The Adventures of MozandKate

Yes, for those of you who may be wondering why the blog hasn’t been updated in, owwww, a month and a half - we’re back in the UK. We snuck back under the radar at the end of July, a couple of weeks early, so that we could visit Kate’s friend Amy’s wedding.

Straight from the plane onto the National Express (woo hoo) up to Stoke, then a night in a charming pub with full English breakfast - slurp - the first one in over a year, then a train journey straight to the wedding place. It was lucky I’d picked up a bespoke suit in Chiang Mai and Kate had picked up a foxy little dress in Beijing. Never mind the fact that both had been stuffed in the bottom of our backpack and specifically remembered the salesman’s last words of “don’t worry, we have a special way of folding it so it doesn’t crease……”. At least we’d made it to the wedding.

So we’ve said hi to the family, visited a few friends (erm sorry Honch for not telling you we were backand you checking the blog every day for 2 weeks for an update) and are now settling in to work in sunny Suffolk. Yes that’s right, the little bit of England that pokes out on the right just north from London. It’s flat - very flat, so flat that the whole place will be under water in a few years and I certainly won’t be taking up my planned hobby of paragliding!

What’s it like being back? COLD! But that’s a good thing - as you may remember from a few of my earlier posts my body wasn’t quite built for the tropics, so it’s actually nice that the temperate gets below 30 degrees. Well apart from the fact it doesn’t seem to even get over 15. It’s been nice to see friends and family, but we’ve both still got a lot more to see.
Unfortunately, as is always the case, work is taking up most of our time - I mean we have to go into an office for at least 8 hours a day, but the reward is this stuff called money seems to appear at the end of the month and with it we can buy overpriced food and exchange it at places called “pubs” for watery liquid which makes us feel dizzy (Pubs, incidentally, now seem to smell of stale beer and sick).

Kate’s working on a “rounding off” post for the blog to let you all know what we thought of each place, but for now I thought I’d direct your attention to a little project we’ve been working on since we went away.
Some of you may remember we went with a volunteer company to Honduras a few years ago to help build some schools and a house for a community living atop a mountain in the middle of nowhere. Whilst we loved the actual project we found it hard when we realised almost 70% of the money we had paid hadn’t been donated to running the project, but was kept by the UK introducer company that we went through. Needless to say, me being a penny pincher, I was non-amused.
When we planned the trip away this time we also wanted to do some voluntary work, but this time we went about it differently finding the local company that runs the project in the country we wanted to go to and applying direct with them. Not only did we save a load of cash, but we knew that 100% of the money we were paying was going towards maintaining and running the project. The only problem was it was hard to find the local companies in the first place as they don’t have websites and we couldn’t find a list of them anywhere. On the back of this our new website idea was born - a single website where you can go, pop in what you want to do and where, and get back a list of every local company who’s there, what type of projects they offer, how many people go, how much it costs, how long it’s for, the accommodation they provide, damn even their inside leg measurement if you want it*. This is regardless of if they have an existing web presence or not.
The site is called Work Travel Volunteer which is about the best name we could come up with, and we’re also writing a few articles here and there to share our vast wealth of information about traveling (and hopefully from a few contributor’s too!). For those of you who care we’ve made it using a free content management system called Joomla - if anyone’s a Joomla wizard who can donate some of their time to making it look better than we can, please feel free to email us!.

*one of these may not be true

Took another overnight train into Beijing and awoke to 4 Chinese women staring at me sleeping. “Ni hao!”

Absolute nightmare getting from the train station to the hostel. London tubes at peak rush hour were a piece of cake compared to trying to get onto a no.9 bus into the city with two backpacks and a million Chinese elbows in your side. Successfully managed to get onto the fourth bus by standing on a few people.

Beijing is apparantly one of the most polluted cities on earth and useless fact no 152 - it’s like smoking 70 cigarettes a day each day you spend in Beijing. The smog is so bad, there is a constant haze over the city and you can see maybe 100m max.

Apart from that minor blip, Beijing is ace. Us plus Wayne and Naomi hired bikes for a day (still trying to get bloody Katie Melua’s “9 million bicycles in Beijing” song out of my head now) and cycled round - past Tiannemen Square, the Forbidden City, Beihei Park to the hutong area, which is the older part of Beijing, but just looked like more grey building to be honest (see - my lack of respect for historical China is evident again. Slap on wrists)

Met up with Dave and Jenny here too (travelled in Borneo with them Go T-Rex!) so had a brilliant few days catching up, drinking more Great Wall red wine (disgusting but necessry), eating street food and Peking duck and putting the world to rights.

All of us made the compulsory visit to the Forbidden City (spent a record 2 hours here - Lonely Planet recommends “a least a whole day”) Again the overwhelming numbers of tourists spoiled things plus quelle surprise, two of the biggest temples were being renovated (as was, disturbingly, Chairman Mao’s body. Getting ready for the Olympics I hear) Wayne and Naomi did well and stayed on longer, but us four headed off for more serious sightseeing - clothes shopping and arcade games.

We fared much better on our visit to the Great Wall. Our hostel had a tour to the “Secret Wall” which turned out to be an excellent choice. Three minibuses drove out to a section of unrestored wall where no-one else visited so we had an hour trek through beautiful hills to the wall, about two hours on the wall and an hour down to another spot for lunch. With no-one else there, so no elbow battling and some fantastic views over Chinese country framed by the rather great wall.

And no, you can’t see the wall from space. Think about it!

Caught our first Chinese train from Chengdu to Xian which was brilliant fun. We travelled by hard sleeper which sounds much worse than it is. You share a carriage with five others and you get a soft bed each. Plus it’s non-smoking/spitting/pushing/snotting/farting/horn blaring which was the best part. Had bottle of “Great Wall” red wine to celebrate.

In Xian we visited the Terracotta Warriors, which is kind of a must in China although to be fair this is really the only reason we went, rather than really wanting to go! Feeling rather jaded and a bit travel weary at the moment and sometimes it feels hard to become enthuastic about each different thing you see, which is going to sound really bad as I know after being back at home for a few weeks I’ll be desperate to be away again!

Anyway, some background to anyone not up to score with Chinese history (shame on you!) The warriors were accidentally found in 1974 by some peasants who were digging a well so they are a really recent, and one of the most important archeological discoveries in the world. Qin Shi Huang ordered them to be made to protect his tomb when he passed away (about 200BC - sorry my lack of Chinese history knowledge means I don’t actually know which dynasty this was) so they are about 2000 years old. About 6000 soldiers have been uncovered so far but there are more underground. Each soldier is different - hair, clothes, footprints, faces.

The reason I felt a bit underwhelmed by it all was a) the amount of tourists there b) they had all been restored so perfectly that they looked new and c) you couldn’t see them up close with the exception of about 5 which were enclosed behind glass. But it was worth the visit for the historical value plus I got in half price using my driver’s license as a pretend student card heh heh

So I suppose you’ve probably noticed after a few entires with masses of pictures the last 4 or 5 haven’t had any - well that’s kind of a mixture between the great firewall of china blocking access to Flickr where we have our photos, and a lack of time on our behalf. I mean we’ve been in Tibet where the men wear hats, knives, Yak skin and ride motorbikes - they certainly look at us funny when we ask about where the Internet Cafe’s are and if they have a dial-up or DSL connection (note: DSL! Woo, I wonder if it’s Yak-DSL branded. Also note: don’t ask for a cappuccino or mocha with ice).

 Anyway we hope to have full image service resumed shortly once we’ve got the time to go back through the images, rename them all and pop them over into the blog.

In the meantime go and have a wander through our Flickr photos whilst we’re sorting them out.

Well the post about censorship here in China certainly raised a few eyebrows and we’ve also been linked to by Hesitating who have an article on protesting and censorhip in China.

Our blog’s not currently banned, and I’ve noticed that now some, but not all, of our pictures also show up without going through a proxy - I wonder if there’s someone employed by the government to go through all the pictures people try to access on Flickr from China and yay/nay them?

Arriving in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan was a bit of a shock to the system after being in the vast hills and fresh air of the Tibetanesque countryside. Smog, spitting, blaring horns, motorbikes, neon adverts crammed their way into our senses. Chengdu is also much much bigger than we had anticipated so we had to navigate our way around by public transport which was fun. Every journey costs 1 yuan (about 6p) and armed with a map its quite easy to know where you’re going. On our first ride, we had a conversation in Mandarin (get us!) with a young guy and he wrote us a “Welcome to Chengdu. Have a nice trip” in Mandarin on a card. Can’t wait to see if Londoners will also give the same treatment to foreigners. Err, maybe not…

Started on the shopping spree before we get home as we know we’ll be penniless once we return and ended up purchasing over 80 DVDs. Not quite sure how we’ll get them back but hey ho. All DVDs were purchased in a rather dodgy room on the 4th floor of an office block - don’t ask but the quality seems pretty good anyhow!

Our food in Chengdu consisted of a very Chinese McDonalds (actually filled to capacity with trendy young things), Sichuan hotpot with Wayne and Naomi and ”mapo doufu” which is spicy tofu that blows the roof of your mouth off. We’ve heard rural dentists also use the spice as an anaesthetic. I kid you not.

The main attraction in Chengdu is visiting the Giant Pandas (if you can see them over the crowds of Chinese tourists) and they were pretty cute. Think the pictures speak for themselves. The centre ctually runs a really successful breeding programme although no pandas have been released back into the wild. Again there is some contraversy over whether this is the best way to continue with conservation or whether more money should be put into protecting the last remaining wild pandas’ environment (only about 1000 left in the wild) or working more on programmes to release them back into the wild. Fortunately the pandas left are well protected. If someone is found guilty of killing a panda it’s the death penalty. Unfortunately China also tends to use the panda as a bit of a pawn, offering them to various countries as an act of goodwill.

Not completely submerged back into Chinese culture, we also visited a beautiful temple where Moz got his ears cleaned professionally whilst drinking green tea (yes, at the same time) and we climbed up another extremely touristy Taoist mountain, Qingcheng Shan, complete with wafty Chinese plinky music coming out of fake rocks and bizarre signs along the way such as warning you not to stride (could be dangerous)

Tibetan Chinese have definitely been the friendliest people we have met so far. Time and time again, people have been genuinely nice to us, even if it’s just to say hello and how are you. Leaving Tagong was another reminder as one of the ladies dragged us to their back kitchen/living room where we were welcomed with a huge “TASHIDELI” and butter tea and sour cheese was forced upon us. (Not so good but forced it down anyway)

As well as being lucky enough to watch a Tibetan horse festival (note to England - Tibet does horse shows better) we also got to witness another Tibetan tradition - the sky burial.

Continue reading Sky burial

Still in Tibetan China and loving it. Our final stop before heading back to the Han Chinese people is the Tagong grasslands - a mere 3700m above sea level. We’ve all been lucky enough not to suffer too much from altitude sickness bar a minor headache and lack of breathe, but some people have been physically sick and had to leave pretty quickly for lower pastures.

The town in Tagong is much nicer and smaller than Litang with a monastery at its focal point, a market square and one long street with various restaurants, clothes shops, plastic toys (why?! Everywhere you go you can without doubt get hold of a plastic car or bracelet) Oddly enough the town is surrounded by grasslands (and mountains, including one huge snow capped peak which looks amazing)

Continue reading More crazy horse

We timed our visit to Litang pretty well as we managed to catch a horse festival. The drive there was pretty cool - we headed up a procession of motorbikes driven by incredibly cool Tibetan bikers with ribbons, tinsel and beat boxes decorating their bikes followed by a Very Important Lama (note to Moz - Lama as in Tibetan religios person not llama wooly, camel like creature)

Continue reading Crazy horse