One Last Fling in China – Guangzhou

Guangzhou is 90 degrees today. 90 degrees. We can take it though, we have to start gearing up for Southeast Asia!

We got an amazing apartment with this view of Guangzhou! We also ordered some interesting lunch… Sorry we didn’t take a photo, but the translation below led our landlord to think we ordered pig intenstine. It was deep fried and smothered in sweet and sour sauce, so that made it delicious! Afterwards, Christina needed a chocolate chip cookie to curb the intestine taste… Couldn’t believe we found a shop that sold chocolate cookies in China!

Guangzhou is our last China city! We kicked it off with a sweet trip to Chen Clan Palace… Imperial digs where the emperor would stsy when passing through Guangzhou, the Lingnan architecture was fabulous, so intricate. We loved the wood and ivory carvings inside but this exterior architecture was awing.

The shrubbery was also beautiful in here, with copious trimmed bonsai!

After we headed to Six Banyan temple, a gorgeous Buddhist temple with wood medium, the iron and white color was pretty and different from what we had seen before. We did our research on temples before we went in and since there were monks around we tried to be mindful and careful. Christina even stepped to the side and walked far by them when we walked past them because if they even feel a woman’s hand touch them they have to cleanse and fast because of the encounter!

Some lunch was in order! We stopped by a street cart with some delicious water spinach, jalapeño teriyaki beef, green beans and pork!

Heading to a garden called Liyan garden we saw really cool lotus flowers in the water and lanterns in the trees. We also found a toilet… in pretty good condition as touted!

Day 2 started with dim sum! We ordered some sort of bird (probably pigeon) meatballs, sesame seed buns with date paste, fish rolls which tasted like pizza rolls, teriyaki glass noodles, bamboo wrapped rice and pork balls. We were stuffed, deliciously!

We went to another beautiful temple that was open to the public, so many more people were there. Seeing tall Buddha statues inside was humbling, a few girls taught us how to throw coins for good fortune into the mini pagoda, and joss sticks were being lit and smoked everywhere, it was a truly beautiful place.

We visited the 5 rams statue in the middle of the city which is the symbol of Guangzhou, whimsical and adorable… We have also been asked to post what the toilets look like, here is a pretty decent one so here you go folks, a basic squat toilet.

Ending the day with a wonderful visit to the Shamian island… An island that was basically colonized by 9 different countries for 100 years, we saw a a lot of English influenced architecture and saw convenience stores named Jenny’s place, Susie’s place, Sharon’s place and Sally’s place.

Day 2 started with dim sum! We ordered some sort of wild meatballs, sesame seed buns with date paste, fish rolls which tasted like pizza rolls, teriyaki glass noodles, bamboo wrapped rice and pork balls. We were stuffed, deliciously!

It ended with a scrumptious supper at a Muslim restaurant serving homemade noodles with beef, leeks, green beans, red and green peppers, fish fried rice, and beef and caramelized onions! We visited twice because the noodles went right from being made into the boiler, delicious! We definitely ate our way through Guangzhou, including a trip to Hooleys pub for a little bit of Guinness nostalgia.

We loved China, the people were amazing and remarkable, we met so many kind and friendly individuals even though we didn’t speak the language.

We absolutely can’t wait to meet more awesome people in our next Asia destination… Nepal! Stay tuned!

Yangtze River Cruise – Day 4 – Three Gorges Dam

It was our last day on the Yangtze River, albeit not being able to speak any Mandarin, we made some great friends. Our roommates were sweet and parent like, offering us food, saving seats for us on trips, and always offering a giggle and smile.

3 goofballs who only spoke Mandarin also befriended us right away and tried really hard to teach us Mandarin. They were always smiling, waving, and excited to see us.

We even used our Italian to make friends with Antonio from Parma and actually were able to have a decent 10 minute conversation with him, that Italian Emphasis Minor in college paid off!

Today was also the day we got to see the Three Gorges dam, the worlds largest power capacity dam, just completed this past year. The dam is 175 meters high, it prevents major flooding for villages along the Yangtze and provides hydroelectric power to much of China. This dam has been in the works for 100 years starting with its inception about 1919, so it is remarkable to see it come to fruition and completed right in front of us.

This photo of a rock inscribed with mandarin says “the great three gorges dam’… concise and true!

Our favorite photo was of us posed by a friend. We met a Chinese woman who spoke Chinese, Italian, and English. She was taking photos for us and said a really good one would be if we looked out into the distance without smiling… She was serious. We tried not to laugh…

We went from our boat, to a van, to get on a bus for 2 hours, to get on a city bus, to walk to our hostel… Another 5 method transport day to get to Yichang!

Off the train we scored a delicious breakfast burrito, chinese style, stuffed with potatoes, cabbage, green pepper, meat sauce and egg! We also found an awesome coffe shop called Hello Coffee to chill and read and got some fancy tea!

And found steambuns two times our height!

Rain didn’t stop us from seeing pagodas!

We travel to Guangzhou tomorrow by 16 hour train… A 30 degree heat increase in this town from our boat trip! It’s also our last city in China before we head to Nepal!

Yangtze River Cruise – Day 3 – The 3 Magnificent Gorges

The highlight or our four day aquatic adventure included drifting through Yangtze’s tall green gorges.

We started out the beautifully perfect and sunny morning on our regular cruise ship with a packed deck ready to look at the first gorge, the Qutang gorge.

We saw many sights such as houses built into the gorge homing goats, caves inside of the rock of the gorge, and huge freighters carrying sand for future concrete projects… the best part was the clear day and being able to view the large protruding gorges as we sat and drank tea on the deck listening to murmured mandarin from boat mates.

At noon we were able to board a smaller ship which was allowed to go through the three lesser gorges, a more beautiful and pristine route where only small boats could travel through. We loved seeing stalactites falling from the mountain, and if you look closely at one of the photos you will see an iron coffin hanging in one of the photos, a coffin from the 18th century! Villagers hung many individuals coffins from the cliffs, there are 13 total still remaining in that region.

This boat was definitely interesting as there was a woman, the tour guide, not only talking about what we were travelling through, but she would sell photo books or food from the gorge. What was interesting was after her speech people would run to the back to buy it, literally run… And wave their money and budge in front of others to get gorge grown corn in a bag… fascinating. Yesterday on our train a member of the train staff talked for 45 minutes about a book, and had people clapping, cheering and chatting, and then they ran back to buy the book. One woman was literally shrieking to buy it.  Tangent, but an interesting sight in China which happens a lot.

These lesser gorges were just GORGEous 🙂 many interesting mountain shapes, and the sunny day along with the ivy green water made them so interesting, nothing like we had ever seen before in Alaska or on our boat cruise in Greece. Christina spotted a monkey but wasn’t able to snap a photo in time! He was just running along one of the sides of gorges!

Because we don’t speak mandarin, this last boat came to us as a pleasant surprise.

An hour into the lesser gorges cruise we got on a tiny boat you could hardly stand in, mostly made of bamboo, you sat on wooden planks and donned a life jacket the whole time.

Our tour guide sang to us, there was a man across the river playing flute in a tiny thatched tent, and our tour guide tried to sell us heart shaped key chains with photos of the gorge. He also let certain individuals wear traditional boating garb, which was very entertaining.

This boat was fun and was just the kind of experience we hoped we would get on the trip!

Tomorrow is the worlds largest power dam!

Yangtze River Cruise – Day 2 – White Emperor City

Mesmerizing at dawn, the White Emperor City was a beautiful place to disembark on day 2 of our Yangtze River cruise.

Both having a head cold on one of the biggest days of travel on this cruise, we made the best of it by gearing up for an old city touring day!

The first thing we happened upon was a large temple at the foot of the city.

It was fun to climb and see the intricacies of architecture on the outside.

Josh loved the city wall against the Yangtze waters.

We loved walking the wall that divided the city and the river… It felt very medieval!

We we could probably stay here forever, walking along dreamy brick barricades, lingering around pagodas, and watch life and people float on around us… This place is simply magical.

Christina loved the stark white pagoda, especially against the mist, mountains, and sky.

We saw some great views of our boat, an oddly placed panda, and more pretty sights. The temple was quite beautiful against the gorges.

We ventured further into the city for some rice porridge (congee) and some steamed buns (Baoza). This time we were served spicy pink cabbage with our porridge, num! Still mastering those chopsticks! The breakfast place was buzzing and Josh and I, per usual, got many looks and smiles.

After full bellies we walked around the White Emperor modern city to see beautiful lanterns hanging from trees, the city gate, and we even saw hanging pasta waiting to dry for the first time! It’s going to be hard getting used to not eating fresh pasta when we get back to the States, we are spoiled here!

Back to the boat on our open viewing deck after walking around, the China flag greets you as we get ready to drift through the Great Three Gorges.

Yangtze River Cruise – Day 1 – Fengdu Ghost City

We are water people. We live next to Cook Inlet in Anchorage, love beaches, and a Malian fortune teller even told Christina she would marry someone who lived next to the water someday. All this love for the life aquatic led us to take a fun and adventurous 4 day Chinese domestic boat cruise down the Yangtze River, one of the longest rivers in China!

Ok, so when we say Chinese domestic boat cruise we mean there are no English speakers, really at all. We had one guy meet us for 3 minutes to give us updates on the day, but really most of the time we spoke in our 5-word mandarin vocabulary mostly consisting of greeyings and goodbyes. but this didn’t stop us from making nice friends and meeting good people!

The first night was spectacular, filled with cruise boats doing evening cruises in Chongqing. Everyone headed to the deck to check out the sites, which were great!

The next morning we docked at Fengdu, which is China’s only ghost city. It is said that many Daoist spirits come here to reside amongst fellow souls, and they have built quite a few interesting statues and temples as this town has become more touristy, one including a giant head which we actually couldn’t find any info on???

The great thing about this cruise is they wake you up at 5:50 am with a woman’s soft and pleasant Chinese voice (who needs alarms?) and soothing music, which also makes for great sunrise pics when you get off the boat! Here are just a few pics of sites in Fengdu. Again, the large headed statue alone was creepy enough to call this a ghost city!

As we took off we even saw a Daoist graveyard in the distance which was mystifying, haunting, and a scenic end to our morning in Fengdu.

We bought some VIP badges so we could enjoy free tea, nuts and sitting in the old fashioned parlor on the boat… It felt a little like titanic! Kind of… Without the sad violins and other awful bits! The VIP guy really enjoyed practicing English with us and topped us off with extra garlic soy nuts as payment 🙂

We saw interesting things like people selling dried first from a small boat, and we also saw beautiful big cities, some with gorgeous bridges, but some with awful smog as in the photos below… Smog is a constant issue in China, more than we knew. Bit the ancient beauties outweigh the new pollution… we loved a temple built right into the rock of an island as seen below!

The day was complete with a gorgeous sunset atop the boat with great photo ops and chinese women taking Bollywood like photos with scarfs, poses, and giggles. We are looking forward to day two off the boat which is filled with temples and pagodas!

Xian City

We have made it to Xian! The land of terracotta warriors and mountains! We had some freshly made noodles with shredded beef and leeks… It was so fun watching the noodle maker create fresh flour noodles as we ate! Josh is loving the large pizza like breadsticks they make in the Muslim quarter and he ate a whole deep fried squid the size of his head!! Christina tried chicken feet, but prefers the noodles! A few other things we found were delicious beef noodles, blue eggs, and a Walmart which is huge but sells the likes of dried fish, seaweed, and chinese products unlike our American Walmarts! We shamefully loaded up on Snickers bars as an Americsn delight and scooted out fast!

We biked the city wall which previously protected the city. Much more tall and wide then we thought and it took us an hour and a half to bike… our bums were a little sore! It was so cool because we were literally saw the whole city from above, we got a two man bike to get the full romantic effect, it rocked.

Ancient chunese music music played as we biked and the red lanterns and flags added that quintessential old orient ambience… Lovely!

we saw a lot of other foreigners on single bikes, most chinese tourists had the two man bikes like us, we lived that. We even saw a wedding photo shoot take place up top. Did you know that chinese women typically where a red, or even blue or pink dress as their wedding dress? Anything goes, I have seen a lot of pale blue, but also white wedding dresses are seen as more western influences sweep towards the east.

We are heading on a 5 day boat cruise down the Yangtze River so we will catch you with a new post on that next week!

Sacred Dao Mountain- Hua Shan

2100 meters up on the Hua Shan mountain sits a sacred Daoist Temple. Close your eyes and smell as insence burns in a large bronze tower from joss sticks in a Dao tribute, your ears delight as you can here Daoist bells ringing in prayer and the temple cafe quiets to listen as well. This is our experience as we ate fried rice after a  rigorous 5 hour mountain stair-climbing hike, worth every minute at the top!

Huangshang mountain (which we climbed two weeks ago) was not quite as impressive as this mountain, similarity named, Hua Shang. Multiple misty peaks were sights at the top of this mountain and we also were in love with the red ribbons people tied around trees as a Daoist gesture… The contrast of red and green was beautiful and contemplative at thinking of its meaning. The locks were clicked in love along the fences as couples professed their love or faith of Daoism.

Half way through the hike we climbed the ‘1000 foot canyon’ which was quite a feat in the hot sunny weather, people stopped to pant every few steps because of the steepness of this climb! We even saw somone who couldn’t keep down their lunch the hike was so intense!

A victory Snickers bar was in order at the top of this mountain which we sweated and shivered through (ok, maybe not quite that dramatic, but we were tired, cold, and hot at some point I the afternoon hours!)

We rode the cable car down which was awesome and scenic, sweet chinese teenagers giggled with us as our stomachs jumped during the 17 minute ride down the majestic mountain. We had a first class train ride home in reclining seats with China newspapers, pleasantries, and treats served to us…. Fancy!

Gorgeous day on a gorgeous mountain!

PANDAS!!!

We were pretty excited to see pandas in China! Did you know pandas are a living fossil and are 7 to 8 billion years old? Christina thought the giant panda was bigger than she saw in person, but was still impressed by its brown bear equivalent size!

10% of the pandas in the world are at this reserve (statistic made up by Christina by May be true). No really, if there are 200 pandas here (and there are only 2000 pandas left in the world) actually there only 1000 left in the world (according to Josh) then ya, sure.

Takisins were everywhere! They look like yaks and musk oxen had a beautiful yeti-like child. Josh had some great encounters face to face with them. They could not get enough of him, kinda like Christina in Asia. Guess who wrote that…. 😛

Pandas were treated so well here. Food was always present and it was adorable to see pandas feeding there faces in the metal bowls. They had them right up to their faces, grabbing them with their hands and licking the bowls clean.

Pandas!! Christina wanted to take one home, but I told her we could not, it would literally eat her face off.

We also saw peacocks doing a flavorful mating dance! We had never actually seen this before so it was beautiful to see all the feathers on the peacock peaked… So cool.

The pandas hanging out in the trees were so cute, sometimes you would just see their behinds hanging out one side and their ears on the other. They could fall asleep in any position!

We were impressed with this preserve. The only thing Christina was upset about was josh not wearing his famous Panda shirt to the preserve… The pandas were not impressed.

Many more photos below! Enjoy!

Terracotta Warriors!

Imagine 60,000 soldiers, each with specific facial features from men of your army, being created for your tomb to guard your body in the afterlife. Emperor Qin Shihuang did just that. After 40 years of about 20,000 workers toiling to create each of the emperor’s soldiers in real life size ceramic soldiers, these Terracotta Warriors were carefully buried with Qin Shihuang in his tomb.

So far about 8,000 of these warriors and 100 chariots have been unearthed.

We can understand how China calls this the 8th wonder of the world simply because of the time it is taking these archaeologists to piece together the Warriors. Because of tear down of warriors and fire by uprising peasants, almost all warriors were broken and millions of pieces must still be puzzled together to create these magnificent figures once again.

The pits were vast and overwhelming, it is so rare to actually be able to be inside of an excavation site as a common citizen (Christina studying art history in college knows this) so we are so lucky to be able to see it! Josh was especially pumped with his expertise in war and history to see these ceramic novelties. History before our eyes!

China Train Experience

The Best Part of our Train Ride, a Xian Sunrise.

If 22 hours on a train in the “hard seat” option doesn’t get our blood boiling for some Amazing China touristing, well, I don’t know what will.

The Beginning.

From Huangshan to Xian, we took one motorized bike taxi, two trains, and used our fascinating feet to finally walk the city wall to reach our hostel in Xian. On our ‘hard seat’ train tix (we couldn’t read the mandarin) we sat 5 to a cubby.

Throughout the ride we saw bellies, as well as hotdogs in a bag, chicken feet, and warm beer being sold. We were also giggling at the individuals smoking right next to the no smoking sign in our train car, every time we looked up someone was back there puffing. It was funny until hour 20 when we realized we were inhaling this for most of the ride, yikes. We also had numerous photos taken of us as we were the only westerners visibly seen on this 22 hour ‘adventure’.

I guess he was warm, our view for the ride.

Interestingly enough, Oreo makes a Green Tea Oreo in China, we tried them on our train trip thinking they were mint Oreos since we couldn’t decipher the Mandarin, much to our dismay they weren’t the greatest, or even ver good 😦

Green Tea Oreos.

The agonizing train ride was not our worst (we did 60 hours one way on a trip to Ghana in West Africa in 2006), so we could take the long and hard sit up seats there. The trip was well worth the wait as we arrived at a sweet hostel in Xian. We are excited for our excavation pit views of Terracotta Warriors, meandering around ancient tombs, and spying on pandas! Stay tuned for these fabulous sites from Xian!

The End.