Hangzhou

Hello. I am writing to you tonight from a small farming village in Anhui province whose name I don't know. I'm the only foreigner in town. I'm staying in a large, empty hostel, where nobody speaks English. I have an 8 bed dorm to myself, and the very friendly staff took me for a cheap staff dinner in their canteen. Aside from the hostel, and a few simple shop houes, I'm surrounded by giant mountains green with bamboo, pine, tea terraces and rice paddies below. It's rather rustic, very rural - but not far away is one of China's top destinations, heaving with tourists: Yellow Mountain (Huangshan), inspiration for countless painters and poets over the past millenia. I'll be there tomorrow to sus it out first hand.

Over the past days however I have been enjoying the former Chinese captial city of Hangzhou (but then most cities seem to have been capital at some stage or other). This is a town I've heard much about - it's where many of my uni friends spent a year studying Chinese. It's home to the much fabled 'West Lake' - my guidebook quotes several ancient Chinese poets going on about its beauty - much of it to the effect that it's the most beautiful lake in the world (or close to). Even Marco Polo agreed. So, arriving in Hangzhou, my expectations were somewhat high.



Fortunately I wasn't disappointed. The West Lake truly is beautiful. The city itself is one one sides, and the three other sides are surrounded by green mountains. Hangzhou is lucky to have four distinct seasons (white Winters, red Autumns, Green Springs, Scorching Summers), and I was there for what I was told is the worst of them, Summer. By day I seldom dared to go outside - such was the heat and humidty. By afternoon however the air is balmy and it's safe to go outdoors. Most time was spent cycling all around the lake - unders its willows, by its water lillies, and lotus flowers, through clouds of dragon flies. I even took my bike to the river, several kilometres out of town, then up through some of the heavily forested mountains to tea villages & secluded temples. Very attractive and photos to follow.

Me, marbles lost, in Hangzhou.

Time's up on computer! Must be off! Cheers, Yoni.

Busy about China

Hello. I am currently in Fujian province. I've spent the last several days along the coast of Southern China, inspecting plenty of colonial architecture in various historical port cities along the way. The most well known of these is Hong Kong. I also made a trip over to Macau - where Portugese is still the official language along with Mandarin. Most recently I have spent time in Xiamen (which used to be known as Amoy).

Xiamen
Tonight I am staying in a town called Xiamen (Amoy, as it was once known, is the name given to the local dialect). Xiamen is an island connected by bridge to the Chinese Mainland. Just off Xiamen island is a smaller island called Gulangyu - and that is where I am staying. This tiny island was ceded to the British as a port after the First Opium War in the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing (the same treaty that gave them Hong Kong). No cars are allowed on the island, and it's small enough to stroll around. There are plenty of neo-classical villas, many in disrepair, and lots of big trees. The place is swamped by Chinese tour groups by day, but by night we've the island to ourselves - as most of the tourists return to Xiamen proper by night. Staying in a pleasant youth hostel which was once the German Consulate.



Macau
Macau has a long history of European settlement. The Portuguese setup up here as early as 1553 (for comparison, that's over 200 years before Mozart was born). The place is rife with colourful Portuguese architecture, great food and giant casinos. Macau is the only place China where casinos have been legalised, and the local government earn as much as 70% of their revenue from the industry. I strolled around many of these casinos, at one I saw a well dressed lady being escorted from a table, she was crying uncontrollably and seemed barely able to walk by her own legs.



Hong Kong
Hong Kong is pretty crazy - it's nothing but tall buildings about rather attractive tropical mountains rising from the sea. It's manic. It's also rather expensive, at least compared with other countries in the region.

Taiwan

I recently left Taiwan, and am now back in Hong Kong. I thought I should say a bit more about Taiwan, as it's really not such a bad place. People are friendly, people tell you that the people are friendly, and I pretty much found this to be the case. On arrival into the country, an airport taxi driver apologised for bothering me: "Excuse me sir, do you need a taxi?" "No thanks." "Oh, sorry to bother you, have a nice stay in Taiwan." A sharp contrast to pretty much every other country I've visited on this trip so far - in Uzbekistan a taxi driver hounded us even before we passed immigration & customs.

Taiwan was however the only place so far where I've seen proper violence - a gang beating. As I was purchasing some iced-tea at a busy night market in Tainan, four chaps with baseball bats came running after someone, clobbered him over the head to the ground and pounded him for about half a minute. It was brutal. The guy got up and seemed to be ok. I took my tea and walked back to my room. I guess this stuff goes on right throughout Asia, and the world, but it served as a reminder to be on my best behaviour. Apart from this incident, it was all pretty smooth sailing.

Photos of Taiwan are in my Taiwan gallery.

Taipei
I spent two initial nights in Taipei before visiting other parts of the island. After this, I returned and stayed another two nights. On the first two nights I hung around with some friends I'd met in Singapore. Ate tasty food, climbed world's tallest building, visited night market, dragged clubbing. Taipei is fairly cosmopolitain, there's plenty of English, lots of modern shopping centres, plenty of trendy fusion cafes and bakeries. There're some grubby looking apartment buildings, but I'm sort of used to those after China and Hong Kong.



East Coast (Hualien)
This was a pleasant surprise. Before arriving in the country I didn't even realise Taiwan (or at least half of it) was in the Tropics. This part of the country looks like Hawaii - lush mountains plummeting into aqua-coloured ocean. Beacuse of its formidable geography and lack of major roads, it's also less developed - in a pleasant relaxing kind of way. The town reminded me of the Thai coastal town of 'Hua Hin'. Here I also visited a famous gorge, but then I mentioned this in a previous blog post.



West Coast (Tainan)
The west coast of Taiwan is flat and home to something like 90% of Taiwan's population. For lack of time I had to skip most of the major cities along this coast, I instead decided to visit only Tainan - a former capital city, orignally founded by the Dutch. It's famous for its traditional temples, of which there are many down the city's many back-alleys, and for traditional foods and snacks. It was hot there, I was forever thirsty, so I had lots of ice-tea (a Taiwanese specialty), I even had South African tea.



Central (Alishan)
Alishan is a popular mountain resort at about 2,500m altitude. It was a pleasant alpine retreat from the swealtering tropical heat at sea-level. Waking at 3:30am to climb a peak and watch the sunrise is pretty much obligatory at Alishan, so I joined the (very massive) crowd. The place was beautiful but somewhat tarnished given its history of deforestation - most of the forest we saw was no more than 50 years old. Some exceptional trees were spared from logging and aged between 800-3,000 years old.

The Stans, Part II: Uzbekistan

As with my Kyrgyzstan post, my Uzbekistan post is a kind of retrospective summary as I've already long left that place. Uzbekistan is a rather mad place. It's got an ancient (ex-soviet) administration which is incredibly frustrating for tourists. It seems that every third person is a policeman and every second policeman needs to see your passport and money. In our first 4 hours in the country we'd shown our passport 4 times (police checkpoints occur about every 30kms on roads). We were even taken for questioning twice in underground police offices at metro stations. The madness is more extensive than that but I won't bore you.

Uzbekistan's current borders were arbitrarily assigned by the Soviets, but the region has a visible identity formed by its position at the centre of the ancient Silk Road trade route that connected the Middle East, Europe, Persia, India and China. Islam was maintained in a series of Khanates (city-kingdoms), which have left some magnificent Islamic architecture in their wake.

Tashkent
The capital city, our first destination and with Almaty in Kazakhstan are the largest cities in Central Asia. It's an anciet city, though most of the centre is of Soviet design - broad, leafy avenues & plenty of neo-classical architecture. It's really quite pleasant, and despite the hordes of policemen, Rayner and I found it a relaxing place, especially its beer gardens. It's also the least conservative place in the country - elsewhere women wear full-body length dresses and veils (but not face the covering variety).



Samarkand
This is Uzbekistan's second largest city and former capital city. It's most famous site is the Registan: a complex of 3 medrassas (Islamic schools). It blew me away for its beauty. All the medrassas function now as tourist shops. Pic below is of a mosque, not the Registan. Also enjoyed strolling around parts of the old town - which consists of a series of walled alleyways, doors leading into private courtyards & people's homes. It seemed rather idyllic at the time. Other parts of town also quite Soviet - leafy avenues.



Bukhara
Uzbekistan is very much on the tourist route - bus loads of European and Japanese tourists abound. Tourism has very much influenced the places we visited - the whole of Bukhara's ancient centre seemed geared for tourists. It's still an intriguing place of turquoise-capped medrassas, minarets and winding alleyways of medieval design which differ greatly from the Soviet town planning in Samarkand and Tashkent. It's hot here - we endured 45C and it wasn't even near mid-Summer.



Khiva
Our final stop was Khiva. An ancient walled city - and used to be a pretty cruel place - even up until the early 20th century. Saw a nice little museum of paintings dipicting various tortures that were enforced by the Khan. They included having your mouth cut open as far back as your ears (for drinking), being buried alive, being thrown from a minaret, 'woman beating' involved putting a woman in a bag and beating her... and so on. One chap we met, our age, showed us a picture of his (great?) grandfather on his mobile phone, an administrator - he looked a proud man in a dark robe, huge dark beard and huge dark turban. He was murdered by poison for a reason I cannot remember. The town these days is pristine and ultra sanitary, it's entirely for the tourists, it's difficult to get any sense of tumult of daily life back in the day.

Greetings from Taiwan

Hello all. I am writing to you from a town called 'Hualien' which is on the Eastern coast of Taiwan. The coastline here is nothing short of spectacular - giant marble mountains, rank with deep-green vegetation plunging straight into turquoise waters (see here). The vegetation around here is some of the lushest I've ever seen. I also went today to Taroko Gorge - a spectacular gorge made of marble which, I've heard, is deeper than the Grand Canyon - though much, much narrower. I even walked through a cave called the 'Water Curtain' - because it's roof is completely penetrated by water - it's like walking through a long, dark, cold shower, with a river down the middle. It was great.

Oops, my time at the net cafe is up. More later. Cheers.

Hello from Hong Kong

The past few days have flown by. Today I arrived in bustling Hong Kong. Last night I was befriending locals who'd never spoken with a foreigner before on a night train - while little 5 year old kids ambushed my notebook and filled it with diabolical cartoons. The previous night I was in the furnace city of Wuhan having a personal tour of a plush revolving Thai restaurant on the 41st floor of a 5 star hotel overlooking the Yangtze River wearing shorts, sandals and a very smelly shirt. The previous night I was again on a night train, eating instant noodles & drinking tea. The evening before that I ate 'boiled pork on a pole' in Beijing with a local friend I'd met on the train. It was well delicious.

So! It's been a very busy few days. There's more to come. Tomorrow I will be in Taiwan. I hope my Stans Part II post will be along shortly.

Cheers! Yoni: out.

The Stans, Part I: Kyrgyzstan

Well! This is a long overdue entry. I am in China, though have just returned from nearly a month in the 'stans' where I was busy sharing taxis, drinking tea, avoiding laghman (lamian noodles) and shashlik (kebab - meat on a stick), practicing my Russian, riding horses, drinking fermented horses' milk, drinking vodka, staying in yurts, and so on. Pictures now reside in my Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan galleries.

Because I've left my blog for so long, I can only attempt a kind of retrospective summary of Kyrgyzstan because I've already left the place. Here we go...

Road from Kashgar to Osh
Getting to Kyrgyzstan was a drama. It's a 24 hour sleeper-bus ride over terrible mountain roads (with stunning views), we wasted 5 hours doing nothing at the border, baggage handlers at one point occupied the bus (one climbed through the window, another into the baggage hold) refusing to leave until they were paid for their services (which we didn't ask for), someone placed a lamb's carcass in the overhead baggage store, a box full of wet goats' livers spilled blood onto my backpack, and so on...



Osh
Osh is old (older than Rome), it's Kyrgyzstan's second largest city and it is the first place we visited in Kyrgyzstan. It's a welcoming place, leafy, and the girls are hot. I nearly proposed to a waitress but decided against it at the last moment, for practical reasons (leaving town the same day).



Arslanbob
Although in Kyrgyzstan, this small alpine village's population are all ethnic Uzbeks (apparently there's a difference). Time spent wandering village backroads, walnut forests, midnight runs to the outhouse.



Road from Arslanbob to Bishkek
The ride from Arslanbob took 12 hours but was one of the most spectacular rides of my life. The scenery was exceptional, of snow capped peaks, deep-green mountain pastures coloured with eruptions of orange and blue wild-flowers.



Bishkek
Kyrgyzstan's capital city. We arrived at night into Bishkek, and it was most peculiar. There's virtually no street lighting, most people on the streets are drunk and at the time we were there there was no hot-water in the entire city (their hot water is centralised). By a random fluke it turned out that my friend Rayner and I had an old acquaintance living and working in Bishkek, so it was with her that we spent most of our time in Bishkek, binging on Western food, exploring ex-pat hangouts, drinking with US marines.



Kochkor & Songkol
Probably the highlight of our trip. Kochkor is a small town in the mountains, and Songkol is a high altitude mountain lake (3,100 metres). We got from one to the other by horse. Neither of us has much horse riding experience, but it didn't stop us scaling a 3,400 metre mountain pass made of rock and ice. We stayed in isolated yurts, saw lots of grass, and drank plenty of vodka and kymys (fermented horses' milk) which, as my friend Rayner says, is as bad as it sounds. On leaving Songkol we were even snowed on, rather heavily, and it was mid-June which is approaching mid Summer.