China. Where u at?

First things first - I am currently back in Australia. Most of you reading this were already made aware of the fact that I would not be able to update my blog whilst in China. This is due to their grand firewall, which also keeps out sites like facebook. Of course, most computer savvy people just install software which masks their IP and go about their business. I had neither a laptop on which to install this software, nor any particular motivation to go to great lengths to access these restricted sites. So I have left my blog entries until now. I am thinking I will divide it into two entries. Not particularly easy, considering not only the length of time I spent in China, but the contrast of the country to everywhere else I have previously been and thus my desire to note down dozens of personal observations. I do, though, much prefer this condensing of my trip, because quite frankly I just don't like working, and writing blog entries after a trip just seems to me too much like work.

In the beginning, there was Beijing, mega-city of my arrival. Man, that place is polluted. I am still boggled by how people live there, breathing all that dirty air in every day of the week. I was blessed, though, upon my return to Beijing, at the end of my trip. I left the obligatory viewing of The Great Wall until this time because I had been told it was muh nicer to visit in the Autumn. I'm glad I did - the day I headed out to see the wall the skies were blue and that stranger to Beijing, the sun, was out for all to see. I visited a more remote, unregulated (officially) section of the wall. It was worth the headache of catching various buses and dealing with touts to get there. I was shocked at how steep some sections of he wall were - it is no walk in the park. Seeing it roll on over hills and up and down ridges into the distance sparked a desire to shoulder a pack and go for a multi-day hike along its length, or at least part thereof.

Beijing otherwise did not really appeal to me. I surprised even myself by how underwhelmed I was by both Tian'anmen square and The Forbidden City. The city is so vast that walking around taking in all the sights and smells, which I love, was rarely feasable. I did enjoy the street food, and wandering through the networks of laneways.

From Beijing I headed to Xi'an in order to see the Terracotta Warriors. I had one of my more memorable food moments here. For breakfast before heading to see the warriors, I stopped at a popular looking food stall just down the road from my hostel. Two pairs of deft hands made me a fried dough and egg fold-up, with obligatory chilli paste, chopped greens and lettuce folded into it, all for about AU$0.30. It was the penultimate breakfast (I'm yet to decide on the ultimate). I chuckled to myself upon thinking about the lost souls paying exorbidant prices for poor imitations of Western breakfasts in the hostel.

Xi'an was just a big smoggy city with consumerism shining through most notably in the form of enormous shopping malls. Its city walls were intact, but they could've been built yesterday for all I knew; this seemed the way with most Chinese structures, it is very hard to tell their true age, and as a result I held little appreciation of them. One area of Xi'an I liked was the Muslim Quarter, which was a pleasure to all the senses to walk through and eat in of an evening. I ate at Muslim restaurants as frequently as I could whilst in China. There are several Muslim minority groups, not just the Uigurs which we hear of in Australia, and they generally make excellent hand pulled noodles, cook beef and mutton very well, and use a bunch of spices different to other varieties of Chinese cooking.

I took an overnight train from Xi'an to Sichuan province on the 'hard seat' class. The seats are not literally hard, though with my bony bum they might as well be after sitting on them for half an hour. What sets hard seat carriages apart from the sleeping classes is that they fill them up with standing class tickets. I found it nigh on impossible to get any sleep with a carriage full of writhing bodies, people playing their music at whichever volume they desired, and a constant stream of staff pushing trollies through the mass of bodies. I observed that more of these trollies contained toys, perfume and other odds and ends than they did useful, requisite items such as food and fluids. At least the Tibetan family on my shoulder slept wonderfully (I was more than happy to offer my shoulder, bony as it may be).

The food in Sichuan province was fantastic. I love spicy food. Admittedly it is very oily, and if you're into that hoo haa then you'd probably also say it's quite fatty. I've never really eaten tofu, but upon my first try of 'mapo doufu', I was hooked. I was lucky enough to meet some friendly students in my travels in Sichuan. 'Lexi' and 'Wayne' took me to their favourite hotpot place, where I lost about 3 litres of sweat consuming skewer after skewer of all variety of meat and veges, including goose heart and duck tongue, cooked in a hotpot of spicy spicy broth. Yang Fan invited me to his hometown, Dujiangyan, a sattelite of Chengdu. It suffered immense damage during the 2008 earthquake, though the only visible indicator is the amount of new buildings. Which, ah, isn't too different to anywhere else in China. We had an excellent array of Sichuan dishes that evening. My chinese hosts paid for these dinners. I was touched by their hospitaliy, and impressed by their sense of pride in entertaining a foreigner - it would have been offensive had I insisted in contributing to the bill.

I intended to enter Yunnan province via the mountains in the west of Sichuan, an autonomous Tibetan region which was actually part of Tibet until it was annexed into Sichuan some years ago. Unfortunately, upon reaching Kangding, I realised I was quite ill, and booked a bus back out of the mountains, in the direction of Yunnan, the next morning. All I can say about Kangding is how I amazed I was by the plethora of mushrooms being sold. Local lined the streets selling far more varieties of mushroom than I have ever seen in my life.

I made it to Kunming, capital of Yunnan province, via an off-the-tourist-trail city and some antibiotics, or at least I think they were. The language barrier prevented fluid communication, but hand gestures and 'infection' and 'antiobotics' entered into a phone translator went a long way. I did nothing in Kunming really other than wait for a sleeper train to Yangshuo. I had made the call to get to Yangshuo, where I would stay until the end of my trip to get some rock climbing done.