China

On the flight London-Beijing we’ve met the editor in chief of Beijing office of the ‘Wirtschaftswoche’ and learned a lot about China. We had a totally wrong view of China, not a trace of socialism, they have pure capitalism and private property, the country is booming and will soon catch up with Hong Kong.

We found a hotel near the Forbidden City where alien people where allowed. One the map things looked so near but a block was in reality more than a kilometer, so we walked a lot. We’ve been to the Behai Park. It’s gigantic, but not a place to relax. Beijing is unbelievable large and everywhere they are building skyscrapers of astonishing bad quality. They have terrible traffic in Beijing: 2 lanes for bikes and 3 for cars. They are driving very slow and chaotic, but it works. Only a few street signs are in English and nobody speaks or wanted to speak a foreign language - especially in Beijing.

We visited the Forbidden City and had the pictures from the The last emporer in mind, but it was disappointing: big place - building - big place - building ... Nothing special, being a king wasn’t very funny. It seems that the cultural revolution not only destroyed the beautiful ancient things, it also let the feeling for something nice vanish. In restaurants or hotels you will vainly looking for some flowers on the table or pictures on the wall.

Credit cards are useless, in Beijing you couldn’t pay a flight with it in a tourist office. An ATM eat my master card, with many signatures I got it back. Money from the card was only in the city branch of the Bank of China available, but we had some problems there as well. With the third card we finally got some money.

We went by minivan to the wild wall (not restored but in a good shape) and were the only visitors there. Very impressive, how the wall with its towers wriggles over the ridge. It was quite steep and very exhaustive to climb at a temperature of 34C. You can enjoy the nature and quietness there, it's not compareable to the touristy Great Wall in Badaling.

We took the a flight to Kunming - only a few wooden houses has remained, but for how long? Economically Kunming is much more developed than Beijing (many ATM and English signs). We bought a normal bus ticket to go to the stone forest, but ended up in a coffee/shopping trip, but the others were as well astonished as we were. A coupel from Hong Kong explained us the changes to their civil rights after the Chines took over Hong Kong.

In Shilin are fantastic stone formations with narrow passages, but thousands of Chinese tourists in travel groups. Finally found a way to get out of the milling crowd and enjoyed the landscape. The vegetation is alpine, only the rocks are looking completely different and so bizare.

Sometimes eating could be adventurous, when there is no menu card - the result could only be stopped with lots of Immodium, followed by stomach cramps. Fortunately we decided to took the plane to Dali, sitting 8 hours in a bus would not have been the best idea in this situation.

Dali (2000m) near the Erhai Lake was the first clearly arranged town without tower blocks, but there as well many travel groups. Inhabited by a minority you see the difference not only in the buildings and clothes, but also that it is more tasteful.

We took a chairlift on the mountain and got into a terible thunderstorm for 3h. We met two American and some locals invited us to their huts during to dry our clothes. Together we took the lift down because it was to slippery to walk.

We made a bike tour to the lake. Too hot and no possibility for a picnic, because the lake seamless pass into rice fields. You can hear smacking noise from fish eating the rice.

We also visited the Monday market in Shaping. Looks like one in South America, only the hats are different. Very funny is the transportation of chickens (tied up under the arm) and the dentists (every can watch and from a sortiment of old teeths you can choose the one you like).

By bus we went onwards to Lijiang (near the Tibetan boarder). Chinese are spitting everywhere, even in buses or planes.

One part of the city is full of traditional wooden houses, we stayed in one with a nice courtyard. There we met the Americans again. We had to canceled our trip into the mountains because of bad weather. Only on the day we departured we saw the fanastic scenery of the Himalaya mountains.

We flew from Lijiang to Kunming and onwards to Guilin. On the next day we headed directly to Yangshuo (to many touts in Guilin). We drove through the beautiful karst-mountain landscape and rice fields. We've been 8 days in Yangshuo. For the first time after 2 weeks relaxation was possible. We spend a lot of time with biking (we had a chain broke in the middle of nowhere, but some kind pheasants repaired it) and on the river Li with a kayak (very exhausting) or on a boat with the bikes. Met again the Americans and a German Tai-Chi-Master, who has won some gold medals at a Chinese championship the week before.

Took the bus to Wuzhou and had to give back our ferry tickets for HK, because the machine broke down. We changed our plans and took the bus to Shenzhen and crossed the boarder to HK by foot. The destruction from the last typhoon on the way into town was still visible. We saw some signs ‘Typhoon signal no. 3 is hoisted’, but were not sure about the meaning. Later on the boat to Lama Island somebody told us, that no. 8 is normal for a typhoon and that they will stop bus and boat transfers. Next morning on TV we saw a 8 in every program, it was very windy and raining, but not so dramatic as we thought.

Most of the remaining time we spent on Lama, shopping isn’t very cheap for us in HK because of the bad Euro. Being for the second time in HK, it seems so familiar and not so exiting as the first visit 3 years ago. For us there was no difference.