Rach's Adventures in China

Here I am, back in London! My travels in China feel like a dream now.. It's hard to believe it actually happened!!

Right.. so I think I left off the blog at the Internet cafe in Jiujiang - that feels like ages ago! After leaving, we bought some Jasmine tea from a teahouse across the street and then hopped in a taxi to go home. The taxis in Jiujiang are unlike taxis I've seen anywhere else in the world - they were basically just tin boxes painted bright yellow and stuck on wheels! I got in the back and Liz hopped in the front. I can't repeat her words on the way home...there was a lot of cursing and swearing. Liz admits to being a bad backseat driver at the best of times but this guy's driving left a ridiculous amount to be desired. Apparently, the double yellow line in the middle of the road meant nothing to him - we spent most of the journey on the other side of the road passing cars - narrowly dodging the traffic coming towards us. I feel I should also mention that there are no seatbelts in these cabs..

So...the next day we got up really early to get ourselves prepared for our day at the adventure camp. The English-speaking Chinese girl knocked on our door at around 7:55 AM to see if we were ready and we followed her downstairs. Waiting for us, outside the hotel, was a beat-up Suzuki mini-bus thing. We climbed in, thinking that we'd probably be the only ones going, but low and behold, a Chinese man, his wife, and who I presume was there son all climb in the backseat behind us, and another girl gets in the front. The driver starts up the engine and we potter off on our way - we have no idea what to expect. We feared for our lives as the driver veered in and out of traffic, although I guess she was an amazing driver compared with the taxi the night before. We drove through some random villages and dropped and picked up people here and there - it was all very random and made no sense, since this was supposed to be a mini-bus going just to the mountain resort. We picked up a girl who was shocked by the two Western girls in the car but who fortunately spoke a bit of broken English - we had what had become a regular conversation of English/Chinese. She helped the woman in the back say 'Welcome to Jiujiang' - she was very pleased with herself and started chanting this! She started talking to me in Chinese, asking where I was from etc, and I was pretty chuffed that I understood and was able to reply. But, like every conversation in Chinese, it reached a point where I could no longer understand and that was the end of it.

We arrived at the mountain in one piece and climbed the steps to the entrance, walking past a sign which welcomed us to Stone Gate Ravine - also called Sho Men Gorge. We were left to our own devices from here on in and we entered the park (crossing a dodgy bridge) with open minds. I thought from the brochure that it was going to be like an adventure park - like one of those military places where you have assault courses. It turned out to just be a mountain trail and we climbed the mountain for hours - I'd say about 3 or 4 hours - in the pouring rain. We passed a random temple where the guy inside tried to get us to pray with him - we declined, since we're not Buddhist and had been advised by our Chinese students back in Beijing that it was rude to partake in religious activities if you're not of that sect. A random Chinese man stopped us on our way and started going off on one in Chinese - we didn't understand a word of what he was saying. It was a bit awkward - we couldn't understand so there was no point in staying there talking to him, yet he kept talking. I think he was trying to tell us something about the mountain or the best way to climb it...I'm sure whatever he was saying was helpful, but we couldn't get a word of it. Next we passed a random cave full of Chinese people! They had a fire going and everything. They were there to carry people up the mountain for a fee - which we saw them doing later. Lazy people, paying people to carry them up!! The steps on the mountain were rocky and treacherous so I have no idea how they did it without falling down or getting hurt.

We eventually reached the top - wahey! It wasn't actually the top of the mountain but it was as high as we were allowed to go on the trail. I believe it was Mount Lu Shan...but we'll never be sure. We were cold and soaking wet and decided to head back down to the beginning. The English-speaking girl back at the travel agents had told us we could leave whenever we wanted.......this turned out to not be the case. We found the woman who had driven us and she ushered us into a little shack out of the rain where we were sat on a couple of stools, while she returned to her game of Mah Jong with her friends. We were pretty much ignored for the next hour - apart from them asking us if we wanted to eat, to which we politely replied no. Liz and I were both shivering - while it was good to be out of the rain, sitting there in our wet clothes was not the best thing for us and we both felt awful. There were a few animals around - a dog, a puppy, a cat and a kitten. The kitten was grossly underfed and kept mewing for food, it was so sad. Liz and I ate some biscuits, dropping crumbs on the floor for the kitten. We were devastated when the woman who owned the shack kicked the kitten across the room on a few occasions - the poor little thing went flying, it broke my heart. Eventually food was brought out and we were once again offered some - this time we felt it was rude to decline and we also thought it might help to warm us up so we tucked in. I have no idea what we ate..... The rice was really nice. The rest of it? I don't know what was in those dishes but I am suspicious that it was cat or dog, and Liz suspected one of them was a small bird. We were made to pay at the end of it, 10Y each, which was a bit steep for a meal we didn't even want!! Fortunately, the end of the meal meant we were allowed to go home and we piled back into the mini-bus - the other people who had joined us for the ride there appeared out of nowhere and came along home with us, being dropped off in random places along the way. Back at the hotel, we jumped in the shower and then went to bed for a few hours, getting up only to go to the local shop to get some food for dinner. We were exhausted!

The next day, we got up early and packed our bags up. We discovered an Internet cafe in our hotel so we went up there to look at hostels for our next destination, Hong Kong. Looking through the options on Hostelworld, we discovered that the majority seemed to be located either in Chungking Mansion or Mirador Mansion, both on Nathan Road. That in itself made me a little bit nervous, and then reading the reviews for the hostel, my suspicions grew. Most of them were from people in England, Australia or Canada but the English was not what you'd expect from native English speakers - they all sounded like foreigners, and the reviews seemed a bit too good to be true. But, since we were running out of time, we agree to book the first night in one of them so that we would at least have somewhere to stay upon our arrival and then we could always extend it when we got there.

We got back to our room at 11:55 am, ready for checkout at 12. Our bags were gone!!!!! We freaked out a little bit. All I had on me was my purse - no passport or anything!! We rushed downstairs and ran into the travel agents - apparently they'd taken it upon themselves to move our stuff out for us since it was getting so close to checkout time. Another example of the overwhelming kindness of Chinese people....but on this occasion, we were a little bit freaked out since all of our valuables had been taken!!! We checked our bags and luckily everything was still there.. My backpack had been left open from when I'd taken my purse out and my passport and camera were pretty much hanging out...I'm just grateful they were all still there!!

The travel agent directed us to the bus for Nanchang and we boarded it - once again getting a lot of funny looks. The buses vary so much over there - there's no companies or anything, it's just random people who own coaches and drive these random journeys for a living. From what I can gather anyway!! We got back to Nanchang and went to the same cafe that had entertained us the day we got there. Most of the family weren't there but one woman recognised us and brought us in. Everyone in there had a good chuckle as we ordered our food and drinks in Chinese. I think our pronunciation is fine (otherwise they wouldn't have understood us), they just find it funny to hear us speaking their language.

We headed to the waiting lounge for our train and it was absolutely packed, we sat down on our bags and waited in the steaming hot room under the watchful eyes of hundreds of locals. We nearly had our tickets nicked and other people tried to sell us better tickets than what we had. About 5 minutes before we were due to depart, they finally let us through to the platform. What a mad scramble!!!!!!!! We barely made it on to the train. Our tickets for this journey were hardseats....that's all they had available when we booked it. After experiencing the luxury of the soft sleeper and hard sleepers, we were certainly not prepared for what we were about to face. I cannot believe I complained about the hard sleeper!!

I struggled to get to my seat - I got knocked over twice by a man who get pushing his way through the aisles. THey oversell the hardseat carriages so there are loads of people standing, who will often try to steal other people's seats. By the time we managed to get to our seats, all of the overhead storage was full so we managed to get one of our packs under our seat and then had to sit on the other one in an obscure balancing act. We went on like that for about an hour and then asked the people across from us if we could put it under their seat - there was no way we could have carried on for a 14 hour train journey like that! The stares were quite horrendous - it was nonstop. I know most people will think that we should have been used to it by now - and we were - but in our condition of complete exhaustion come the evening, it was more than tiresome. We played games (like Hangman) to make the time pass and even made lists of 100 things we want to do before we die. I got to around 73, I think. We were both so tired and by about 12 am (about 6 hours into our train journey) we were both feeling delusional and dreaming back to the days of the hard sleeper. The seats on this train were HARD and very uncomfortable. My butt fell asleep within 10 minutes of being on it and didn't wake up until about an hour after we'd got off the next day!! Anyway.. we both managed to sleep a little bit - although it was more like drifting in and out of consciousness!!

We were ridiculously grateful to arrive in Shenzhen the next morning. We had debated spending a night there but Liz's guide gave a very unappealing view of it, with very high levels of crime, so we gave it a miss and headed straight for customs to leave China and enter Hong Kong.. I'll leave the rest of this story to be told another day as it's late here in London and I need to go to bed!

Phew....where do I begin.

It's 7:30 PM and I'm sitting in an Internet cafe in a town called Jiujiang, which is north of Nanchang and on the Yangtze (sp?) river. I'm sure you're wondering how I ended up here.. (so am I, to be honest!)

We asked in our hostel in Shanghai if we could get the train to Hong Kong from Nanchang. You can't book train tickets from another city in this country - you have to actually be IN the city. It's ridiculous. So we planned to arrive in Nanchang today, book tickets to HK for Thursday night, and then have a few days to mess around in the countryside before heading down there. The woman at the hostel booked our tickets to Nanchang and reassured us that we could get the train to HK from there.

So we embark on our 11 hour train journey from Shanghai - this time we had a hard sleeper instead of a soft sleeper and it was far less luxurious!!! The train was completely open and there was 3 layers of beds. Luckily we boarded early and managed to get two of the low bunks so we wouldn't have to climb up to the top bunks!! The Chinese people found it quite hilarious that there were two Western girls on our train and basically stared at us for most of the journey. One girl tried to talk to us and would repeat everything we said back to the rest of the train in Chinese and they would have a good laugh. We're getting kind of use to this treatment by now!!

I managed toge to get a bit of sleep on the train and it went by a lot faster than I had anticipated. The train had been stopping a lot and we had no idea where we were so we didn't get off the train until one of the guards came and told us that this was our stop!

It was pissing it down with rain when we left the station in Nanchang. It was 6 am and the ticket office was closed so we got bundled into a little cafe opposite the station. Well, I say cafe, of course it's not really a cafe!! We asked for coffee (kafei) but they didn't sell it so we settled for Xuebi (Sprite) but decided to give the local delicacies which were on offer a miss. It was a family-run place and they all sat down with us at our table and had a long conversation with us, during which they offered to let us stay at their house. It's kind of funny here - a lot of people think that if we don't understand them when they speak Chinese to us, that we will understand if they write what they're saying down in Chinese characters. A lot of the people we've met don't know pinyin so it's been a bit of a struggle on all sides at times!!

Anyway.. we spent about an hour trying to figure out where to get tickets from and then about an hour queuing up for tickets. We find out that the train doesn't go to HK from Nanchang and so we have to go to Shenzhen instead. We got a bit flustered and ended up booking tickets for tonight - I had to go back and re-queue to change them for Wednesday instead. We felt a bit better after booking our tickets for the train - at least we'll be headed in the right direction. We were soaking wet and freezing cold and didn't really know what to do with ourselves so we tried to book into a hotel for the night, but the prices were extortionate (well, comparitively!!). As tempting as it was to whip out the Mastercard, we braved the rain again and walked around trying to find a bus that would take us to a town which was on the map in Liz's Lonely Planet guide called Jiujiang. There wasn't any info about the town but we decided to give it a go. We found a bus which was filled with local men who shouted 'Yin guo ren?!?' (English?!?) when we got on the bus - they all found it really funny. The bus took about 2 hours or so and when we arrived we faced the same problems as everywhere...language barriers and no idea what we're doing!! We thought about continuing on to another town called Lushan but we couldn't find a bus. The buses here make as much sense as the trains - there's just random coaches scattered around and you have to go and ask each one if they're going where you want to go!! Luckily a woman snatched us out of the street and took us to a travel agency where a girl spoke some English and she helped us get sorted out. Lushan sounded very expensive (and after another look at Liz's Lonely Planet, perhaps not a place we would like to stay overnight) so we asked them about other options. After about half an hour, we had agreed a price for 2 nights at the hotel next door as well as a day trip to an adventure camp place at a lake tomorrow. No idea what we're letting ourselves in for but it looks quite fun.

We had a good nap at the hotel - it was sooo nice to just have somewhere to kip and have a shower - we were feeling pretty miserable by this point!! We got a taxi into town around 5:30 and I picked up some trainers for about 4 or 5 pounds for the adventure place tomorrow. We couldn't find anywhere to eat for ages but eventually sidled down an alleyway and found a place that the locals seemed to eat in - basically you picked your own meats and veg and they cooked it all up for you. It's a bit stranger than it sounds though - luckily a woman took us under her wing and helped us with it all. The food was ridiculously spicy but really nice. It hit the spot - we hadn't really eaten a meal for a couple of days so it was nice to have some real food.

That brings us up to now - I'm just sat in an Internet cafe, about to head back to the hotel for an early night. We're leaving at 8 am tomorrow morning for this crazy adventure place. Should be interesting.

Hmmm what else... Shanghai was really different to Beijing. I'm trying to think what we did there!! My memory's a bit of a blur. On our first day, we just walked around the Putuo district (where we were staying) for a few hours and then came back for a bit of a rest. In the evening, we headed out into town and went up the Oriental Pearl tower which was amazing. We went right to the very top and the views were incredible, I've got loads of amazing pictures. It started to get a bit late so we headed back towards the hostel in search of some quick food. We ended up at the 'Be Good for You Teahouse' across the road which was very busy - seems like the place for the local people of about my age to hang out and play cards and have ice cream floats and stuff!! It was cute. On our way there, both Liz and I nearly got mugged by two different people. Obviously the area we were staying in wasn't that nice - we haven't had any problems anywhere else in China so far.

This is going to have to be a quick summary because our time is running out in the internet cafe.. The next day, Emily (from summer school) arrived at our hostel and we headed out in Shanghai with her. We walked around the Bund area as well as the shopping areas on Nanjing Street. Emily got a call from Sarah (another girl from summer school) who was meant to be flying from Shanghai but had missed her flight - we made plans to meet her somewhere. In the evening, we went to the Old Town where we got some very strange looks and I got yelled at for taken pictures of some of the locals - they weren't very pleased. Emily and I tried some street food - tentacles on a stick!! Next we got a taxi to Yuyuan street in search of a steamed bun restaurant but instead ended up on a seafood place where all they serve is crab and crayfish....it was amazing!!!! They bring you bowls of them and you have to crack the shells and pick ou the meat yourself. They even give you plastic gloves and aprons! It was really funny. After that, we wandered down a bit further and found a nice outdoor restaurant where we graized on some pork buns and rice jellies over some oolong tea. It was really nice there but there were quite a few Westerners as it was in the hotel district. We said goodbye to Emily and Sarah that night before bed as they were heading off the next morning.

On Sunday, we got up early and went to the Jade Buddha temple which was overrun with tourists. We'd read that it was one of few Buddhist monasteries in Shanghai that was still practicing. It was still practicing but unfortunately the tourism had kinda killed it. We got invited into a posh shop upstairs which we noticed they only invited Westerners too - they tried to sell us loads of memorabilia and sculptures which had been blessed - they all costs thousands or tens of thousands of yuan!! Yeah right!!

We found our way to the tube station and headed back east. We managed to find Yuyuan gardens using our mapreading skills which turned out to be a really cute shopping area. We spent quite a while there and sampled some more local foods, like some strange fish balls and baby octupus. It was getting late and we rushed back to the hotel to get ready to head off to Shanghai South railway station in search of our next adventure!!

Right..time to go. can't imagine I'll be on the net again before Hong Kong! Bye everyone!