So it's been far too long since I've posted once again and have loads to catch you all up on! Luckily enough Cairns was a rather uneventful few days, taking a few days out to relax before our big flight to Beijing and the start of our Asian leg of the trip. The first two nights were pretty similar; the first saw us arrive in Cairns at about 7pm so we ate our free meal and enjoyed a night's sleep in the air-conditioned bliss that was Gilligan's hostel and resort. The second day we moved over to Coronas, explored Cairns a little bit and then enjoyed at free meal at the Woolshed (which in classic stupid-Michael fashion I repeatedly referred to as the Woolpack until Ben corrected me haha!) and then hit the hay pretty early again. Unfortunately Coronas didn't have air-con but we struggled through, made all the easier in the knowledge that we were only paying $10AUS a night - our cheapest nights to date I think...
The next day I took a wlak up to the Botanical Gardens in Cairns and a climb up Mount Whitfield with one of the guys from our hostel room who was a pilot up in Queensland doing some training to renew his license. Another meal in the Woolshed was followed by an evening out in Gilligan's bar, preceeded by pre-drinking in a couple of our friends' room where being the bad influences they are, they convinced us to drink goon spiked with vodka - it ended up being something of a messy night, including a certain travel companion getting thrown out of the bar for disobeying a barman's order not to drink anymore! As it turned out it was near closing time anyway and everyone was leaving so it didn't mar an otherwise amazing night and a good catch up with loads of friends we had made whilst travelling up the coast! The pictures speak for themselves. The next day I prepared to leave Australia, buying afew essentials and sending some postcards home before an early night ready for the bus in the morning.
We had a bit of a nightmare with the airport shuttle in the morning, having been missed off the list all together! Luckily they are habitually late and one that was scheduled to pick up a half hour after our own came to pick us up and we made it to the airport just in time to check in for our horrendous 24 hours plus in transit! As it turned out the actualy flights were rather short, varying from about 4 to 8 hoursm but we had big lay overs in Sydney and then Kuala Lumpur airports before our connecting flights. Unable to sleep particularly well on the flight to Kuala Lumpur, I caught around 6 hours shut-eye at the airport, despite falling asleep in one lounge only to wake up a few hours to find a whole extended family had moved in around me! When we finally arried in Beijing we jumped into a taxi and headed to the Happy Dragon Hostel to meet the girls. The roads in China were an interesting experience, there seem to be few rules and the driver seemed comfortbale taking our lives into his hands as he avoided crashing into traffic tuning into the road by only a hair's bredth a fair few times! That night we headed to the Hou Hai region of Beijing for our dinner. Our first experience was memorable, sampling 'hot pot' - which saw a number of meats and vegatables cooked in a large metal container filled with hot water and flavoured with herbs and spices. We made an incredible amount of mess but all left full,and determined never to try it again as it was far too much effort. Jet-lagged and ready for bed we returned to the hostel ready to start the tour we had booked for China the next day.
We woke up and checked out of the hostel (at about midday - a much more civilised time than Australia's 9 and 10am check-outs) and headed to the Chongwenmen Hotel, the first hotel on our 6 day tour. We had a free day until the evening where we'd meet the other guys on our tour so headed off to see the Yonghe Lama Temple, a working Tibetan Buddhist monastery in the city and one of the largest temples of its type in the world. We wandered around the complex amongst tourists and devotees, visiting the exhibtions of Tibetan sculptures and the 18 metre stature of the Buddha carved from a single sandlewood tree that even extended beneath the floor of the building which housed it. We also experienced our first culture shocks; the first being people staring at us without even the slightest mark of self-awareness, and the second the habitual hocking up of phlegm and spittle by the locals, again without even the slightest note of embarassment and in fact frequently with as much zeal as they could muster. That night we had an introduction meeting with our guide Andy and then got to know our fellow travellors over some Peking duck and at the karoke bar at our hotel, where I excelled performing Madonna's Vogue.
The next morning we woke up early to head to the Great Wall. Access to the wall is pretty tourist-friendly nowadays and we took a gondola up to the wall itself, avoiding the stallholders cries for us to take a look at their marchandise as we passed. The gondola ride was one of the most terrifying experiences to date, on some rickety old ski-lift God only knows how far above the ground, but I made it to the top eventually and loved the views from the wall. We took a short walk across the wall and I have never taken so many photos in one place in my life! The views were spectacular and we were blessed with good weather. After about an hour or so on the wall we joined the queue for the toboggans and slid our way down the hill to the coach-park and got back onto bus and headed for Hong Qiau market. We were harrassed to buy cothes for a good hour, assured that we would be offered a good price and that to look was free, but Ben came out with a new belt and Charlotte a new scarf so it was a successful trip. That evening we headed back to the hotel and then out for something to eat before we attended a Kung-Fu show, The Legend of Chung Yi. It was a funny show with kung-fu moves strung together with a narrative, but an ionteresting insight into the spiritual culture invovled with the martial art, even though it left us humming the tune for the next few days.
Our last day in Beijing saw us take in Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. The first a huge outdoor expanse now something of a monument to the Communist Revolution with a number of sculptures and statues to the People's Revolution, Mao's tomb and a monolith dedicated to the martyrs of the revolution. It is also the home of the Chinese parliament buildings, which were interesting to see albeit from the outside. The Forbidden City was amazing and one if my favourite sites on the tour. I wasn't expecting it to be quite as large as it was but well deserves its name, being a seemingly endless complex of buldings and padogas with intricate architecture dedicated to the emperor's private and public life. The dragon, a spirtual creature in Chinese mythology, dominated buildings as the emperors were considered the human embodiment of the beast. It was a great introduction into Chinese imperial culutre and we also learnt that Chinese lions are usually found in pairs to represent the male and the female, the former holding a ball as a symbol of imperial power and the latter a cub as a symbol of fertility.
That night we returned to the hotel to collect our bags and headed to the railway station to get the night train to Xi'an city. A 14 hour train we stocked up on instant noddles and got on board spending the night chatting to the others on our trip and then braving the three-story bunk beds,`punctuated with the occasional jolt as another train passed or we stopped. The girls weren't too impressed at having to travel several carriages to find a western toilet and avoid the squat toilets that are the norm in China but everyone took the trip in good humour.
When we arrived at our hotel we dropped off our bags and headed out to see the famous Terracotta Warriors. A working archeolgoical site we visited each of the pits,the first probably the most famous with the foot soldiers discovered by some farmers in 1974 after almost 2000 years of entombment and obscurity after their commissioner the First Qin Emperor died and the people rose up. Designed to follow him the the afterlife, the greater part of the warriors including footmen, horses and cavalrymen are still buried beneath the pits. There were a number of exhibits which were very intersting including a few which showed the warriors complete with original paint before the light faded that which was left.
On the way back to the city I stopped and took a bicycle tour of the city walls, 40Yuan got me access to the wall and 20Yuan hired me a bike for the afternoon which allowed me incredible views of the city both intra- and extra-mural. The former preserving something of its ancient character with buildings in the tradtional style and the latter contrasting with 20th and 21st century sky-scrapers. Despite a few problems with the bikes two fellow travellors and I made our way round in about an hour and returned in time to meet the rest of the group for some traditional noodles in a local restaurant. That evening I took a look around the Muslim Quarter, after quick visits to the Bell and Drum towers (the first traditionally sounded to indicate the start of the working day and the latter its end) beautifully lit in the night, where I bought a postcard and took a look at some of the souvenirs on offer.
In the interests of not making this the longest blog post in history I'll stop there and update on Hangzhou and Shanghai real soon - it also gives me an opportunity to remember exactly what I have been doing!
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