Chinese New Year train tickets are a big opportunity for corruption and for people that profit buying all the tickets and then reselling them on the black market. Buying tickets in Chinese New Year is difficult for locals and proved too much effort for a laowai. At the end we book flights to get to Xi’an and Tibet and then we hoped to train tickets to come back from Tibet once they became available (In China you can only buy train tickets 10 days before departure and only from the city of departure)

Cycling on top of Xian's wall

Xi’an
Xi’an was our first stop. The city has a long history as capital of several Chinese dynasties including the Zhou, Qin, Han and the Tang and as the endpoint of the silk route, one of the cities in China most receptive to foreign influence. Nowadays Xi’an is one of the biggest cities in china, part of the touristic triangle that most of the tours do in China and the place where the famous Terracota Warriors are.

The Terracota Warriors
The complex where the warriors are is impressive in size. It is clearly prepared for the hordes of Chinese tourists that visit it in high season. Fortunately we went on Chinese new year when all the Chinese are spending time with their families so we could explore the entire place by our own. The highlight of the exhibition is in a building named Pit 1 that contains most of the reconstructed terracota warriors and horses into battle line formation.  There are another two buildings with terracota warriors and chariots but those are quite unimpressive after visiting the Pit 2.

The terracota warriors

In 2008 I visited the great wall in the Janshaling-Samatai section. In 2010 Christina and I visited the Mutuanyu section of the wall. Even if this section is much more popular and developed for the tourism (there are more stores and there are even a couple of cablecars) the experience is the same. We hardly saw any tourist. It is exciting to hike the great wall, specially the wild areas where the vegetation makes walking difficult. I remember collapsed sections of the wall on the Janshaling-Samatai section but I don´t remember trees growing on top of the wall. We walk for many hours and my legs remembered the hike for several days. The bottom line is that even if it takes some effort, you really need to go to the wall. The decision is not what section to visit. There is something magical in the wall and you will meet it the moment you walk on top of it.

Looking ahead

The group of couchsurfers that visited the Wall with us

What Christina said:

Around Beiing there are three sections you can visit to see the wall. There is one very close which attracts the most tourists because you can get there with public transportation or via taxi. Then there are two sections that are further away from Beijing and therefore less people go to. We decided to go to Mutuyanu which is about 70 km away from Beijing.

Playing a little bit in one of the towers

We were lucky to go there on a beautifully sunny day and spent several hours walking on the wall and taking pictures of the amazing piece of architecture and the stunning landscapes surrounding it. Some parts of the wall are renovated but when you go beyond these areas you get on the unrestored “wild” wall which is a lot more fun to discover. Here you will meet trees on the wall
rather than other people and in some parts you can also camp although that was something we postponed to warmer seasons. We were so in love with the beautiful atmosphere the wall, landscapes and the afternoon sun created that we got back to our car 2 hours late, where a very angry driver was waiting for us. But we were happy.

Jumping on the Great Wall

The trip itself was interesting because we travel by train instead of flying. The cheaper train between Beijing and Shanghai takes one night hop and most of the people travel in sleepers. When we arrived on the train station 2 hours before departure the waiting hall was already full and once the doors opened, the Chinese people start running from the waiting hall to the train. There is a good reason for this. Chinese sleeper trains are very similar to transiberian trains but have a configuration in rows with 3 levels of benches. Your ticket only book the row in which you sleep but not the level so on boarding time, you need to run if you want to claim the lower benches. As we didn’t know this we let all the Chinese people board the train before us so we only had the top benches left.

This was actually my second time in Beijing but the first time for Christina. You can read what I wrote about on my first trip in 2008 about the city, the palaces and temples, and the opera and acrobatic shows. This time we visited the touristic sights around Tienanmen square, the forbidden city and the mausoleum of Chairman Mao. Those monuments are really impressive. I was very keen on visiting Mao because after seen Lenin in Moscow in June, I thought it was the correct year to show my respects to Mao as well. Chairman Mao is displayed in a laying position with strong illumination on his face. He looks a little bit less healthy than Lenin. Maybe because he died older? maybe the lights?

David meditating at Tienanmen Square

Beijing, that awful place to live

The pollution in this city is horrible. Unlike in Shanghai, you can feel there is a dense layer of smog at street level. The cold and the pollution takes away a lot of your energy. There is a big problem on the food safety side: I’ve visited twice Beijing and I’ve been food poisoned in both. Just for comparaison, It only happened once in Shanghai during the six months I’ve been living there.

A history apart are the traffic problems of this city. The city is massive and lacks a lot of infraestructure. Vehicles can barely move because the traffic is too dense, there are not a lot of highways but many multiple lane crossroads and massive roundabouts.

Chinese people playing Chinese chess in a park

Moving around in the city center as a tourist is a nightmare. Subway lines are insuficcient and the stops are really far apart. Taking buses is out of question for tourists because you need to master Chinese to understand them. So the only opntion to move around the city are the taxis. The problem is that the taxi drivers in Beijing are very spoiled. They normally ignore you when you hail them and if they stop, two things can happen. They may not like your destination and act like if they dont understand you and kick you our of the taxi or they may like it and try to rip you off asking for a ridicolous amount of money for the ride. We got tired of this and at the end we were hijacking taxis when they stopped on the traffic lights, ignore the complaints of the taxi driver and act as stupid foreigners. We were really thankful when the drivers took us without ripping us off.

I don’t think the problems affect only foreigners because I saw local people also losing their nerves. The root of the problem is probably that the taxi fare is too cheap. A taxi ride in Beijing is easily half of the price of Shanghai and as the Chinese government subsidize taxis in Beijing, they probably lost all their motivation to do their job. We could not find any phone number to call and send a complaint as in Shanghai.

Acrobatic Spectable

What Christina said:

Equipped with thermic underwear and warm hats we decided to face Beijing in December. We travelled there in an overnight sleeper train. The train station in Shanghai a lot more resembles an airport than a train station. There is a security check before entering (like everywhere in China there are 10 people standing around and nobody actually looks at your scanned luggage), there are several “duty frees” and there is a gate where you wait for the train, ours greeting us with an estimated 300 Chinese who all wanted to take our train too. Once our gate opened everybody immediately jumped up and, climbing over seats and gates, rushed to the train. Since we had designated seat tickets (for the hard sleeper category) we didn’t really understand this and waited till most people had left before heading to the train. We soon noticed why this was a big mistake.

Your ticket tells you which row your bed is in but in each row in the hard sleeper category there are 3 beds on top of each other, the top bed being the least popular one. Evidently, this was the one we ended up in. The problem with the top bed is that it is too close to the ceiling to sit on and that the opening from the ventilation system is right next to your bed so you have a constant draft of fresh air being blown at you. This is ok when your train is in Shanghai where the outside temperature is 15°C but once the train got close to Beijing and the landscape started getting snowy it was rather cold.

My first impression of Beijing was that it was a lot cleaner and less polluted than I had expected (although I would soon change my first impression). And it was cold. Very cold. The cold can be somewhat annoying when you spend an hour waiting for a taxi to be so kind as to stop for you but it can also be very amusing when you see the way the Chinese “equip” their children to stay warm. Wearing approximately 10 layers of clothes these children look like stuffed dolls with a little head looking out at the top. Very cute. The children probably remember Beijing as a very hot place where mum and dad had to carry them everywhere because they couldn’t move. As for the taxi problem we soon developed a technique of “hijacking” a taxi when it was forced to stop at a red light. Sometimes we were thrown out of the taxi again but often the taxi drivers brought us where we wanted to go to because they didn’t know how else to get rid of these stupid foreigners.

While in Beijing we visited the forbidden palace, the preserved corpse of Chairman Mao, ate Beijing duck and went to an acrobatic show. The actual goal and highlight of the trip however was to see the Chinese wall.

David jumping at Tienanmen Square

CEIBS Group picture

Infrastructure in rural China
It was my first time in rural China. I saw what I expected: Chinese villages look the same as Spanish villages minus the cultural differences. What surprised me is the amazing infrastructure this country has, there are highways and high speed trains everywhere. This country is investing seriously on itself with a dense transportation network that reminds me of Germany.

Chinese traffic rules
Another thing that surprised me are the Chinese traffic rules in the road. I was in the front seat so I could admire the skill of our bus driver. The driver was smoking constantly while watching a movie on a TV screen in the dashboard. The speedometer gauge was constantly at 0, but this was the faster bus I have ever rode. In fact we were most of the time in the left lane on the highway passing trucks, cars and other buses. The few times we were on the right lines it was because another vehicle was in our way on the left lane. In China is not a problem to pass other vehicles on the right side, but you need to horn to warn the other vehicle of what are you doing. Lights are optional.

Another group picture

Jumping next to the trail

* You can go hiking in China with flipflops but if you go in Korea you better get serious professional mountaineering equipment.

Highlights of the trip:

• We rented an economic, cheap car. We got a huge American vehicle. We drove it for three days up route 101 following the coast.
• We discover that Walmart doesn’t have fresh fruits/vegetables section. When asked, they point to fruit in cans and frozen vegetables.
• We tasted amazing doughts Vodoo Doughts @ Portland
• We had an outdoors bath in Bagby hotsprings. We were naked in public in America. Legally!
• We camped in a beach looking at the Pacific Ocean
• We drove over the skyhigh bridge that connects Oregon and Washington state.
• We camped next to a creek in a forest and we were close to being eaten alive by bears. Luckily they butchered salmons instead.
• We ate the best cheese macaroni ever and we visited the first Starbuck in the world in the pike market in Seattle
• We had central american food for lunch with Luis in Seattle. It was really good
• We rode the Amtrak from Seattle to Vancouver. Yes, there are trains in America. It was our first trip in a Diesel train because the line is not electrified. Amtrak’s train carts are manufactured by Talgo, an Spanish brand.
• I had a reecounter with Tim Hortons’s boston cream drought but somehow they don’t taste as good for me as some years ago.
• We went to a (heavily uncensored) comedy show. It was my first time in a live comedy show and I really like it!

The route we followed:

Hangzhou Lake (click for a bigger picture)

In Hangzhou I surfed Pan’s couch. This was my first experience in China and a surprising one. Pan hosts lots of couchsurfers and the night I was there, he was hosting 5 people from all over the world. We had a lot of fun together! Moreover Pan has a store in Taobao and he tought me how the Chinese electronic commerce site looks from the sellers point of view.

Couchsurfers in Hangzhou

Giulin is a place that lives out of the tourism, there are lots of souvenir stores and travel agencies where you can buy anything you can imagine or book any kind of outdoors activity. What is beautiful in this area are the landscapes and the best way to enjoy them is to take a boat from Giulin to Yanshuo, a small city 80 kilometers south of Giulin. So the first thing we did was book a tour to go to Yanshou the next day. You need to do some price shopping here because all the agencies offer the same tours but each one add a different markup you need to negociate with them.

From Guilin to Yangshou by boat

The boat trip was amazing. There is no way to describe with words how beautiful this place is. Check the pictures to get an idea!

Yanshou is another city where everybody lives out of tourism. Just 3 minutes after landing in this place we met Esther, a local guide that helped us a lot to locate a place to stay and to rent a motorbike. I will never forget her broken English and the permanent smile on her face. She was really fond of her office, which was a small table on the main commercial street.

In the afternoon we took the motorbike and we rode to explore the countryside. It was quite an adventure because our idea was to locate a quiet place to take a bath on the river, but instead we got lost, and by the time we found the river it started pouring. A lot. We got completely wet. We were totally wet and freezing but the weather changed very fast and soon after sunset we rode the bike back to the city

Guilin Scenery

The next day we did another touristic activity. In this area the rocks are very fragile and the water erode it quite easily. What happened during the last millenia is that water went underneath and slowly excave massive caves. Those caves are the reason of Guilin’s unique landscape. The ceiling collapsed while the supportive walls didn’t. In fact the hills/mountains are getting higher with the time because the ground gets eroded faster than the higher points.

The next day we explored one of those caves. Even if it was pretty far from the city it was worth the visit. I’ve never been in a such a massive cave, with impressive ceilings, amazing natural structures and colors. The cave features an interior river, a waterfall, a natural swimming pool with mud and a hot spring.

Time was running out and after having lunch on a place with amazing dumplings we took the bus back to Giulin and from there, to the airport. We arrived at Shanghai late at night, exhausted but really happy with the amazing time spent on the weekend!

You can do the boat trip in a big boat on in canoe. I recommend the big boat!

Sunset at Guilin

View David Grajal – Transiberian trip 2010 in a larger map

• From Moscow to Shanghai. A Transiberian story.
• Moscow
• From Moscow to Saint Petersbourg
• Saint Petersbourg, the Russia that looks at Europe
• How to travel by train in Russia
• Kazan
• Alcohol in Russian trains
• Russian dacha in Rodna
• Ekaterimburg and the Europe-Asia border
• Omsk and the secrets of online poker
• Krasnoyarks and the monuments on the 10 ruble note
• Irkustk the Paris of Siberia
• The baykal lake and Omkon island
• Ulan Ude, the place with the biggest Lenin head
• Russian cuisine
• Why Russians don’t want to live in Russia and my thoughts about Russia
• From Russia to Mongolia
• Mongolia, the land of Genghis Khan
• My transiberian journey. Conclusion.

Transiberian Wheels

Music to put you in Mongolian mood
This is the favorite song of Gotov, our travel guide in Mongolia. Every time I listen to this song a picture comes to my mind: Gotov riding a horse next to Genghis Kahn in the battlefield.

In Mongolia I found a beautiful grassland and landscapes full of smiling people. It is a place where the pace of time seems to be slower than in the rest of the world.

I got to know a man, Genghis Khan. He managed to keep a huge empire of grasslands half together. Mongols luckily had the best horses when horses was the transportation medium. I walked on the remains of the Mongolian empire, visited the old capital Karakorum and I imagined how that place was when there were thousands of Mongol warriors waiting for the Kahn to announce what country to invade next.

Jumping in Mongolia

I did a jeep tour in the north and center of the country with Serena, Julio, Johanna, our driver Himan and our guide Gotov. We drove through remote valleys and the Goby desert. I rode horses and a camel, I swam in a river and a lake. We visited the few Buddhist temples that still remain after the destructive communist period. This country was part of the USRR and you can see statues of Lenin next to statues of Ghengis Kahn.

When we were in the tour we were as far from civilization as you can get. There were not power lines, no pavement, no bridges. Sometimes there was cell phone coverage. This is how nomadic way of life can still exist in 2010. They use cellphones for communication and solar panels feeding lights,television and small electrical appliances.

Ulan Bataar
The capital is the worst part of the country. It is ugly and the most polluted city I have ever been. I was told it gets even worse in winter when the city is at freezing temperatures and everybody is using coal for heating.

I stayed in the Golden Gobi hostal, which I recommend because it has a good location, it is clean and because the owners (Bob and his sisters) are a lot of fun and willing to help you on everything you want. We were so happy in this place that one evening we cooked pasta for owners and guests.

Our Russian van

The tour
Serena, Julio and I decided to look for somebody that wanted to join our tour. The larger the group, the cheaper the price so we needed more people to join. We went to other guesthouses and sold ourselves and our tour as the best thing ever. We finally recruited Joanna, an American girl interested in doing a journey through the countryside on the same days as we planned.

The tour was a 6 days tour in North and central Mongolia. 280USD per person. The tour included the driver, the guide, the food, the entrances to monasteries, stays in the gers, gas and the vehicle. The vehicle is the same undestructible Russian van we used in Olkhom island. The only thing the tour didn’t include is alcohol, which in this region means the tours doesn’t include massive amounts of Genghis Khan vodka.

In Mongolia there are horses everywhere. Horse population is larger than human population.

During the tour we shared with Gotov and Himan many bottles of Genghis Khan Gold and we tried the dried Mongolian cheese and the mongolian tea. The taste of the cheese and the tea is weird and strong. Both are local specialities with an acquired taste. The best moment of the day was at night when we sang traditional Mongolian songs together.

Amarbayasgalan monastery
Our driver was Himan. He didn’t speak a word of English. Our cook and guide was Gotov. They were amazing people and we got along very well. After leaving the guesthouse we stopped next to the road to buy some audio tapes for the trip. Yes, audio tapes. They still exist. We bought the weirdest mongolian music we could find. Those tapes and Himan´s personal collection of Mongolian hits were our soundtrack for the 6 days tour. Other items we bought for the trip were mountains of snacks, some presents for the nomad families we visited (candy), a kite, a couple of soccer balls and a badminton set to have some fun.

Already on our first day we drove off road for a couple of hours. It was a good introduction to 6 days or serious driving on the plains. At the end of the day we arrived at Amarbayasgalan monastery. This buddist monastery belongs to the geluba order, the yellow tibetan order. The history of Mongolia and Tibet is very interrelated and the main nexus of union are the common Buddist beliefs.

The ger
The Ger is the Mongolian tent, a house designed to be packed and ready for transport in less than one hour. Nomad families move twice per year with the solstices. In rural Mongolia there is no private land so the nomads camp wherever they want. A ger has one room made with a circular wooden structure covered by a cloth made of yak. This cloth makes the ger water, snow and wind resistant. There is a coal stove in the center which serves as a heating as well. The door is always looking south and the furniture is circularly deployed around the ger. The top part is a window open to the sky and it can be covered with a cloth attached to a string named ‘navel cord’. It has a religious meaning. I was surprised by the smart design of the house and by how stable and versatile it seemed to be.

Ger camp

Posing with a Mongolian family in a Ger

Riding the mongolia horse, Genghis Khan alike.
The mongolian horses are robust but much smaller than European horses. We rode horses through an awesome grassland scenary. This was my first time riding for a long time a horse. It was fun to compare our skills with the little Mongolian children. They are trained since they are 3 year old to ride horses so the little kids rode the horses like an extension of their bodies.

Our favorite song.
This is the second track of this column. In our Mongolian tour we were listening mythical western stars from the 80 that are very popular here and some Mongolian authors. This song was our personal favorite and we had a lot of fun trying to sing it with Gotov and Himan. Listening to this song bring back many memories, driving off road in the beautiful grasslands with the only company of the ocassional ger, horses and yaks.

Kharakhorum and Erdene Zuu museum.
Kharakhorum is the old capital of the Ghenghis Kahn empire. You can imagine this place as a huge tent camp with thousands of warriors always ready to follow their leader on his quest to conquest the entire world. As it was a tent capital, there are no remains that give hints of how Kharakhorum looked like. Here you can find the country´s most important buddist monastery, most of which was destroyed by the Russian communists between 1936 and 1937. It was under reconstruction when we visited it.

Riding the mongolian camel.
We drove to the semi-gobi, the starting point of the desert from where you can see an unlimited amount of sand and dunes. In this place I rode a camel for the first time in my life. It was an even weirder experience than the horses, because they smell worse, they are much higher and they are much more stubborn.

Riding the camel

Wild horses in the Khustain Nuruu natural park.
In the Khustain Nuruu national park the stars are the formerly extinted race of wild horses named Przewaslki or Takhi. These animals have recently been recovered in collaboration with some European zoos. Now there are more than 250 horses in this park and around 2000 throughout the world.

A ger packed and ready to go

Once the tour was finished I needed to leave Mongolia and get to Shanghai ASAP because I was running out of time before the first day of classes. I hung out for just one day in Ulan Bataar visiting a buddist monastery and the national museum and then I said goodbye to Mongolia and the transiberian train.

I flew from Ulan Bataar to Shanghai on the first of July, 2010.

The most interesting thing about the bus was the entertainment system. The driver played several times the same DVD. It was a concert recorded in Moscow with popular Russian bands and a lot of western stars from the 80′. Between the stars, Albano, Bonnie M. and Sabrina. Did you think they were retired? Me too. I was surprised to see that Sabrina is still alive. I was shocked that she sang ‘Boys, boys boys!’ in the same way she did when I was a little kid. I clearly remember watching her singing the same song in Spanish Television in the eighties, in that memorable perfomance when her boobs went out of her bra. Her tits were the first ones I ever saw!

Then we took all our stuff and we did a passport control while the bus was being checked by the Russian police. They checked our visas and the Russian registration card as well. If you read somewhere that the registration in Russia is not need anymore it is a lie. The policeman spent a considerable time with my registration and my train tickets checking if I stayed longer than three days in the same city. If you are doing this same trip using this same border control, do your homework and register your visa and keep with you your train tickets.

I took some nice pictures in the border but a Russian policewoman saw me and forced me delete all the pictures I took on the border control. After the Russian control we drive the bus for aproximately 20 seconds to get to the Mongolian border control. We needed to get off the bus with all our stuff a second time to have our luggage and visa checked. The Mongolian police didn’t like my visa because somebody on the Mongolian consulate forgot to include my birthday on it, but he just complained loudly and let me get into the country without major problems.

The exciting first hours in Mongolia
On the baggage control I was witness of the fight between two mongolian women to put their things first on the Xray machine. On the right corner a small ugly Mongolian with a massive bag, probably more than 30 kilos in weight and on the left corner a huge ugly Mongolian with lots of 1Kg packages of Russian Rice. The things scalated pretty fast and soon after yelling, they start slapping each other! The Russian police needed to intervene to control the situation and calm them down.

Mongolian landscape

Somebody opened one of the bags of Serena while it was being checked on the xray machine. Nothing was missing but it served as a reminder that Mongolia is not a safe country. At least not as much as Russia. In Mongolia we needed to have a lot of care against pickpockets.

What about the Mongolian landscape? It is empty. There is nothing. No rivers. No roads. No towns. No industry. No people. Nothing. Not even trees or animals. Just plains and some mountains. In those first hours in the bus I fell in love with the empthiness of the Mongolian scenary. It is similar to the Siberian oblast, but without trees. It is similar to North Korea, but without the fields and without rocket launchers in the hills. It is unique. Green. Plain beautiful.