Day 83 - Hekou, Lao Cai

13.10.09

Pulling into the bus station just after midday, I go and eat my final Chinese meal before saying my goodbyes to the People's Republic Of China and entering the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Once on the other side, I am immediately pestered by someone who wants to change my money and another who wants to give me a lift on the back of a motorcycle to the train station. I politefully decline and so am obviously followed a short while by the money changer and then about 200m by the motorbike driver. Vietnam seems the same as China so far except that the signs are all in an alphabet that is based on Latin, which in theory should be easier to master and find my way.

Getting to the train station and buying my tickets onwards to Hanoi is easy than buying them back home. The people at the counter speak English, the prices for each option (hard seat, soft seat, hard sleeper, soft sleeper, etc.) are also posted on the window along with a timetable. It's over in a matter of seconds and far from the first stressful buying of tickets in China. I have 5 hours to kill, so find an internet cafe and whizz around on the net while guarding my bags and doing some research to prep for my Vietnam travels. The train leaves at 7.30pm and I am sharing with a Peruvian guy called Pedro Pablo and a Vietnamese man called Yen (pronounced with a falling tone) and a woman called Yen(pronounced with a rising tone). Chug, chug, chug and we are off to Hanoi...

Day 82 - Kunming, Somewhere on a road

12.10.09

Another very relaxing wake up and a saunter down to the post office to send my soon to be redundant China guidebook and mountain scarfs, and the assortment of dried leaves that I bought yesterday. Tonight my sleeper bus leaves at 7.30 and heads off south down to the border town of Hekou and from there it's a walk across the river and I shall be in Vietnam. I end buying some more Pu'er before I leave China so I can have some while I am wondering around the jungles, beaches and bustling cities of China's neighbour. It's quite sad to think that I will be leaving the country I have spent so long in and experienced so much in. I have been here since the 10th of August and have raked up 63 days travelling over a fantastic country, meeting some great people and learning about a fascinating culture, history and language. The next stop Vietnam, will, hopefully be equally as good, but I am not going to enjoy going back to a zero communication level as it makes everything so so hard.

I get on my bus at 7.00pm and we leave on time 30mins later. It's old, quite small and smells as if it has done many journeys to the humid and sweaty south China-Vietnam border, mmmmm. At about 1.30am the bus stops and I wake from my slumber partly and have a look around, but don't really take any notice and fall back asleep. when I really wake up at about 7am, we are still in the same place and the bus doors are open and there is a lot of traffic backed up around us. Out of the bus and down the road I find out that there has been an accident and an artic has literally taken out a small minibus, the debris of the crash spread out along the road a good 50m or so. I can't see any sign of the passengers as they would have been long gone, but outside the mini bus sits one lone trainer. We start moving at about 8am and arrive in Hekou at lunch time the next day.

Day 81 - Kunming

11.10.09

Beautiful lie in until 10am and slowly meandering out of bed and into the shower, all in all I'm out of the hostel at a very unrespectable midday for what will be my last full day in China, but I feel refreshed. I have nothing to do today really, apart from do a bit of planning for my onward travels, and I have decided to head straight to Hanoi and have some Vietnamese fun. I head over to the University district with it's many swish and fancy cafes, shops, restaurants and a shop that stocks English language books. 5 mins of quick browsing and I pick up a guidebook for Vietnam for 240Y, to put this into perspective I am currently paying 35Y per night in accommodation, can get a large meal for less than 10Y and a 500ml bottle of beer costs about 3-5Y. I guess they just know their market and that tourists will pay for the privilege to know about something before they get there.

After my big spending I head over to a tea shop and buy some Pu'er tea, famously made in Yunnan and what I sampled a few days before in Lijiang. I get to sit down and sample some of the teas and over the course of an hour or so I buy two Pu'ers, a green tea, and a Ku(bitter) tea, I'm quite sure I've not been duped as the teas are lovely, well worth the buy and I have enough to last for ages. Internet cafe in to the evening to see if I can finally get this blog up to date.

Day 80 - Kunming

10.10.09

We all get up apart from Ilya who is stay another day and head off to Tiger Leaping Gorge tomorrow, to catch our morning transport in very different directions. Michel is going to the airport to fly north east and to Chengdu, Chen is going north west(ish) to Shangri-la and I'm heading off south east to Kunming. It's another goodbye to some great people and again it's sad to say goodbye to people you meet along the way. You can form good friendships considering you eat, travel, sleep and explore all with the same people and spend more or less all of your time with them. The journey to Kunming is an average 9 hours or so and over the course of the 500km the weather gets hotter and hotter and I am no longer in the relative cool of China's highlands. The city is relatively small for China's standards and seems quite relaxed and green, with it's tree lined roads and laid back atmosphere.

A bit of shopping and I buy some new headphones as my Heathrow £40 duty free pair have broke down, Gutted! Also to the global firm that is the giant Walmart plonked in the middle of Kunming. It's heaven as I love strolling around the Chinese super markets at home and this is like one massive house party, if I was back home I would come out with trolley loads of weird and wonderful things.

Day 79 - Lijiang

09.10.09

Today Chen invites us to go with him to a small town called Suho which is right near Lijiang and shares it's old world charms, but in a more rural setting. Ilya needs to go and change some money first, so he sets off to get it done and in the mean time we potter about the hostel and grab showers, wash clothes etc. An hour passes, and then another one and we think that we must have lost our Russian companion. We decide to go and grab some brunch and Chen takes us to a Lijiang hot pot restaurant which is delicious and with an interesting decor, pig carcasses being dried on racks by fans along one of the walls. Chen insists on paying for lunch, the taxi fare to the restaurant and the bus fare out to Suho, he won't accept our money and wants to treat me and Michel to everything. We call the hostel and ask for Ilya but 4 hours later and there is still no sign of him.

Suho is lovely and so laid back, we hit a cafe and drink espressos with cheesecake and tiramisu, Manu Chao playing on the stereo system in the background, incense swirling up next to the window and big deep sofas to recline into. This really doesn't feel like China and it seems like I am in a seriously relaxed coffee bar in Camden somewhere. When we eventually pull ourselves back to the hostel in the late afternoon, there is still no sign of Ilya, he must be seriously lost and without a mobile phone there is no way to contact him. Chen makes us some tea in the traditional and old fashioned way, it's delicious. We also have Pu'er tea, which is a traditionally made, old fashioned tea and is lovely, it also stimulates your appetite and I am starving after a few cups. Ilya eventually makes it back and tells us that he got lost several times, eventually made it to a bank in the afternoon and then spent over two hours searching for the hostel. Epic. We all head out and Ilya takes us to a place he found where we drink Chinese moonshine, two small glasses equate to about 4 UK shots and it definitely packs a punch.

Day 78 - Shangri-la, Lijiang

08.10.09

Off to Lijiang on the 1pm bus and we spend a good amount of time trying to work out whether Ilya can fit his bike on board or not. It doesn't look like it will fit, and in the end, we leave it behind as a gift for the staff at the bus station. The journey doesn't take too long and we pull into Lijiang about 5 hours or so later, 'only' suffering one burst tyre on the way, which our driver doesn't know how to change, so end up waiting for another driver to come along and help him fix it. It's quite ridiculous when you think about it, in the past 2 weeks, I have suffered 3 burst tyres on bus journeys, I don't think I've ever had one on a bus journey before.

Once in lijiang we get a taxi to the road to our entrance at the old town (It's all pedestrianised), apparently the old town is like a labyrinth to navigate and so a taxi to the nearest point is the only way. Luckily our hostel is about 50m from where we get out and it is all remarkably easy. In our room we also share with a Chinese man from Shangdong called Chen Feng who seems very quiet, but then if you can't speak English and we are all speaking it, then I can understand why. I tell him that we are going for some food and does he know anywhere good, at which point he dons his coat and takes us to a nearby place where we have a wonderful noodle/spicy/broth concoction. He then takes us on a tour of the old town of Lijiang, which is huge and beautiful. It has a strange vibe about it as it's very tourist orientated in places, but still retains a beautiful charm. We all go for beers in the evening, which I shout for as it's kind of like a celebratory job drinks. It's weird being the main point of communication between Michel and Ilya and Chen, but I am the one with the best grasp of the language, my aim when I get back home to the UK is to keep it up and keep learning. It's a great language to speak and is quite fun to learn.

Day 77 - Shangri-la

07.10.09

Today I'm going to try and extend my visa, apparently Shangri-la is the place to get it done. It should be more or less on the spot, as opposed to other places which can take 3-5 days. I'm camped outside the office at 9am and pick up my forms and am told to come back in the afternoon to get it finalised after they have done their checks. Alan left early in the morning, leaving me, Michel and Ilya to go for a wander, but Ilya isn't ready so it's just my bearded Latin friend, we have a walk around the Gompa overlooking the old town with it's colossal prayer wheel, definitely built for the tourist industry and then rendezvous with Ilya for a BBQ skewer lunch. The afternoon sees my visa extension processed at the speed of light and I walk away with another months stay in China and only 16 quid lighter (Much better than the 100+ it cost me to get it in the UK)








The development of the day happens when I check my email in the evening and find that I have a message from Procter and Gamble about my start date and my brand. To my humongous surprise and colossal shock, my start date isn't next year around February or March like I thought it was, but is in fact now on the 1st December, with my brand Salon Professional. That puts a massive spanner in the works as I don't want come back to the UK at the end of November for literally two days and then head straight over to Geneva in December. My Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand mission now needs some serious thought and planning as I don't have time to complete it all. I have around 3 or 4 weeks or travelling left, time to get some planning on the go and decide my next steps.