No, full.

We were up at 6am and went into the town of Yichang to figure out a way to get to the southwest. Turns out, there wasn't much leaving from there to where we wanted to go. You either had to take a bus to a city 3 hours away, then a train or a heady mix of trains and buses and even the travel guy didn't know the places we were going. Furthermore, the guy at the travel agency would keep saying there were seats on this train or that train and when we tried to book it, he would say, "No, full." What are we supposed to do? We finally pinned down a two leg plan, taking the night train (11hours later that night) to Hua Hua, then onto Kaali and figure out our exact route to the Vietnamese border from there.

Today was also our 1 year anniversary, September 5. We had a lot to be thankful for in the last year and it was hard to imagine this time last year that we'd be celebrating it looking for a place to do laundry in Yichang, China! We made the most of it and had an amazing dinner and Andy even got imported wine, from France (You don't even want to know about Chinese wine). Then a walk along the lovely river that we had just cruised down. We also didn't know we'd be spending the night on the train, but we had to get to where we were going when we needed to get there. It was scheduled to leave at 11pm.

At that hour, the Yichang train station was creepy at best. And we tried to read a little, but everyone seemed to keep staring at us as the only Westerners in the city, much less the station! Combined with the overall dinginess and the wafting of air from the open restroom inside, it was downright distracting. Then we learned the train was at least an hour late! It did give us a chance to try to communicate with the drunk locals though, one of whom was especially intrigued with Andy's copy of Bill Clinton's "My Life."

When we boarded, it was actually quite pleasant. We had an entire sleeping compartment to ourselves with no conductors knocking in the night. We got into Hua Hua an hour late, but had met a nice Chinese man, former military guy who was now a teacher of "Politics" at the University there (mostly the political philosophy of Mao Zedong and Karl Marx, he said). Luckily, he cut into the front of the line and bought his and our tickets (as he was on the same train) to Kaali, the 'small' city to the west.

His former military service, and now ID card, allowed him a discount on the ticket and to be let through to the platform before everyone else. Luckily, he took us with him! Although it didn't end up making any difference as the entire train was packed to the gills. He had said we'd be able to find a seat in the restaurant car, but that didn't happen as they said no one could sit in there. So we had to take our full gear inside the train, fighting for space in the aisles with people, while trying to upgrade our non-reserved "seat," to either a reserved seat or sleeper spot on the 'black market,' which we found out is just a way for conductors to make extra money -- and they make a lot of it. As if that wasn't enough, in the standing room only aisle with people constantly trying to jostle past us and our huge packs here comes a little restaurant cart trying to get through. We were thinking, are the boiled eggs THAT important at this moment in standing room only train with people fighting for black market tickets?!! We finally got ours, a hard sleeper, the only problem was it was 9 carriages ahead down the way. We fought our way, car after car with our stuff, and at this point Sarah was about to lose it. She was so upset at bumping every person's head we walked by she was forgetting the words for 'excuse me' and instead saying 'how much is it?'! We finally found our place in the middle of constant chatter, eating, and a TV blaring a dubbed version of "The Fifth Element" and still were able to fall asleep for an hour and a half. When we woke, all the same noises were going on, and the same family of girls were playing with each others hair, talking small talk, and picking at their noodles.

When we got to Kaali, we needed to get to the bank before it closed as we had heard there were no other banks or ATMs where we were going.
We needed to go to an actual bank branch because, unbelievably, we were still having ATM problems. For some reason, both of our cards were now being denied on "technical problems." We would later find out from Citibank that there were no more problems on their end. No more security flags. Nothing. This Chinese "glitch" would plague us for the rest of our time in the country. Luckily, we reached in and pulled out a last resort: Kathleen Ku had given us a wedding gift of American Express Travler's Cheques in time for our trip. We had to wait until the next business day for the Bank of China to cash them though, so we used the very last of our American cash just to make it through the night.


After cashing the cheques the next day, we planed our next steps and were a little exhausted so we decided to just stay in Kaali and not do any day trips. Andy got his jeans repaired. Amazingly, the woman refused to take the money (only 30 cents) because her sewing machine was acting up and she didn't feel she had been able to do a proper job, even though it was still a functional one. Sarah got some time on the Net and we figured out the plan: public busses over the mountains and passes through rice paddies traversing the back door between the provinces of Guizhou and Guangxi. We would leave at 7:30am the next day.

Thanks: to Kathleen Ku for a gift that couldn't have come at a better time. Also, thanks to those who have been giving to Teak Foundation, whose link is at the top right of this blog.

"1st Class"

For the rest of Chengdu, we saw the Giant Pandas at the National Breeding Center, enjoyed bottomless cups of Chrysanthemum and Jasmine tea (gave a shout out to Jesmine Choi), and toured a bizarre mechanical dinosaur dungeon for kids in a dank basement at the edge of People's Park. It was admittedly kinda scary when they would let out a pre-recorded roar, but the ferocity was, in the end, mitigated by the occasional decaying plaster and exposed steel rods.

Sarah got her funds transferred, finding the phone easier than the Internet. Go figure. And we booked a "1st Class" cabin aboard a boat to tour the Yangtze River and the Three-Gorges before the river is flooded in a couple of years from the massive new Three-Gorges dam in Yichang. The guy John we booked the tickets with said, "You know this is a Chinese tour don't you." "Yeah," we said, thinking it would of course be a little rough around the edges. Little did we know just how rough.

Took a bus from Chengdu to the concrete-riddled, hot-house of Chongqing (CHON-CHING), where our boat was leaving from. There wasn't much there (even the hot pots they are supposedly famous for were really hard to find and when we did were nothing special). Even the Chinese we talked to said even they hated Chongqing! It would also turn out that we were arriving on the hottest day they had in 50 years. Man, you talk about an oven, that place was crazy!

A guide was walking us to our boat and the one in front of us looked a little dinged, but we thought, 'ok, we can live with it.' Then he turned to the left and we saw our real boat. Pretty much a rusted hunk, that was trying to be salvaged as a tourist boat for its last few runs. And the first class room? Let's just say we didn't even want to think what 2nd class was like. The bathroom was dirty, floors missing tiles, a/c barely blowing a breeze. In hindsight, we would have carried our packs all the way up and demanded something else, but we had a back door trip through southern China already timed out with our Visa entry into Vietnam. And all the boats are supposed to be booked and so then we'd have to recheck into a hotel, and so on. Plus, they say you're supposed to see the boat before you buy the tickets, but what an enormous pain getting down to the dock in searing heat and you have to do it within the couple of hours you're leaving because the boats are continually rotating in and out. Even then, you can never be sure that the boat you bought the ticket for is the one you'll be on!

But then of course we thought this trip IS mostly about seeing the Yangtze and the Three Gorges, which didn't disappoint and were magnificent. But we definitely had a quick education of what a "Chinese tour" was. They also had funny little charges and fees for everything. 50 Yuan to go to the upper deck and cafe, which did have two huge air conditioners blasting. Attractions at each stop was all extra fees, and there were fees sometimes just to leave the boat. A deposit for your key. Even a deposit for the cheap, laminated paper ticket you had to pay 50 Yuan for in the first place. Apparently, they either couldn't build in the cost into the ticket price, or laminated printouts are quite expensive.



The first night was searing hot, so we couldn't wait to leave and get the air moving. When we did, we went up to the cafe to just sit in the blasting A/C for a few minutes, play some cards, bide our time to go back to the room and then silently pray.


The scenery was spectacular, however. Perhaps even the most spectacular was ironically the LITTLE Three Gorges. Named so because the passage is more narrow here, but the height of the cliffs is roughly the same, making for an even more dramatic juxtaposition. We also visited the Three-Gorges Dam, which is really only worth it just to stand in the middle on top of it while they are doing construction. The security is tighter than an airline, though. You can only bring a camera and a passport. We left everything else on the bus.

Later that night an enormous rain storm broke out with lighting flashing all around us and the two other Westerners we met on the boat, Tim and Sara from England. At about 10pm, our boat itself went through the locks, being lowered about 20m to the other side and finishing our journey. All in all it was a great trip, the magnificent scenery better than the experience.

The next day, we would begin a truly adventurous, "backdoor" journey through some really random places in southwest China, continuing to book it south and make it in time for our Visa entry into Vietnam.

Throngs of surging people and chaos.

When we arrived at the X'ian rail station, it was nothing we had ever imagined. Throngs of surging people and chaos. 'Whoever pushed the hardest' was the order of the day. We shoved with our big backpacks through and they help us deflect others who would have made our trip ten times longer. When we got in, there were masses of lines, including the one 200 deep for our train. You see, in Chinese rail stations, they wait till the last minute (sometimes seconds) before letting the long line of people through to the platform when the train arrives. Maybe it's a control thing, but once they do, everyone pushes forward, with all their bags, boxes, sacks of whatever and cages and make the long, serpentine route to the platform. Ours had to go up and down stairs over the tracks, past reeking public restrooms, up and down another flight, and depending on what car you were in, all the way down the platform as well. We made it as the train pulled in. Found our cabin and the fact that we weren't sleeping in the same compartment as the ticket agents promised, but the gracious people as we always found the Chinese to be offered to trade spots. We ended up in the same cabin a very pleasant English man and a Chinese woman from a non-profit organization for orphan children in China and based in England.

The journey was about 14 hours but parts of it were a dilly. Through the rain, we could see the magnificent Yellow River winding through the mountains as the train followed it and its tributaries for most of the day. Then there was the ascent. Over the course of 100km it seemed, the train kept rising higher and and higher and veered around precipices at sometimes uncomfortably close range to the drop below. It has been said Chengdu is a new city (relatively of course) in Chinese history simply because of its difficult geography.

As darkness fell, we settled in with our dehydrated noodle soup, one spicy, one everything, and fell asleep in the 4-person compartment early as we would be woken up at 4:30-5am and the train would arrive at 5:30.

It did almost exactly on time and that's when an amazing day began. We decided to take a long walk with our stuff from the train station to the guesthouse. It turned out to be exhilirating watching Chengdu wake up to the day, but it also turned out to be a long walk! A little tired, we had the choice of either resting the day or seeing the city we had heard so much about. We chose the masochistic option and rented bikes, setting out for our first taste of Sichuan food and it didn't disappoint: it was a massive (but managable) fire of dryness and spice that filled every corner of your mouth. We meant to go to the golden goat park across the street and walked for hours within a beautiful park, including a wonderfully restored homage tracing the history of Chinese poetry, complete with works by Lao Tze. But it turned out to be the wrong park! We finally left and cycled to the right one and it contained beautiful Buddhist shrines and a garden.

Then it was off the Bamboo Riverview Park but on the way Andy haphazardly jumped a curb and busted his tire. He still wasn't sure if it just needed air to refill it or a whole patch job, so Sarah agreed to stay on a street corner while he found out. Someone had said there was a place down the street. After looking for a while, Andy found a Medical Supply Center. Sounds strange but they did have wheelchairs, decatheters and IV stands in the window with big wheels that at least indicated an air pump. He inquired and was right. The owner obliged him, filled it up, then the tire went back down just as quickly. Disappointing, but at least Andy knew it was a patch job. The owner motioned North, then East around the corner, with gestures that indicated there was a place that could actually fix it. After a grueling mile of walking and asking, he did find an older gentlemen with an air pump, but couldn't communicate to him that he just needed a patch and not just air. The lost subtleties resulted in the man following Andy down the street with an air pump in hand. Luckily, Andy saw what looked like the place with a couple of guys working outside on bikes and cycles. They said they could fix it immediately for 30 cents, US. Well, this was certainly different from the four days and $20 US for a flat in Denmark. They proceeded to start, but then the old man with the air pump that was standing there started to intefere again, thinking Andy was getting a repair he might not need! Rather than wasting time explaining everything, Andy motioned to the repair guy to FORGET the old man and PLEASE keep working and asked the old man if he could find him a restroom or a hose to wash his hands. Sarah was keeping an eye on the other bike and had no idea what was going on.

When Andy and the old man came back, the repair guy said it was fixed. Andy was elated. Such a better system than the rigidness and apparent laziness of the Scandinavian system. Could this represent a microcosm of the new economic world order to come? But upon closer look, everyone noticed the tire was still flat. The repair didn't hold. Hmm, maybe this wasn't quite the new world order -- shoddy workmanship. But the repair guy asked for a few more minutes. Afterwards, Andy came back. The tire was fixed and yes, it held for the rest of the day.

We saw the beautiful Bamboo Park, had famous Chengdu hot pot in the market corner and cycled our way back to the guesthouse only to find it had turned into a full-fledged party. Tons of Chinese were drinking, talking, laughing and eating in the street. We weren't even sure we were in the right place! But, we decided to join them and end an unbleivable day in one of China's most intriguing cities.