Hi everyone,
Well we've arrived in China safe and sound. But not before we collected some more ‘travel experiences’ to tell you about…
After our 7 hour wait at the border on Tuesday, we finally boarded the 6pm sleeper bus to Kunming and quickly made ourselves erm, uncomfortable on our place-mat sized bunk beds. Sarah’s feel dangling over the end of her bed, Phil’s practically over the shoulders of the guy in front of him, we departed for a night of fun on south west China’s bumpy roads…
What with being bounced about, stops for police checks and toilet breaks and the noisy coughing and spitting of our fellow passengers, we felt like we’d got about 14 minutes sleep between us, however when Sarah woke up as we pulled in to Kunming station she noticed a curious hole in her day rucksack that hadn’t been there the before, and her camera, i-pod and cash had gone missing. .. It quickly became obvious that someone had cut into her bag wth a razor blade and helped themselves to the contents.
Trying to communicate this to the bus driver was no easy task and, despite some creative and energetic use of our trusty picture dictionary, we failed to inspire much action on the bus driver's part and as everyone, thief included, got off the bus and drifted off into Kunming city, we gave up on any hope of getting back the missing things and instead turned our efforts to finding a policeman to report the theft too.
We did find a station fairly quickly, and though none of the officers inside spoke English themselves, they called a very helpful English speaking policewoman, who took down a draft incident report quickly and gave us an address of where to take it to next, as well as offering us her top 5 places to see list in Kunming as well as some restaurant tips!
Feeling slightly less forlorn, and ready for some breakfast by now, we set off in taxi to find our hotel. This too proved more complicated than you might imagine. We had anticipated that the taxi drivers might not speak English, and had managed to find the name of our hotel in Chinese the day before. However rather than trying to copy the intricate Chinese characters ourselves, we thought we’d be clever and photograph the address on screen of the computer, so that we could show that more accurate version to the driver instead. This was all on Sarah’s camera of course – which we no longer had. Oh joy!
The driver by now (perhaps not surprisingly) had given up on any efforts of communication and instead took us on a magical mystery tour of Kunming, perhaps hoping that we might spot our hotel if we drifted about for long enough. This strategy didn’t look too likely to yield results since, although few people have probably heard of Kunming, rather like lots of Chinese cities we’ve never heard of, it’s HUGE – about the size of Birmingham in fact!
So after about an hour of this misery, we gave up and instead asked to be taken to the Bureau of Foreign Affairs, where we needed to go anyway in order to get the incident report registered (thankfully, we had this address written down in Chinese from the helpful lady officer). This bit of the morning proved to go much more smoothly as we were seen to immediately and treated like minor visiting foreign dignitaries. As our report was efficiently processed and translated, we were offered drinks and taken around the station to meet and greet some of Kunming police’s head honchos, all of whom seemed very jolly indeed (“this is Mr Fu, my boss – he speaks German!”). After half an hour or so of this, and with the necessary documents in hand, we were sent on our way with a hotel recommendation and its name written in Chinese (which we gratefully took!), an earnest 'be careful now' (which we politely nodded to), and a cheerful wave.
Obviously this incident has been very annoying, however it could really have been a lot worse and we’re just grateful that we’re both OK, and that we also didn’t lose anything of sentimental value, apart from a few music videos (I’ll sadly not get to introduce the tribes people of the Peruvian hinterlands to Wham after all!!). Perhaps the luckiest thing of all in fact was that during our loooong wait for the sleeper bus the day before, Sarah had copied all of her photos onto a memory stick, which she then put safe and sound in her handbag, where it still is. Phew.
Another plus was that this did give us the perfect opportunity to hit China’s shops when we arrived in Kunming, to look for a camera replacement. This was a real eye-opener. We had expected to be craning our necks gazing up at Shanghai’s and Beijing’s skyscrapers – but even in Kunming and Chengdu (where we are now) – small provincial towns by comparison – the shops, offices (and hundreds of banks in particular) are just on a different scale – there’s just street after street of skyscraper after skyscraper after skyscraper after skyscraper after skyscraper… we can confirm that China has well and truly embraced capitalism, and there seems to be a LOT of money floating about.
Bag-burglary incident aside, Kunming was a perfectly pleasant place to spend a couple of days easing ourselves into China, being relatively warm, modern, well-organised and friendly (every so often someone shouted ‘nice to meet you!’ or ‘Hello England!’ across the road at us). With few real ‘sights’ to see, and having become exhausted of camera shopping, we were free to mooch and spent a good day wandering around the university area where there are trendy shops and cafes, and wandering around the park where we saw the locals relaxing joining in sing-a-long Chinese opera, flying giant kites 1000s of metres up in the air or bouncing around on springy stilts (there is probably a better name but I don’t know it – see photos!) – all pretty entertaining!
We decided to fly to Chengdu yesterday (we got a very cheap deal and it saved us 22 hours on a train) and sadly seem to have left the sun behind in Kunming. It’s well and truly dismal here – cold, wet and with grey skies that serve to make the view out of our window of the mega-concrete skyline look like some kind of nightmare post-nuclear vision of the future. That might be a bit of an exaggeration (!) but you will get the idea from the pictures.
Downtown Chengdu as dusk falls - Mao looking on
Our first foray into the city was for another unsuccessful trawl around the electronic shops yesterday afternoon (camera prices being as standardized as the office buildings…), then to one of very few preserved ‘old style’ streets (now featuring attractive antique and craft shops aimed mostly at tourists).
Sarah in one of the few preserved areas of old Chengdu
After that, making an effort to try and re-balance the books a little after the losses on the bus, we thought we’d go into one of the big supermarkets to try and see if we could find some local produce to make a cheap and cheerful meal ourselves (we have a budget spreadsheet to think about after all!) but this too was a bit of a culture shock. On offer was decidedly the weirdest 'food' we’ve seen in the whole of Asia! Giant aquariums containing all sorts of miserable looking sea creatures (can you blame them for looking miserable?), live giant frogs on the deli counter and sad-looking turtles without their shells (but still alive). An ´interesting´ experience, but a bit baffling and we left boggle-eyed and still hungry!
So we have decided instead to opt for blissful ignorance of the ingredients that we’re eating and hit the restaurants instead, where we’ve actually had some very good experiences. Sichuan food is apparently the spiciest in China and we’ve been tucking in to herby dumplings for breakfast, ginormous bowls of spicy noodles for lunch and roasted fish and meat for dinner. All very different to the English take on Chinese food!
This morning we thought our best chance of escaping the greyness might be to get out of the city, so we got ourselves onto a trip out to see Chengdu’s famous Panda Reserve this morning. The reserve has had a lot of success at breeding in the past 5 years and they now have 48 bears, many of whom were out today, doing the things that pandas do (munching bamboo, scratching and dozing mostly – all whilst being ridiculously cute!)
It's possible to be cynical about the state's motives for supporting high profile panda projects, however it is difficult not to feel all warm and fuzzy at the sight of so many healthy, happy bears. The cubs in particular had all of the adults ‘ahhhing’ along with the kids and they had us stood out in the cold and rain for ages watching them tumbling about and shakily climbing trees. You can actually pay to have a cuddle with one of the cubs, but on balance we thought it was very expensive, and perhaps the panda wouldn’t enjoy it as much as we did!
One more Panda pic for luck!
It’s still grey all the way outside so we’ve opted for a lazy afternoon in. Luckily we’re staying in 'Sim’s Cozy Guesthouse' which is indeed cozy and has free DVDs, games and books to borrow, as well as cheap Internet and chocolate brownies – so we’re planning to watch Chinatown on DVD and catch up on bit of (real paper) journal writing*.
We're crossing our fingers that the weather improves in the next few days however and we can get out and about again. If it does clear-up, we’re planning to go up a mountain (Emei Shan) – about 130km from here. I’ll refrain from using the term ‘climb’ at this stage because we heard a rumour of a cable car and have made no promises not to use it… If it doesn’t get any better outside on the other hand, Sarah has read about a Sichuan cooking course down the road which we could book ourselves on to polish our spring roll rolling skills… we’ll let you know which way things turn out later in the week…
Meanwhile, we heard that the weather’s been pretty awful at home too so hope that no-one’s been too badly affected by any storms etc. and you’re all enjoying cream egg season (yes, we’re missing them!)
All the best for now,
Sarah and Phil x x
* Actually we’ve been on the Internet for 5 hours now and have already eaten the chocolate brownie we were supposed to be saving for tonight as Sarah lost this journal entry when her computer had a disk failure and had to start from scratch again – grrr!!!
