Monday, May 25, 2009

Don't Tell My Mom

Please don't tell my mom; it's not the type of thing she's want to hear. My dad maybe could handle it, but mother's don't like to know these things. Yes, I did it because it seemed fun, and No I didn't get hurt, so there shouldn't be any problem. No harm, no foul, right? Still, don't tell my mom that we skipped out on our bus ticket from Hue to Hoi An and hired motorbikes to drive us 100 miles down the coast.

Our drivers, Nho and Ty (Easyrider), were just supposed to drive us around the old tombs and city of Hue during our 5 hour bus layover. We were just supposed to get back on the bus and ride to Hoi An that afternoon, but the more we rode, the more fun we had, the more they talked up riding down on the bikes and after a while it seemed like a darn fun idea. So we did.

Of course riding a motorbike through the windey highways of Vietnam, past the rice paddies and mountinous jungle isn't the safest way to travel, but there just isn't a better way to see the country. They took us to a mountain waterfall with a swiming hole below to relax at. They took us over the seaside mountain pass outfitted with a US bunker from the war, as the green hills which looked on raced to the blue Pacific below. They took us along the miles and miles of beach, past the resorts, restaurants and men lounging on plastic chairs. They took us off the tour bus and into the real Vietnam, bringing us local snacks (gelatinous rice steamed in bannana leaf with shrimp) and local restaurants. It you ever come to Vietnam, please hire a motorbike.

But please, don't tell my mom. These kinds of things tend to worry mothers, so please don't tell mine.

Friday, May 22, 2009

Life on the Road

I'd like to say I'm jet-setting around Asia, but that's not quite true. I'm more of 'slow bussing around Asia.' It's been a busy week, traveling from the foothills of the Himilayas to the Gulf of Tonkin and the Pacific Ocean. Adrienne and I are adjusting to life on the road still, with each day presenting new challanges and new adventures.

Leaving China left me with the problems of traveling in a unique country [Vietnam] without the requisite bag of tricks I'd developed in China. Adrienne has told me I need to smile and say, 'no thank you', to street people, instead of just ignoring them like in China. Also, I've found the Vietnamese slightly less punctual as the Chinese. Plus there are more scams.... much more.

Talking to people makes you wonder why you'd come to a country where almost everyone has their own scam story on either a bus, travel agent, taxi or xe om (motorcycle taxi). The scams are all the same, from extortion to overpricing, to bait-and-switch to outright theft. I sit on edge waiting for my crack at this seedy underside of Vietnam, suspecting everyone of harboring an inner swindler. Not the most enjoyable way to travel, but as time passes my feeling has been dissapating. Hopefully it won't be my lingering memory of this country.

Aside from that I've been taking a lot of busses. Overnight sleeper busses where instead of seats there are proper bunk-beds, like in a first class airplane but much more cramped (up to 40 bed on a bus!). The roads suffer more than the buses, as we traveled 7 hours from the tiny village of YuanYang to the Vietnamese boarder, travling the entire way benath the completed but unused highway - Vietnam hasn't built it's side at the boarder yet, so China forbids travel on it's half. In addition to the Chinese government's urban transportation policy, descending and climbing the hills near the Sino-Vietnamese border on the tiny windey roads can also be cause for nausea. Or at least it was for an old gradma 3 rows behind me, yacking into a bag as we climbed the hills to the village of YuanYang. I just put on my iPod and rubbed Tigerbalm under my nose to cover the sound and smell....

The decent from the mountains of Lijiang, through the rice village of YuanYang, the rainy hills of Sapa and down to the metropolitan hub of Hanoi has been a dizzying display of minority villages, fantastic panaramas and lots of rain. The best thing I've seen in the past week was Halong bay - an oceanic playground of hundreds limestone cliff islands shooting up from the green-blue water below. It's an experience to kayak through a small cave into a hidden lagoon surrounded by towering green cliffs on all sides.

I'm catching a bus down the coast in 10 minutes to Hue and Hoi An. Beach here I come!

Saturday, May 9, 2009

Chinese Sunscreen

We often use the word 'Chinese' to describe something with uniquely Chinese characteristics, which celebrates the heritage of the country, like 'Chinese Food' or 'Chinese Martial Arts'. However, sometimes the word is used to designate something of low quality, 'Chinese quality' for example (or just look at all the fuss the PRC kicked up over Guns and Roses latest album - 'Chinese Democracy'). We'll I am afraid I need to rail on 'Chinese Sunscreen'. The quality is low.

Adrienne and I arrived in the remote western tourist city of LiJiang this week, expecting to see timeless Chinese Streets (used in the first meaning), and breathtaking scenery. On our first full day we saddled up on some bicycles and headed out of town, being sure to slop on some sunscreen before we left. Adrienne and I both have a bottle of sunscreen, but Adrienne's is from the 'Cancer Prevention Center of Australia', mine is from China. Choosing to rub the Australian stuff on our faces and necks, we set out on a very sunny bike ride to a small, rather decidedly uninteresting and unworthy-of-the-hype town nearby. As we paused for lunch we realized how red our arms were becoming and pulled out my Chinese sunscreen to remedy the problem before the burn was absolute.

The sunscreen did nothing. It might as well have been water. In no way, shape, or form did it prevent a single UV ray from our sun from reaching our skin; in short if we'd have been from KFC we'd have been served extra crispy. Thanks Chinese Sunscreen.

Not to fear, we made the best of it, setting off on a 2 day hike of Tiger Leaping Gorge the next morning, burned as can be, but happy to be traveling. The hike was strenuous at times (900m elevation gain), but to see the 5500m tall mountains sweep down nearly 4000m to the bottom of the gorge was unforgettable. To put it in perspective, the distance from the bottom of the valley to the top is almost as great as the distance from sea level to the tallest mountain in Europe. We might have been red from Chinese sunscreen, but I've no complaints about the Chinese mountains.

Tuesday, May 5, 2009

To the road...

As I write this I am less than 12 hours from getting on a plane out of Shanghai without knowing when or if I will return to this city. It's been a fascinating interesting experience, you might even call it life changing. The past two weeks have been understandably busy, scurrying around to ship off all my things and say goodbye to friends before I leave. This end, like most, is bittersweet; As excited as I am to travel, and as excited as I am to leave, departing a place where friends have been made and an enjoyable life lived always has a twinge of sadness. Because I've been busy I haven't been able to write everything I wanted to write in here the past few weeks, so I'm going to hit you with some quick hit paragraphs about Shanghai.

This city can be beautiful. Who knew?! At the City Urban Planning Museum they showed a map of the downtown and had all the parks and streets lined with trees and flowers highlighted in green, which stunningly displayed how much of this city has greenery if you care to see it. Now that the usual grey has abated for the past two weeks and the sky is blue, everything seems greener and more natural.

And Shanghai isn't taking this beautification lying down either, hoards or workers and public works projects are making this drab grey city more and more vibrant by the day. A block from my house an old decayed street was redone with more trees, more flowers and a new paint job that took the street from depressing to leisurely in a few weeks. Elsewhere in the city paint on the old grey block houses gives them a lighter presence, casting the mind back not to the communist era, but before that when Shanghai was really coming into its own. Perhaps in a few years the city will complete its transformation, which I no doubt will return to see.

The Shanghainese can learn, and learn fast. The World Expo is coming and Shanghai needs to be ready for it's big debut. As a result there have been posters, fliers, people with microphones urging pedestrians on the escalator to... Stand on the Right, Walk on the Left. You may recall I railed against the Chinese inability to grasp this concept, which I suspected at the time was because nobody had ever told them to. Turns out I was right, and all they needed was a massive government campaign to tell the people what to do and think, and compliance has been exceedingly swift! Westernization here they come!

Unfortunately the Expo brings other problems for the expats living in Shanghai. The government here has already unrolled a campaign of advertisements which will run nearly 24/7 on every available viewing screen proclaiming this upcoming expo as the seminal pinnacle of human creation for all of history. I'm not kidding, May 1 marked the '365 days until' point and the ads ratcheted up from boiling to straight vaporization. Thankfully I'm leaving and I'll never need to gaze into the happy eyes of the large 'toothpaste-looking' mascot ever again. The rest of the expats remaining behind in Shanghai will no doubt have reoccurring nightmares about this creature and will need psychiatric care... Good luck to you all.

On an unrelated topic, I've realized China does a pretty good job at recycling. I don't know how accurate my last statement is, but my personal experience in the past week while trying to throw out all the junk I didn't want left me realizing how much other people in Shanghai wanted my junk! Now, I've experienced the strange bottle recycling phenomenon before. Every city has recycling and every city has can and bottle people, but rarely are these can and bottle people seemingly homeowners with leisure time to play majong. Whenever I try to bring my empty bottles to the trash cove in my building complex, I make it halfway there before some old man comes running up to me to take the bottles from me, which wouldn't surprise me half as much if he hadn't been relaxing in our guarded compound playing majong with his buddies. I don't even know where the recycling place is near my house, but he does and I know how to find him, which is all that matters. Also, as I was Cleaning my room, I had loads to throw away, the useless junk I'd collected but had no intention of paying good money to send home, every trip I made to the dumpster full of bags had been seized by curious collectors before I returned with the next load 5 minutes later. Somewhere in Shanghai people are enjoying baggy sweaters, extra reading lamps and broken suitcases and I hope they enjoy them. Here's to you, Shanghai's secret recyelers!

Finally, as a last ditch 'Tourist in Shanghai' moment, I saw the Chinese Acrobats Show on Sunday night. Between the lady who balanced 20 water glasses on her chin before climbing a latter in high heels and the gentlemen who flipped off see-saws onto waiting chairs 30 feet above, I was most impressed by the one man who juggled a porcelain pot the size of a mid sized TV on his head. He would toss this massive pot in the air, catch it on his head, then tossed it from lip to lip on his head, all without dropping the thing which would have caused a massive headache, had it not crushed him completely. Nothing like a little good old fashioned tourist razzle dazzle.

And so, for the next 4+ months I expect nothing less than the usual tourist razzle dazzle. This isn't the end of the blog. Although I can't get Shanghaied in Shanghai anymore, I can still write about everything I see in South East Asia and beyond. I'll write soon.