegies) is much better than the fruit and vegies that I have in Australia or the US. Its much fresher and hasn't been hanging around half frozen in store rooms and trucks for a few weeks before you buy it (like it has been in Woolworths and Safeway).

We tried to get to a restaurant called '1910 Gare du Sud', recommended in the lonely planet, serving Yunnan specialities. However it was down some back alley, and the Chinese name for the restaurant sounds like South Train Station, so the taxi driver started taking us there until we realized the mistake, but we still couldn't find the place. We ended up going to another restaurant, Brothers Jiang, which serves across-the-bridge noodles, another Yunnan specialty. They bring you all these dishes of raw vegies and semi cooked meat (and raw eggs) and rice noodles. Then they bring you a steaming soup and you put everything in there to cook, and then eat it. It was interesting but I didn't find it very flavoursome. Apparently Brothers Jiang is a bit of a chain store so that might explain it.

Apart from that we managed to find a convenience store and stocked up on some Western type snacks which are always good to have handy.

Silk Road Day 3 - Jiayuguan and train to Dunhuang

We saw a few hours of scenery after we woke up on the train, before we arrived in Jiayuguan. As you can see its pretty bleak in Gansu. Dirt and power lines basically. It would be really hard to make a living here off the land. Also the dirt seems to have been dug up all over the place and then just left there. Next to the train line it makes sense because they used it to build the train line, but elsewhere its a bit weird. Actually a day or two later we went past a dug up looking field and our friends told us it was the local cemetary. There were no grave stones or markings at all, just mounds of dirt.


We arrived in Jiayuguan at about 11am, and first bought train tickets for later that day to go to Dunhuang. We met a nice chinese couple in the ticket office who spoke English and gave us some info on the train - supposed to take 3 hours to the Liuyuan station, then you get a car for 30 minutes to Dunhuang. It turned out to take a little longer than this.

Jiayuguan is sometimes known as the 'mouth of China'. Here they have the Jiayuguan Fort and the western most points of the Great Wall of China. This used to be the frontier of China, but it has since expanded.

We spent a while haggling with a taxi driver to take us to the Fort and to the Overhanging Wall and finally agreed on 60RMB, which was more than the Lonely Planets info - 50RMB. We had to do a 'walk away' to get 60. We went to the Overhanging Wall first (part of the great wall) and walked up to one of the sentry posts high up on a hill, which gave a stunning view of the surrounding Gobi desert. It was a pretty steep walk so we were fairly stuffed at the end of it. It was fairly touristy really, as you can see from the photos the wall has been rebuilt somewhat, it hasn't lasted this well. At the top in the dirt everyone has spelt out all sorts of messages with the stones, in every available spot. Most were in Chinese - names in lovehearts. Some were English and said 'peace' or similar. When you walk down you go a different way, so the whole thing is like a big tourist circuit. There were some big horse at the end that Jane posed on. I'm not sure what they were representing since the labels were in Chinese (story of my life at the moment). On the way down these Chinese guys wanted us to keep taking photos of them, and after about 5 photos we were friends and so took photos together. We said nihao and they said hello, and then we all said goodbye.

The driver then took us to the Fort. Check out this link for info on the Fort. We rode around here on a tandem bicycle which was quite fun. The most interesting part was the museum which showed a history of the great wall. The wall was actually made from all sorts of different materials including dirt, and wood, whatever they could find in the local area. Lots of interesting pictures but they were in Chinese, so not much good to us. We had a look around the fort and I took some random pictures but was a bit bored by this stage (gee Great Wall, etc, ho hum) and was talking to Jane about this weird Chinese film I saw on Star Chinese about this princess, daughter of an emperor, who was born with a condition that made her smell really bad all the time. All her suitors ran away or killed themselves rather than marry her. Then a poor peasant gardener cured it and they got married and lived happily ever after.

When we got out of teh Fort our taxi driver was gone, and we had to catch our train so we got another taxi driver to take us, felt kind of bad but really the drivers fault for taking a risk in doing other fares while he was waiting for us. We went to the train station and got onto the train. It turned out we had standing room only tickets because the train was booked out. We got on and found a spot to put our bags and stand but some of the locals made room for us to sit down which was really nice. Lots of people were bringing noodles on to the train that they had bought from stands on the platform so I decided to buy some before we left. I went to the door and the taxi driver happened to walk past! I started asking him where he went and he looked kind of sheepish. I gave him 50RMB since we paid for the other taxi to go to the train station and he abandoned us and he was quite upset about this since he wanted to stick to the original deal even though he didn't wait for us. But the guard slammed the door shut and we were on our way!

The guy at the ticket office told us the train was meant to take 3 hours but it ended up taking 6. When 4 hours had passed, I asked the guard what time we were going to arrive and she said 'ba dian' which means 8 oclock but I was so shocked I didn't understand until about ba dian when we still hadn't arrived. But we had fun on the train. We stopped at some station and I asked this guy we were sitting near where we were. He said 'bu zhidao' so I immediately looked in lonely planet to see where we were. But it wasn't in there, since 'bu zhidao' means 'don't know'. We stayed at bu zhidao for ages. Me and Jane bought some cold noodles with chicken and vinegar for 2RMB. This was expensive, a cheap snacky meal was 0.5 RMB (7c AUS). Then we were off again. We put our rubbish under the seat so we could throw it away later, and then the guard came along, picked it up and threw it out the window. That's what everyone seemed to do with their rubbish. We noticed some facilities near the train tracks that you could see on approach and then all of a sudden there were big mounds of dirt and forests (in the middle of the desert) between the train tracks and the facility. We had some long conversations with the passengers during which we established that we were from Australia and didn't really understand what they were saying. Then towards the end of the trip they became very insistent on communicating something to us. We thought they were asking us whether we liked the train music (which is usually Kenny G or similar) but no. We thought they wanted to listen to our ipod, but no. They wanted us to SING to the carriage. We firmly refused but they went ahead and got the whole carriage to stand around us at our end and then started clapping a beat for us. We had no idea what to sing. We had just been listening to Manic Monday by the Bangles on my ipod so we sang that. They loved it, even though we didn't know half the words. Then we sang I still call Australia home. Then they told us to sit down, which was a pity because I was getting into it by that stage.

We ran into the same chinese couple that we met in the Jiayuguan train station when we got off the train so we took a taxi to Dunhuang together. Dunhuang is 130km from the train station so it took a while. The couple were both nuclear chemists and the guy was posted out to some facility near Dunhuang. They commented on the stars and I noticed the clear sky, like Australia at night, no smog.