Week 39 - Lao Cai Province, Vietnam
AND SO: we made it to Vietnam. After resigning ourselves to our Back to Malaysia! Tour '09, we made one final assault on the Vietnamese consulate in Kunming and... got our visas in two days. So here we are, at the border town of Lao Cai, tired and hungry and cranky and forced to wait another seven hours before our twelve-hour train to Hanoi. Grand.
We meandered around Chengdu for our last couple of days, hanging out at lots of really nice little bars and taking full advantage of the first decent hot showers since - uh - since Australia, actually. Chengdu continued to impress even as it got colder, and we're making plans to move back here to work in 2010, when, hopefully, we'll be able to deliver on our commitment to make it through Tibet, Nepal, India and on toward Iran.
In the meantime, we headed back south, to Kunming. There we found another city suffering from extreme pleasantness - and this one with a bit more warmth into the bargain. I know - pleasant? Lots of words spring to mind when you think of Chinese cities, but "pleasant" isn't one of them, unless it's part of the phrase "as unpleasant as a colonoscopy performed by a student doctor with unsteady hands". But while I can't speak for the gargantuan colonies of eastern China, Chengdu and Kunming are both extremely nice places to hang out and cry yourself to sleep over how little money you have left.
But they are cities, and they are in China, so one still walks around to the musical accompaniment of men and women, young and old, spitting noisily onto the footpath or out the window of the bus, or (slightly less commonly) vomiting into the gutter. One still gets elbowed in the face by wrinkled grandmothers with bony elbows trying to get onto a bus that's half-empty anyway. One still gets run into by silent electric scooters speeding down the footpath. One still has to physically pick up old men in big hats who push in front of you in the forty-five minute queue for train tickets and then set them down gently somewhere where they won't bother you. Incredibly frustrating at first, it eventually becomes sort of fun: it's every man, woman and child for themselves in China, no niceties or formalities, biggest asshole wins. And I can be a fairly big asshole when I set my mind to it.
New Year's in Kunming was fairly low-key: we trawled the bars and cafes around the uni and then settled on our hostel balcony to watch the sky fill with Chinese lanterns floating slowly past like dead jellyfish. It was a great way to spend an evening, even if it wasn't quite sweatily-dancing-on-the-sands-of-Bondi-to-DJs-until-collapsing-at-10am level of awesome. But if New Year's Eve was lacking in energy, New Year's Day was a cranked-up adrenalin-fuck of epic proportions. People swarmed into the city from across the province; leaving the hostel was like joining in a rugby game with no ball, no teams and with points going to those who shopped for cheap household appliances with the most gratuitous violence. I got rammed repeatedly from behind by a young mother with a big trolley; Erin ended up fatally impaling a guy with a 30% off umbrella while laughing maniacally. Or thought about it more than was healthy, anyway.
We left that night on a sleeper bus bound for the border. The bus crawled along in fits and starts, stopping every twenty minutes before finally dying a slow death at about three o'clock in the morning on a lonely stretch of dirt road in the mountains. The driver and a couple of other helpful souls jumped out to fix it; we lay wide awake to the sounds of clanging and swearing til five o'clock, when the bus finally rumbled back to life.
But the damage was done. We would miss the only morning train to Hanoi, watching the clock tick as the Chinese border officials quizzed us endlessly on ridiculous questions about our passports (to Erin: "In this photo you have a piercing! Where is your piercing now? And why are the edges of your passport rough?"; to me: "In this photo you are wearing glasses! Why aren't you wearing glasses?", and so on). Then the customs official confiscated two of our books, claiming that they are forbidden in China. "But we're not going to China! We're leaving it!" we protested. "Doesn't matter," he said, and stood staring us down until we skulked away miserably.
So now, we sit and wait for the 6:45pm train, which will drop us in Hanoi at the enchanting hour of 4am. Good times. We are armed with some two and a half million dong, which is about enough money for a concert ticket back home. But wads of cash are always nice to fondle, regardless of how worthless they may be.
But tomorrow we will be in Hanoi; in around two weeks we will reach Saigon. And, looking around me now, at the quiet streets and friendly faces and speeding golf buggies (Lao Cai's tourist gimmick is replacing cars with electric golf buggies; go figure) I think that after a big sleep and a nice big juicy cheese and veggie baguette, I'll enjoy Vietnam quite a lot.
Hope you're all well,
Lachie
ps, Episodes 1-11 are up for viewing, and our techniques get more and more subtle - just what does the Pink Elephant sequence in Episode 10 mean? That's some straight-up impenetrable David Lynch shit there. The next few episodes will trickle through slowly as we're all split up, but we'll get there. Oh, and we busted the video camera trying to film ourselves on Dance! Dance! Revolution! machines in Chengdu, so expect the quality to drop even further from that point on. http://pingpongkapow.wordpress.com/
AND SO: we made it to Vietnam. After resigning ourselves to our Back to Malaysia! Tour '09, we made one final assault on the Vietnamese consulate in Kunming and... got our visas in two days. So here we are, at the border town of Lao Cai, tired and hungry and cranky and forced to wait another seven hours before our twelve-hour train to Hanoi. Grand.
We meandered around Chengdu for our last couple of days, hanging out at lots of really nice little bars and taking full advantage of the first decent hot showers since - uh - since Australia, actually. Chengdu continued to impress even as it got colder, and we're making plans to move back here to work in 2010, when, hopefully, we'll be able to deliver on our commitment to make it through Tibet, Nepal, India and on toward Iran.
In the meantime, we headed back south, to Kunming. There we found another city suffering from extreme pleasantness - and this one with a bit more warmth into the bargain. I know - pleasant? Lots of words spring to mind when you think of Chinese cities, but "pleasant" isn't one of them, unless it's part of the phrase "as unpleasant as a colonoscopy performed by a student doctor with unsteady hands". But while I can't speak for the gargantuan colonies of eastern China, Chengdu and Kunming are both extremely nice places to hang out and cry yourself to sleep over how little money you have left.
But they are cities, and they are in China, so one still walks around to the musical accompaniment of men and women, young and old, spitting noisily onto the footpath or out the window of the bus, or (slightly less commonly) vomiting into the gutter. One still gets elbowed in the face by wrinkled grandmothers with bony elbows trying to get onto a bus that's half-empty anyway. One still gets run into by silent electric scooters speeding down the footpath. One still has to physically pick up old men in big hats who push in front of you in the forty-five minute queue for train tickets and then set them down gently somewhere where they won't bother you. Incredibly frustrating at first, it eventually becomes sort of fun: it's every man, woman and child for themselves in China, no niceties or formalities, biggest asshole wins. And I can be a fairly big asshole when I set my mind to it.
New Year's in Kunming was fairly low-key: we trawled the bars and cafes around the uni and then settled on our hostel balcony to watch the sky fill with Chinese lanterns floating slowly past like dead jellyfish. It was a great way to spend an evening, even if it wasn't quite sweatily-dancing-on-the-sands-of-Bondi-to-DJs-until-collapsing-at-10am level of awesome. But if New Year's Eve was lacking in energy, New Year's Day was a cranked-up adrenalin-fuck of epic proportions. People swarmed into the city from across the province; leaving the hostel was like joining in a rugby game with no ball, no teams and with points going to those who shopped for cheap household appliances with the most gratuitous violence. I got rammed repeatedly from behind by a young mother with a big trolley; Erin ended up fatally impaling a guy with a 30% off umbrella while laughing maniacally. Or thought about it more than was healthy, anyway.
We left that night on a sleeper bus bound for the border. The bus crawled along in fits and starts, stopping every twenty minutes before finally dying a slow death at about three o'clock in the morning on a lonely stretch of dirt road in the mountains. The driver and a couple of other helpful souls jumped out to fix it; we lay wide awake to the sounds of clanging and swearing til five o'clock, when the bus finally rumbled back to life.
But the damage was done. We would miss the only morning train to Hanoi, watching the clock tick as the Chinese border officials quizzed us endlessly on ridiculous questions about our passports (to Erin: "In this photo you have a piercing! Where is your piercing now? And why are the edges of your passport rough?"; to me: "In this photo you are wearing glasses! Why aren't you wearing glasses?", and so on). Then the customs official confiscated two of our books, claiming that they are forbidden in China. "But we're not going to China! We're leaving it!" we protested. "Doesn't matter," he said, and stood staring us down until we skulked away miserably.
So now, we sit and wait for the 6:45pm train, which will drop us in Hanoi at the enchanting hour of 4am. Good times. We are armed with some two and a half million dong, which is about enough money for a concert ticket back home. But wads of cash are always nice to fondle, regardless of how worthless they may be.
But tomorrow we will be in Hanoi; in around two weeks we will reach Saigon. And, looking around me now, at the quiet streets and friendly faces and speeding golf buggies (Lao Cai's tourist gimmick is replacing cars with electric golf buggies; go figure) I think that after a big sleep and a nice big juicy cheese and veggie baguette, I'll enjoy Vietnam quite a lot.
Hope you're all well,
Lachie
ps, Episodes 1-11 are up for viewing, and our techniques get more and more subtle - just what does the Pink Elephant sequence in Episode 10 mean? That's some straight-up impenetrable David Lynch shit there. The next few episodes will trickle through slowly as we're all split up, but we'll get there. Oh, and we busted the video camera trying to film ourselves on Dance! Dance! Revolution! machines in Chengdu, so expect the quality to drop even further from that point on. http://pingpongkapow.wordpress.com/
