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.

Sheep Placenta cream

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

The passional dance show on the first room of the pavilion

The lines for all pavilions were amazing. Lines of 5 hours in most European pavilions and a 6 hours queue for Saudi Arabia Pavilion. We were lucky because CEIBS could gave us VIP passes for the Luxembourg, Italian and Spanish pavilions.

The CEIBS group that visited the Expo

The Spanish pavilion
The first room of the pavilion is amazing. The second room is very weak because the message is not clear and the third room has Miguelito. Nobody really knows what is doing there but it helps to create hype and attract media.

The best part of the visit, the restaurant in the Spanish Pavilion. I had amazing croquetas! Almost as good as the ones my mum cook.

My real passport with the stamp of the Spanish Pavilion

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

I think we managed our space and time very well. I was pretty busy with CEIBS tight schedule  but I could find some time to show them around some of the most representative places in Shanghai. They also travel by their own in the city and they know the city much better than me!

Serena and Julio arrival

The best moments were always in restaurants or pubs. Chinese food is a bit weird for our taste and the higienic conditions are not always up to Spanish level. It’s funny to see how people react in this stomach-hostile environment!