#39: Viva Vietnam

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/

#38: Dead Goat Christmas

Week 38 - Szechuan Province, China

THE HIGHWAY: continued to beckon to us in Litang, where I last left off. Litang was a stunning little town, but the altitude of 4,000m was just too much - doing up our shoelaces became an Olympic sport; walking down the street a marathon of endurance; sleeping in our beds a cacophony of noise as our hearts beat furiously to keep up with the demand for oxygen. We would have adjusted within a few days, but lacking the time we decided to push on to Kangding.

The ten hour ride thereafter was the worst we have experienced on this trip. It wasn't just that it was dangerous in places (it was) or unspeakably dull in others (it was) but that we sat up the back under the air vent half a foot above our heads, which served the twin functions of giving us something to smash our heads against going over each bump in the road (and the road was pretty much one long bump) while simultaneously spewing clouds of choking dust over us constantly, so that our hair and clothes were thick and crunchy with the stuff after an hour or so. In the morning, with the road blanketed in ice and snow, the driver swerved around clifftops and left Erin staring fixatedly out the window with exactly the same expression on her face that you see on young children watching Bambi when the mother gets shot. In the afternoon, with the roads dry and dusty and the landscape flat and featureless, the driver slowed it down so that we could feel every bump, inhale every dust particle (as well as those tasty tuberculosis particles floating around from the other passengers), and get the maximum amount of enjoyment from the whole thing.

But we made it. In Kangding, a fairly large city squeezed into a deep valley, we met up with a Portuguese-American for a couple of nights of cheap Chinese liquor to defend ourselves from the cold - and oh my, it was cold. Kangding lies at an altitude of 2600m, but it was far, far colder than anywhere we'd been, higher or lower. It was so icy that even wrapped up in all our layers it was only possible to spend about twenty minutes outside.

Strangest thing about Kangding - remember this is a large, completely modern city - is that, walking around one day, it started to snow a tiny bit. This was pretty exciting, as although we'd driven through acres of packed snow, it had never snowed on us before. So we walked around feeling pretty Christmas-y, with tiny flakes falling on our faces, when we started to feel a stickiness under our feets. We looked across the street, where, on a bridge in the middle of the city, was a small herd of goats and yaks. People were picking the ones they wanted for dinner that night. They were being slaughtered and skinned, right there on the street.

We were walking in a flowing stream of goat and yak blood, quickly congealing and freezing under our shoes.

(apparently that was China's way of saying, "Merry fucking Christmas, foreign devils!")

From Kangding we started on the last leg of our journey, on our first proper-sized bus in China, to Chengdu in the northeast of the province. Perhaps it's the results of spending a while at altitude, but Chengdu seems like a perfect city. It's compact and clean, quiet (all the motorbikes are electric), choc-a-bloc with great bars, great food, and friendly people (well, friendly in the standard Chinese pushy-and-rude sort of way). Erin and I came within inches of deciding to stay and work here; in the end it was only our continued memories of working in Bangkok and the promise of an Australian summer that dissuaded us.

Adam left us in a puff of smoke; we spent our last couple of nights getting drunk and silly and then, early Christmas morning, he was gone. Off to Nigeria by way of Bulgaria by way of Hong Kong, Adam was an absolute joy to travel with for the last three months, an ace at keeping the energy levels up and the excitement flowing, and we're going to miss him a helluva lot.

Subsequent to that, Erin and I suffered a harsh lesson in the importance of planning your travels in advance. With Tibet out of the picture we'd planned to waltz across the border to Burma. But from China, permits to Burma cost more than permits to Tibet, so that was out. Vietnam was another option, but two weeks to obtain our visa is two weeks that we can no longer afford, money-wise. So instead we've planned a Great Railway Bazaar, travelling by train from here in Chengdu all the way to Melacca in Malaysia (with a bus interval in Laos, seeing as though that country has precisely 13.5 metres of railway track, all on a bridge in the Mekong, left by the French after their planned Vietnam-China railway fell through).

It's an exciting plan, as it gives us more time in Malaysia - the one country that it felt like we rushed through. We leave today, for a 19-hour journey on the 4:10 to Kunming.

Hope you all have a fantastic new year,

Lachie

#37: From Here We Go Sublime

Week 37 - Szechuan Province, China

BIG NEWS: this week is that we have made the decision to turn back from Tibet, with not enough time on our visas, too much money for the permits, and too much general hassle. Plus, we're currently at 14,000ft and feeling a touch of altitude sickness - Tibet rarely drops below 18,000ft. So, instead, we'll be continuing north as far as Chengdu, which we should reach by Christmas. Adam will then fly out to meet some friends in Bulgaria while Erin and I will loop back south to cross the border into Burma. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

It was about a week and a half ago that we left Dali for Lijiang. Both are stunningly beautiful cities, full of the cobblestone alleys and gushing canals that most people assume disappeared from China with the first Coca-Cola sign. To walk around in during the day, wrapped in sweaters, jackets, scarves and beanies, surrounded by cherry blossom trees, they were exceptional.

But they're also complete tourist traps. Lucky we were here in winter: we were told by a couple of people that Lijiang, in particular, gets so crowded during the summer that people are habitually shoved into the canals by the force of the mob. Even in winter, it was a little disconcerting watching the endless groups of Chinese tourists obediently trotting along behind a tour guide armed with a large coloured flag and a megaphone. And nightlife: forget it. Cheap beer in Lijiang ends at sunset, after which you pay a ridiculous $9AU for a small light beer. After a couple of nights we caved in and spent $27 for three; two minutes after finishing we were told to order something else or get out.

We got out. Dali and Lijiang are one-day towns; their appeal is reliant on you not having time to notice the shit between the cracks. So we pushed on north to Tiger Leaping Gorge, where, surrounded by snow-capped peaks of 20,000ft or more, we trekked for two days along the ridge above the gorge. It was spectacular; we were covered in dust and our feet ached from the long climb but reaching the peak of the ridge and staring out into a 16km long gorge framed by those mountains was indescribably beautiful. China gets more and more beautiful at every turn; usually there are enough annoying aspects to match the good things but not here: alone on the track apart from the occasional goat-herder or trader carrying his goods by pony (plus a couple of Swiss backpackers with whom we had a drunken, stumbling night of draining bottles of cheap Chinese liquor), we felt the kind of peace that we had assumed China was incapable of giving.

From there to Shangri-La, at 10,000ft, where Tibetan prayer flags strung from hillsides and temples littered the countryside; where yaks replaced the cows in the paddocks and feral pigs replaced the feral dogs on the street. Crested by a massive monastery filled with dancing monks, people swinging prayer wheels, and lurid hypercolour murals of the gods and spirits, Shangri-La marked a massive difference from the China we'd seen so far. And we had it all to ourselves; even the beautifully-preserved old town was a ghost town with the freezing weather. Unfortunately, we weren't really in the mood to notice it: we were cold, we were tired, we were nauseous and breathless from the altitude. Basically: we were lame. So we stayed indoors, chewing on Tibetan bread ('baba') and tea eggs and rice porridge.

Then we thought: Hey, why don't we go somewhere even higher and colder?

Which is how we ended up here. We set out two days ago on a road infamous as one of the most dangerous in the world, the Szechuan-Tibet highway, little more than a dirt track skirting narrow ridges with sheer drops of a kilometre or more on either side. For ten hours on the first day we tried to act manly and not whimper and cry "OhgodfuckI'mgonnadienopleasefuck" as the bus grunted its way through passes layered heavily with snow, surrounded by mammoth peaks in every direction.

I tried to pass the time solving problems (as in, "How many flimsy-looking pine trees clinging tenuously to the cliff face would it take to stop a 4-ton bus of screaming passengers from rolling down that cliff?", or, "How many times can the bus roll down that hill before one of those giant pieces of heavy jagged metal that they've loaded into the aisle is certain to fly around and decapitate me?"); and eventually made it into the town of Xiangcheng with my dignity intact and my pants comfortingly dry.

Our dignity didn't last long there, however. Xiangcheng is less a town than it is a bunch of people working a vast transport scam. Namely, the woman supposed to be selling bus tickets onto Litang refused (illegally) to sell them to foreigners (we had been told by an expat in Shangri-La that this would be the case; this woman also happens to run a far more expensive - and therefore profitable - taxi service to Litang). We then tried to wake up early in the frigid morning and bribe / blackmail / violently coerce the busdriver into letting us on the bus, but he was having none of it, and when Adam and I tried to kick some ass he quickly subdued us with the "Seven Dragon Fists Beating the Shit Out of Weak Crying White Men" technique. How were we to know that he knew Tai Chi? Our language was no help; Erin and I haven't come far enough in our Mandarin studies and even Adam's skills aren't good enough to say "Holy Fucking Christ why are you doing this to us?".

In any case, we eventually ate a big serving of humble pie (tasting a lot like rice porridge) and shelled out the extra money to share a minivan with a Tibetan man whose breath smelt like all your worst nightmares, a Chinese man who inexplicably whimpered on every third breath for the entire trip, and an irritating German who couldn't tolerate the locals smoking in the van and so opened his window to a -16 degree breeze that cut through us like a knife covered in thick poison which is, itself, covered in rusty steel barbs which are then cursed with infinite misery.

At least the road was paved this time. It wound over endless arid plains, looking more like the scenery you'd expect to see in Iraq or Jordan than here. On each side frozen rivers wound by like white ribbons threading across the boulder-strewn landscape. It was a breathtaking 5-hour journey (in more ways than one), and left us here, wheezing and dizzy in Litang.

If Tibet gets any more Tibetan than this town, I'd be surprised. It's quite rare here to see a Chinese face, or to hear Mandarin spoken (unfortunate, since we know absolutely nothing in the Tibetan language). Yaks wander the streets; the motorbikes are ridiculously pimped out with streamers and flowers and psychedelic mudflaps; walnuts and dried apricots have taken over as the market food item of choice, and we are continually mobbed either by friendly faces shouting "Hello! I love you!" or robed beggars (some with demonic face-masks) chanting something that sounds like the word "Ziggy" over and over again, like "ziggyziggyziggyziggy". The beggars here are the most prominent and persistent since Battambang in Cambodia, which seems odd as the Chinese government now gives welfare and beggars have been thin on the ground elsewhere in the country.

We go to some hot springs today for a bit of blessed relief from the biting cold, then we continue our meandering way down the highway to Chengdu, which with some luck we shall reach by Christmas. Hopefully there will be showers there (showers having disappeared somewhere around Shangri-La). I will hopefully write again by Christmas, but in case I don't: Merry Christmas to each and all of you, hope it brings all the peace and happiness and video game consoles that you just know your parents got for you.

Lachie

ps Episodes 7 and 8 are now up, covering our last few trips around Thailand. We're going to try and push through as much as possible before we split up, so expect an onslaught of Ping Pong Ka-Pow-age over the next week or so. http:\\pingpongkapow.wordpress.com

#36: Into the Belly of the Beast

Week 36 - Yunnan Province, China

CHINA IS: everything you think it's going to be. It's loud, it's dirty, it's smelly, it's smoggy. It's crowded, it's beautiful, it's utterly frustrating. It's: scratched kung-fu movies on sleeper buses, it's: old communists sitting calmly with a cigarette watching the dream die, it's: young women on tiny mobile phones in expensive boots and scarves. It's: plump middle-aged couples playing mah-jong in the park, it's: grim-faced men spitting on the street, it's: families huddled around outdoor tables hosting a gargantuan banquet of every edible thing known to man. It's: neon lights. It's: traditional temples with endless whirrs and clicks of cameras. It's: stunning mountains and streets lined with cherry blossom trees.

What I didn't expect, though: it's all happening at once, one massive enthralling mashed-up stir-fry of cliches and surprises.

Our last few days in Laos passed in a rush - from beautiful Luang Prabang north to Luang Nam Tha, past innumerable villages of bamboo huts staring out across the valley. In Nam Tha we paused awhile to sit by the river and smile at the young children who approached cautiously with shouts of "Sabai-dee!" and then ran screaming when we turned and replied. A couple of nights in a Chinese-run guesthouse graced with large portraits of Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin while I overcame a stomach bug, then onwards. From the jungle we caught a rumbling bus over a Chinese-built road that had completely collapsed in some areas, leaving gaping holes that tumbled over nerve-wreckingly high clifftops.

At the Chinese border I expected trouble - a bag search, a bribe, a full-body inspection. Instead, the official quizzed us endlessly on what each part of the Australian coat of arms represented - not because he was suspicious of us but just because he was interested. We made some stuff up - "Um, I think that thing represents our greatest poet, Banjo Lawson..." - and then we were in China.

From the border town of Mohan on to Jinghong in an air-conditioned minibus cloudy with cigarette smoke (I have never seen a people as determined to smoke in every place they can possibly dream up as the Chinese - and that's coming after "Of course you can smoke in the cinema" Cambodia. Adam reports that one can still light up on some Chinese planes.). We crossed the Mekong - the fourth country in which we have sat by that river - into Jinghong and wandered around town, taking in the smells of hard work and industry and then coughing it up later in black snot and phlegm. It's certainly odd being around people who are constantly working after the "Maybe tomorrow" countries we've been living in for the last eight months. China seems absolutely full with things and people doing things. Erin and Adam, hyper with the excitement of a new country, buzzed about the streets exclaiming "Look at that!" "No, wait, look at that!" while I dragged along behind, tired and cranky and struggling to breathe in the smog.

From Jinghong we took a seventeen-hour sleeper bus - a delightful cornucopia of smells and sounds, let me tell you - to the old city of Dali, towards the northwest of the province. To give you some vague idea of the size of China: we have been travelling in modern buses, on modern highways: we have had more than twenty-two hours of straight travel: and we're still only halfway through the lowermost province.

After a long period of travel you can feel like you've been living on a constant diet of spicy squid-flavoured potato chips and sleeping pills, so here in Dali we shall rest up for a few days. It is a beautifully-preserved old town, strung with restaurants churning out stunningly-good food and criss-crossed with canals and lines of cherry-blossom trees. It's surrounded by mountains and is perched on a large lake - the air is crisp and cold and the spectre of winter has kept it empty of non-Chinese tourists. But it is freezing - we've bought some cheap thermals, and gloves, and a second layer of jackets, but I don't know how well they'll last us - and it's only going to get colder from here.

Our Mandarin is coming along much more rapidly than I had supposed it would; after three days we seem to have most of the essentials covered - introductions, bargaining, ordering food, and locating toilets. Though the latter is something we try to avoid, since Chinese toilets are, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the worst toilets I have come across anywhere in the world. Papua New Guinean toilets were generally nothing more than a hole in the dirt, but at least most people seemed willing to aim for that hole. Going to the bathroom here is like running into a burning building to save a child: cover your face and get in and out as fast as humanly possible.

But in both its good and bad aspects China is absolutely captivating. A lot of people I know - including myself, up until a couple of months ago - have no real desire to travel to China. It seems crowded and dirty and pushy and polluted, and whatever seems beautiful about it one can find elsewhere - in Nepal, say, or Mongolia, or Vietnam. But that misses the crucial element that one only finds by coming here, which is that you simply cannot take your eyes off the entire dirty, noisy, perfect mess. This is a mammoth country, larger than you can imagine, and yet it's entirely filled - things are constantly happening or on the verge of happening; there is always something to see or to do or to have done to you.

From here we travel north to Lijiang, from where we make the crucial decision to take the hard road through Shangri-la, across icy roads traversing the snow-capped mountains of Szechuan to Chengdu; or whether we retreat to Kunming, to the comfort and convenience of the Chinese railway. Are we mice or men? I'm hedging my bets.

Lachie

ps, Episodes 1-6 of Ping Pong Ka-Pow are all uploaded; we'll try to churn another out over the next few days. pingpongkapow.wordpress.com