Night Train

The train from Guilin to Shenzhen is seventeen hours long. Our's departed at 9:18p so we were in for a long night. The hard sleeper cars are arranged in open berths each with six beds, two high, two middle, two low. These compartments are situated on one side of the car with a narrow aisle on the other. The bed is also the seat you paid for, so if you didn't get lucky enough to book a bottom bunk, sitting up is near impossible as there is little head room in the middle and top bunks.

The beds were barely wide enough for a westerner, but amazingly softer and more comfortable than many of the hotel beds we've slept in these seven weeks, so we ate noodles, climbed into our bunks and drifted off as the train rocked its way down the track. In the morning rice gruel was served as the sun came up over the Chinese countryside. This was a big deal, because we had not seen the sun for a long time. We knew by noon that when we did get off the train, the weather was going to be beautiful.

Gettin' Outta Dodge

Yangshou's winding wet streets, mountainscapes and river views were magical, but a month and a half of cold gray days were wearing holes in our spirits and our socks. We needed to find the sun. By our second day we were plotting an escape route. Our desperation lead to a two hour online search for ways to somehow adjust our itinerary so that we could find ourselves on a tropical beach by the following evening. In the end, cost prohibitive flights and rooms already booked made this dream infeasible, and we were forced to call an audible. We left Yangshou with a nebulous plan to get to Shenzhen, a southern city in China on the border on Hong Kong, where the temperature might hit the mid-60s. This plan, according to our research, was going to be extremely difficult if not impossible.

First, we would have to get to the Guilin train station by bus, and then succeed in booking a same-day overnight train, unheard of in China. Add to this the fact that we had no lodging in either Guilin, in the case of a booking delay, or in Shenzhen in the event that we could board a train. Not to mention the fact that check out time in Yangshou was 11:30, the two-hour bus ride would land us in Guilin no later than 2pm, and we knew that the first train departing for Shenzhen would have us waiting for at least 7 hours.

We rolled the dice, found the bus, and jumped aboard. It was raining, of course, as it seems to every day we are in transit. After a near two hours of gastrointestinal discomfort from the previous night's hot pot and a screening of Baby's Day Out on the bus television, we lucked out by guessing our stop when all of the Chinese people got off. With minimal effort we found the ticket window, crossed our fingers and prepared for the worst.

After some pointing and picture drawing, we handed over our passports, 484¥, and were issued tickets for two hard sleepers for that evening's train! The teller seemed very surprised that we were buying a ticket for a train the same day, but don't believe the hype. It's possible, if only in the slow season. So with seven hours to kill, we hit the supermarket nearby to stock up on snacks. We got two instant noodle bowls, strange cheese and scallion savory pirouline looking things, coconut cookies, little oranges, caramels, and beer.

By this point it was so frigid and wet that after having a quick bite on the street for 10¥ each, we hit the waiting room and camped out there the six hours until our train came through.

- Ken and Davida

Yangzhou

The hotel room was spare. It was poorly lit, there were few amenities and though not frigid as the days in Xi'an, the window was open when we entered and the damp chill mountain air was cold comfort. As we said, we piled on the comforters and crashed, a full day of buses and planes having drained our energy reserves.

Torrential rainfall throughout the night woke us several times, and finally drew us out of bed early. We stepped onto the balcony and stood agape as the conical limestone karst mountains loomed over us, to our left and right, partially obscured by fog and clouds, as the Li river, straight across from the hotel, surged from the night's rain. The street below was relatively quiet save for a few colorful umbrellas passing by. Just as we were laughing to ourselves recounting the previous day's terrifying lightning strike in flight, the deafening sound of firecrackers below our window precipitated a reliving of that moment with uncanny timeliness. Shortly thereafter, a six piece band clamoring away from inside a small SUV rolling slowly down the street signaled the opening of a store, the birth of a baby, the unclogging of a toilet or something of the like... the Chinese celebrate everything by detonating ordnance.

The days in Yangzhuo were gray but brightened by the picturesque scenery, a bamboo boat ride and the amazing food. Beer fish, a local delicacy mimicked throughout China, was the culinary highlight. It consists of a fish of your choice, in our case catfish, caught locally from the river, poached in beer, and served in a chafing tray over tealights with treasured Guilin chiles, peppers, onions and tomatoes. It was some of the spiciest food we've had since arriving in China.

-Ken and Davida

The Karst Mountains of Yangzhou

The road from Xi'an to Yangzhou is fraught with bandits and dragons. The route is dreary, rainy and otherwise unpleasant. Alright, only some of that is true. It went like this: we left our lovely hotel room in Xi'an with our packs strapped on and walked fifteen minutes to the airport bus. The bus trip was over an hour long and the seats were cramped being that Chinese people are generally shorter than Ken. We sat at our gate for two hours then on the plane for another hour as we were forty minutes late for our scheduled take-off time, par for the course in China. We touched down in Guilin after a harrowing two hour flight during which the plane was nearly struck by lightning. Another bus awaited us at the Guilin airport to take us to the train station because naturally there is no train to the train station. There we were meant to catch the bus to Yangzhuo, a ninety minute ride. However, when we discovered that the Yangzhou bus bus would not depart until eight o'clock the following morning, we were crestfallen... and wet since it had been raining all evening.

We stood in front of a hotel in downtown Guilin and weighed our options. A cab would be three hundred yuan, around forty seven USD. A hotel room would be around the same amount and we were already booked in Yangzhou for the night. Not wanting to deal with more road time in the morning, we bit the bullet and grabbed a taxi. It was worth it. Darkness and wet roads lay before us. We had no idea where we were going and no orientation as to where we were. Over an hour later we pulled up to the Riverview hotel, a quaint residence on the banks of the Li river. Our room was spartan but spacious, and the balcony overlooking the river was worth the cheap upgrade.

It was late by this point, but the rain had abated. We thought about wandering the streets of Yangzhou to get a feel for our new town, but the ten or so hours it took to go door to door, the closed shop fronts and the chill mountain air made us take refuge under the three large comforters in the room. We called it a night and hoped the beauty of the Karst mountains would reveal itself in the morning.
-Ken and Davida

Xmas in Xi'an

We awoke early Christmas morning to sunlight streaming into our warm four star hotel room. As it had been quite some time since we'd seen the old boy, we laid abed for a spell soaking up his ultraviolet goodness. Our gift to ourselves this year was a trip to the see the Terracotta Army of Xi'an, a spectacular collection of life sized soldiers buried as funerary art for the emperor Qin over two thousand years ago. The idea was that he would need an army to protect and fight for him in the afterlife.

We layered up to combat the subzero temperature outside and walked fifteen minutes to the railway station to catch the 306 bus to the museum. It took an hour, cost just over a dollar each and was warm and comfortable enough. As we had been quoted a 150USD car service at the airport for the same excursion, we high-fived as the bus meandered its way to our destination.

The walk from the bus depot to the museum is a somewhat lengthy affair, lined with touristy restaurants as well as all manner of stands selling all manner of crap, from miniature figures of the clay soldiers to ceramic German shepherds to small battery powered seals that bark and balance balls on their noses. Ladies cajoled us with broken English to purchase their wares or eat their noodles as we hurried past, eager to get out of the cold.

The museum itself is essentially an enormous airplane hanger built over the excavation sight. It sits a few meters down from present day street level and is comprised of now roofless corridors full of ranks of the terracotta soldiers eerily poised as though ready to defend at any moment. Officers and infantry, horses and the remains of chariots stand guard facing east, the direction from which Qin's enemies would likely attack. Each statue's face is unique, each a very distinct personality. Among the legions are the remains of the fallen, fragments of once beautiful figures broken by the passage of millennia and the collapse of rotted wooden roof beams.

Our heads were spinning as we left. The work and care it must have taken to create such an amazing collection only to bury it forever was astounding to us. In fact, we were so blown away that we wandered into a restaurant for lunch that served us the most disappointing and one of the priciest meals we've eaten in China. Small plates of over cooked noodles, not the dishes we ordered, were presented to us and our attempts to contest the exorbitant bill were met with little more than indifference. You can't win 'em all.

We took the bus back to the city, warmed up at the hotel, found a small soup stand on a cold street and ate our Christmas dinner sitting at a low table on the sidewalk. It may not have been a Dickensian goose, but I couldn't have imagined a more satisfying and warming moment. Happy holidays, dear friends.
-Ken

Suzhou, The Venice of China

Take a thirty minute bullet train west from Sanghai for under 6USD and you will find yourself in a small, historic canal town called Suzhou... The cab ride was short and the driver friendly. Possibly the only personable cabbie in the country. However, when he wanted to drop us off in the middle of a six lane highway bridge, I thought we might be getting screwed. I asked him "are we here?" but he of course could not understand me. It must have been my Philly accent. He started rambling and pointing, first left, then right, then straight ahead, his gestures even more confusing than his dialect. Davida said, "Forget it. We'll find it." We alighted and scurried to the side of the highway where we discovered a stone stairwell leading down to the banks of the canal over which the bridge crossed and were instantaneously teleported to the China of three hundred years ago...

The stone streets were lines with red orb lanterns and quaint shop fronts. The canal was adorned with wooden barges which carried dozens of Chinese tourists along the waterways. Walking the narrow throughway, we heard the sonorous melodies of an oriental orchestra, and before long, came upon the source of the haunting tones. A lofted opera stage sheltered by a pagoda rooftop housed a three piece chamber ensemble opposite a pavilion from which we have since taken to spending the twilight hours.

After a painless check-in at our hotel, fortunately a stone's throw across the canal from that very pavilion, we entered our room and found it a darling first floor sanctuary whose windows opened right onto the sidewalk on the waterway, revealing this exquisite place from the most intimate of vantage points. Passersby gaped at us through our window as though we were the attraction, amused by the white people hanging out of it. Skippers stared as their barely seaworthy vessels chugged by.

Our first order of business was to find lunch. It was cold and rainy, as it seems to be every travel day for us, and it was this that prompted a minor lapse in judgement. Intent on finding a warm place to take refuge, our options slimmed as we passed one open-air restaurant after another, each with nothing but Chinese characters on the menu, until we finally came to a place with pictures and an actual door. But upon entering, we immediately realized that its differences were greater than just these. We managed to find what is probably the only Muslim Pakistani restaurant in town. And they weren't too keen on us, either. We ordered greens, some meat on a stick, and a chicken dish that turned out to be mostly tendon. And not the tasty, well seasoned sheep tendon we enjoyed in Beijing, but a chewy, crunchy affair that had the texture of nostril cartilage. It took 30 minutes for our food to arrive. And for the price we paid, we could have eaten street food from any of the dozens of stalls we passed five times over, in a quarter of the time. Oh well.

That evening we took a walkabout, and as the red lanterns were lit, the charm of Suzhou was further revealed to us. This is the Venice of China.

Today, we hit the streets like Bourdain, on a mission to eat everything strange. We were rewarded with unknown fishes, pork products, dumplings and fruits. Basted, fried, candied, and otherwise prepared, our awe and enthusiasm for it soon became quite a spectacle, and again we somehow felt that we were the attraction as tourists and vendors gathered to watch us eat. It is worth mentioning that we washed our meal down with baijiu, a unique Chinese liquor that tastes like moonshine, costs 1 dollar American, and is consumed exclusively by men over the age of 60. What a sight this white guy is with his thick beard and his baijiu eating fish on a stick in the middle of the sidewalk on a cold Suzhou evening.

Now we are back in our room listening to the catlike voice of a crooning karaoke singer drifting down the canal from a nearby bar. We might just put our names on the list.

Ken and Davida

Hot Pot Supper with New Friends