China (Part 2)

Am a little behind in these entries, so I'll try to summarise the 3 weeks into one post.

From Shanghai, we took the train to Xi'an (pronounced Shean - obviously!). Our hostel had agreed to meet us at the train station (the train arrived in at 5:30am) and we were happy when we emerged from the crowds at the station and saw a guy holding up a sign reading 'John King'. We were at one side of the barrier and he was at the other so he told us to just walk around to where he was (round trip of about 20m). Simple enough, we thought. But when we walked around, the guy had disappeared! After waiting for about 15/20 mins and searching the immediate area for him we accepted that he had left us behind. We took a taxi to the hostel and when we were checking in told them about the guy leaving us behind. "We're very sorry", they said, "please have a free cup of coffee in our resturant". Fair enough, we thought and did so while we waited for our room to be prepared. Then we saw the sign on the wall saying that all guests get a free cup of coffee while waiting for their room - welcome to China, we thought :-)

While in Xi'an, we made a trip to the Terra Cotta warriors - one of the biggest tourist attractions in China. They were quite impressive, but we were hoping to get a little closer to them. Unfortunately, they are set up so that you look down onto them from above and you don't really get that close.

In Xi'an, we also hired bikes and cycles around the city walls - a round trip of 14km.

From Xi'an, we took a 17 hour train journey south to the city of Chengdu. In the sleeping car lottery, we were assigned to a chain smoking chinese man. Thankfully he didn't smoke in our confined compartment, but did spend the entire journey (day and night) coughing up flem into a bin the way only chinese people can. Thankfully he was in a lower bunk, so didn't have to spit past any of us :-)

The hostel we stayed in at Chengdu was the cheapest we had come across so far, with beds for as little as EUR 1.50 per person. We decided to splurge and spent a whopping EUR 7 on a room to ourselves. About 10km outside Chengdu, is a Giant Panda breeding centre, complete with Giant Pandas (both big and small) and embarassing videos showing all aspects of how the scientists carry out the breeding. Autumn is the time when the baby pandas are born so we were lucky to see some new borns about the size of a kitten. They were all in incubators and we expect that the pandas get better health care than most Chinese people!

We booked ourselves onto a 4-day cruise along the Yangtze river, and ended up meeting up with a nice bunch of Europeans on an otherwise chinese boat. We were even blessed by being assigned 2 germans in the sleeping compartment lottery! Most of the Yangtze river is polluted and covered in a layer of smog, but part of our tour included a trip up into 3 little gourges which were really quite spectacular (although not as good as I'd seen in Norway).

By the time we arrived at our destination we decided we had spent enough time in China and so made a bee-line for Hong Kong.