...bus, bus, LAOS, buuuuus, Luang Prabang

Yes, there was more to come. Two buses on consecutive days took us down to the Lao border and across, which was quite exciting for those of us who'd had a sheltered upbringing, but otherwise fairly uneventful. You can buy 30-day Lao visas for 35 dollars at the border, although some nationalities only had to pay 30. Do they not remember the days of servitude under the French?! The luggage on the bus was interestingly stowed though, to say the least.


The six of us then stayed at the first town of any note, Luang Namtha, where we sampled the first Beer Lao (of many - mmmmmmmmm), ate baguettes (OK, thank you France) and then said our farewells the following morning.


Nathalie and Emilio were heading west towards Thailand, where they have a date in a couple of days with some friends on some undiscovered island in the south. Cloggies Kim and Ewoud were hanging about for a couple of days before also heading west for an expensive slice of eco-tourism called the Gibbon Experience (have a look on google), which we would have also done had it not been all booked up by the time we decided to come to Laos. But our destination was Luang Prabang to the south, which the smiling man in the ticket office assured us was six hours away - a mere pittance in the scheme of our recent bus odysseys.

What fools to believe a word of it. Nine hours later we rolled into a bus station, only to find out that it was a fifteen minute tuk-tuk ride to town. All of which is leading up to saying that we arrived in our first destination of any note in Laos fervently wishing we'd stayed in China, with its wondrous rail network.

Luckily, Vishnu or Krishna or someone had obviously taken pity on us - salvation was at hand in the form of an Indian restaurant just in front of our guesthouse, which served us the most delicious curries and naan bread. If you've been reading this blog you'll know I've been loving the food in China, but eating it twice a day does test the patience a little, so something that different was very welcome. Yes, I know we should be trying out Lao food, but give us a break, we've got a couple of weeks yet.

Having recovered from three more days on buses, Laos seems to be a good choice for a break from China. It's so quiet! And so undeveloped. Every village we passed on the bus was made entirely of wooden houses on stilts, and Luang Prabang, though Laos's second city, has no building higher than two storeys and far more palms than houses or indeed people. I think we'll be staying here for a few days yet...

Some of the food on offer at the lunch stop on our journey south reminded us of the more exotic dishes of China


We preferred to be reminded of Leeds and Bradford


View down to the Nam Khan river, with Luang Prabang on the right (yes, there is a town down there)

Bus, bus, buuuuus, Xishuangbanna...

Bus. Such a short word, and yet... We did manage to get the 7.30 bus on the Wednesday morning. By midday we were at the first of two intermediate towns on our journey down to the Xishuangbanna capital, Jinghong. A further five hours left us in the second town en route, Jiangcheng, with the sun already set and the next bus to Jinghong due to leave at 6.00am the next morning. Hm - we had expected, or at least hoped, to reach Jinghong that night. Ah well, it could only be another three hours or so the next morning.

WRONG. The 149 kilometres (less than 100 miles!) took us 10.5 hours. That in itself wouldn't have been so bad, if I hadn't had to engineer a second knee joint in my legs in order to squeeze them into the ridiculously small space between my seat and the one in front. We could only assume that there was a mechanical problem with the bus - we didn't get above about 25 miles an hour all day, and occasionally the driver would park up and investigate something under the bus.

What can you do but laugh it off? At least we weren't alone - the couple responsible for our delayed departure from Yuanyang were with us and helped us see the funny side. They had travelled by train from France, through Europe, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia and most of China, so were suitably battle-hardened. And the food at our lunchtime stop was truly delicious and only about 30p each.

Once in Jinghong, we put our feet up, ate as well as usual, and met up with one of the Dutch couples we'd met in Kunming. Added to the Franco-Argentinian couple from Yuanyang, and with a couple of new strays from the US and Israel, this made quite a cosmopolitan posse, and in a Thai restaurant one night we were invited to share some horrendous moonshine with a group of Chinese workers from Harbin, right up in the north east of the country. The 'conversation' was the usual mix of single-word repetition, mention of Beckham (to much smiling and laughing), Sun Jihai (much delight) and Zidane (much confusion, especially after trying to mime a bald head - the headbutt mime did the trick finally), and pointing at unhelpful words in phrasebooks. After the meal we headed to the night market next to the Lancang river (which becomes the Mekong once it crosses the border) and paid small children to use their rifles. Horrifically unethical as this may sound, we were only firing pellets at balloons. Pretty good fun after a load of nasty booze.


The following day six of us rented scooters and set off for a morning market in a town 40km distant, which of course had long finished by the time we got there. Each tiny roadside village on the way had its own large and mostly deserted Buddhist temple, which made the getting there and back much more fun than the destination itself, as of course is often the case (though perhaps not where buses are concerned).







After four very pleasant days in Jinghong, it was time to head off towards Laos. How else to sign off from China (for the time being - we're definitely coming back) but with a message, in a bus station of course, for us all to ponder...

Another day, another cloud

We didn't make the 7.30 bus this morning. Most of the blame for this must lie with the couple we met in the last town, who are now staying in the room next to us, and who last night insisted on buying loads of beer and sitting chatting in the freezing night fog. And lo and behold, it's foggy again this morning. Tomorrow we MUST leave!

It seems at least that the fog lifts in the afternoon, and yesterday we actually got a fair amount of sun. So we decided to go for a brief wander out of town, and came across a nice little village full of friendly locals but more particularly full of pigs of all ages. Mmmm, bacon.



Five young villagers


Woman and duck

Kunming and south towards Laos

We still haven't decided if we're actually going to cross into Laos yet, but we're heading down towards the border anyway. The region of Yunnan just this side of the border is called Xishuangbanna, and is supposed to be China's own mini-Thailand, complete with a minority called the Dai who are related to the Thais, and plenty of wats and sticky rice and coconut and all that sort of stuff.

Being cautious types, we've decided we'll venture into Laos if and when we have enough malaria pills to be able to do the country justice. So far we have enough for 12 days there, which may or may not be enough. It would certainly mean some looooong bus journeys if we want to get down to the capital Vientiane.

The point of this previously unplanned side trip would be to delay slightly our journey towards the Himalayas, so that the weather is a little warmer by the time we get there. Initially we were thinking of a quick jaunt into Vietnam, also accessible from here, but having spoken to people who've just come from both places, Laos, with a population of just over 6 million compared to Vietnam's 81 million, sounds like more of a break from China.

Anyway, more on that later. Kunming was, as promised, the city of eternal spring. Oh, the sunshine! Ah, the blue sky! It's the sort of city you could imagine yourself living in for six months or so, maybe teaching English or studying. Very relaxed, clean, cosmopolitan, full of nightlife and young people. We moved to a hostel called The Hump Across The Himalayas after going to a fancy dress party there. It had a fantastic roof terrace overlooking one of the city's nicest squares, and was such a good place to recuperate and meet people that we stayed there several days longer than we planned. Even the nightly din from the karaoke bar right below our room couldn't put us off.

The Hump's roof terrace and some Dutchies we got talking to


The view from the terrace at night


A temple in the hills near the city






Having finally torn ourselves away from the Hump, Faye picked us out a nicely segmented trip down to Xishuangbanna, rather than enduring the 24 hour prison that is the sleeper bus. The first town, Tonghai, had a superb little park full of temples up the side of a steep hill that deserved to be full of tourists, but which we virtually had to ourselves. We must have dodged that beaten track again.




Taking tea in our hotel room in Jianshui, the next town along


Market day in Yuanyang, a small town on a mountain that seems to be permanently in cloud


'Ow much for yer cock pet?




From here there's a bus at 7.30 tomorrow morning, which we think takes us to a town where we think we can get another bus to Jinghong, the capital of the Xishuangbanna region. We'll see...

Food is fun in China

Pouring the main event into my crossing-the-bridge noodles, a speciality of Yunnan province.


Ducks, already roasted (or maybe fried, who knows) and about to be chopped up, deep-fried for a few minutes and then dusted with tingly Sichuan pepper. Delicious. Sadly this picture doesn't show the other local delicacy just next to the headless ducks - yes, you guessed it - duck heads. I don't know if you hold the beak like a lollipop stick to eat it.


A good option on long train journeys - these are much better than Pot Noodles, but then I expect duck heads are too.


Ideal for breakfast when you wake up in a cloud are steamed buns with veg and minced pork in. Warm the cockles they do.


(18) The following may contain scenes of violence
We haven't sampled blowtorched bitch yet...

Little things...

Some of the "English" on display here in China is pretty amusing, to me anyway. Here is a sample of some of the things that have tickled me. Click on the pictures to see them full size if the text is too small.

Some sort of underwear detergent? Yet on the other side of the building the equivalent sign says West Street Under Ground Department Store in (almost) perfect English.


Clothes with trendy English logos on them are always good for a laugh. One sports jacket I saw a cool youngster wearing was made by PUMAN (with the leaping puma motif). "HIGH NICE" was emblazoned across the jacket, but better, above the puma on this sports jacket it said "SPORTS RARELY".

In a hotel we stayed in recently, there was a sachet in the bathroom which was apparently "the 53rd of Miss World Final Appointed Products" - she'll be delighted to know that her 53rd product is "specially designed for washing men's genitals". Still, we shouldn't have been surprised - the hotel's "manogement is scientific", and "in our dancing hall, KTV rooms, chess & puke rooms, you can satisfied with yourself". I cannot disagree with the hotel's boast that "we are solidarity, brave and creative, reinforcing inter management, standing outer figure".

Recommended - I've never had such an attentive membrane pour.


Also, here's a probably short-lived subsection of my blog I'm going to call "Things I think I've heard when people are speaking Chinese". So far...

- ee by gum
- one to the pound
- cabbage holder
- shamalamadingdong (this one may have required some imagination)
- baby I need you

Bear with me if this leaves you cold. Out here, where people don't even speak European hand signals, this sort of thing is keeping me sane.

Photos from Guangxi and Guizhou provinces

I had to include this... Outdoor karaoke, all taken deadly seriously, by the river in Guilin


Mist, terraced hills and a village made of wood. What more could a traveller ask for?


Faye being dressed as a Yao woman for a photo. This photo, or "PHUTU! PHUTU!" as it is apparently known locally, did not come for free.


Faye is second from the left


More terraces near Ping An


Wind and rain bridge in Chengyang village, dating from 1916 (so the same age as my Nana!)


Dong men playing cards in the central square in Chengyang


A Miao woman and little bairn (kitten?). What I particularly like about this picture is that she didn't expect any kind of payment for it.


Miao women grinding some sort of cereal crop

Trying to get off the beaten track

From Guilin, where I wrote the last two entries in a really friendly youth hostel, everyone we spoke to was on their way direct to a city - either west to Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province, east to Guangzhou and Hong Kong, or even north to Beijing, a 28-hour train journey. Our plan was to take several days travelling northwards into the next province, Guizhou, via a series of small market towns and some picturesque mountain villages. As none of the reasonably intrepid-seeming travellers we met were going that way, we felt pretty sure we'd be getting off the beaten track, that holy grail for all pretentious wannabe travellers like me.

(Actually, talking of pretentious travellers. The French. What's up with them? In this part of the world, there aren't many people that speak any English, so when Europeans, North Americans and Antipodeans cross paths, they tend to be all friendly and chatty, keen to find out where they've been and are going, and if they know of any good places to eat etc. It's just nice in this fascinating but very alien country to have a chat with someone you don't see 24/7 - no offence Faye. But there appears to be one group of Westerners who shun the others, who want to avoid sharing even a smile of recognition with other foreigners. And if you pay attention, they always turn out to be... French. Now maybe they're so keen to get the genuine China experience that they think any Western contact would make it less pure. But who do they think they are? It's as if they see your presence, along with theirs, in some out-of-the-way town as meaning they've failed in their mission to get away from it all. As if only they and the locals have the right to be there. Maybe I'm misinterpreting it, maybe they're all just shy. Hm. We even overheard a French girl remark to her boyfriend, after Faye had chatted to them in French at the top of Moon Hill, that other foreigners they meet are "sympa" but the French are not. In case you think I'm being hypocritical by the way, considering the previous paragraph, we were actively hoping to find Westerners on our route across country, to give us someone else to talk to - we were just pleased that it didn't seem that EVERY foreign tourist in China goes that way. Anyway - I just had to get that off my chest. If any French people are reading, please use the comments page to defend your proud nation! Sorry Matthieu, you know I like you froggies normally, but here they're all turning their noses up at us...)

Our planned route involved taking country buses to market towns, finding a cheap hotel, dropping our bags and getting local buses up to unspoilt little villages full of ethnic minority groups such as the Yao, the Dong and the Miao (yes, the Miao). We planned to stay in some of the villages themselves, where the Rough Guide mentioned accommodation. See what trailblazers we are?!

Because of the number of hours it would involve in uncomfortable, bouncing country buses, we planned to take our time over the journey. This started out fine - we spent two nights in the town of Longsheng, with a day trip up to Ping An village on the middle day. But then we realised that we'd seriously underestimated the amount of money we'd need for the trip, quite a problem as there are no branches of the Bank of China, and hence no cashpoints that recognise our Visa cards, anywhere along the route. This miscalculation was largely due to the phenomenon of these "untouched" little villages charging hefty admission fees to tourists. And when I say hefty - just to walk around Ping An cost us 2.5 times the price of our hotel room, with private bathroom, for that night. (In saying that, the room was about 2 pounds 70 between us.) So unfortunately over the last three days we've spent a couple of hours in pretty villages and then many more hours on a bus, as we couldn't afford any more nights' accommodation before we reached our destination town of Kaili and the Bank of China. Worse, hours spent on buses here have turned out to be seriously damaging to your hearing. Bus drivers blare their horns for six seconds on average before overtaking ANYTHING - including pedestrians and cyclists, of which, in this country of 1.3 billion people, there are quite a few. And bus airhorns, especially when you're sat in the front seat, are LOOOUD LOO-OOO-OOUD LOOOOUD. We both had splitting headaches when we finally reached Kaili last night after seven hours on the bus.

So, what about that beaten track? Well, as you can guess, we were less than pleased with the entrance fee policy for the villages we saw. I think in summer they'd be full of tourists, probably mostly Chinese. But luckily we seem to be here in low season, so despite the disappointment of finding out that these villages are definitely tourist attractions, the experience felt a lot more authentic than it might have done in season. The last village in particular, where we arrived too late in the day to pay the entrance fee (woo hoo!) and stayed the night, was full of locals in traditional dress going about their daily lives, rather than locals dressing traditionally in order to get money for photos from tourists. And what's more, there's no mention of any accommodation in this village in the Rough Guide - and the village doesn't even feature in the Lonely Planet! That surely counts as at least a mini-sidestep off the beaten track.

Beaten track or not, the scenery along the whole way, and the wooden buildings in the minority villages, were absolutely beautiful. We spent about 16 hours in total on buses between Guilin and Kaili, but I don't think we travelled more than a few hundred kilometres, so mountainous was the route. Later today (there doesn't seem to be much to do in Kaili, and I'm buggered if I'm getting on any more transport today) I'll upload some photos. We also continue to eat very well for very little - Chinese food in China really is good. For 1-2 pounds between us, we're getting two meat dishes, usually with a tasty sauce and plenty of veg, plus unlimited rice, and for lunch we can usually get a bowl of fried rice, fried noodles or noodle soup for about 30p each. Pointing at what other diners are eating seems to be the best policy for ordering. And it all tastes GOOOD! Also, as we get further west, nearer to Sichuan, the amount of chilli used in every dish is on the rise, which can only be a good thing. And we don't think we've eaten any dog yet (Guizhou is the best place to come if you're a canine-ivore apparently).

We're still on the original plan (see first entry). We're going to relax here for a day or two, then get an overnight train to Kunming in Yunnan, right in the southwest of the country. We've heard good things about Kunming - it's known as the City of Eternal Spring apparently and people who've come from there have said the weather was really good. That's nice to hear, as it's bleeding freezing in Kaili today.