Kelsey and I took a trip to Bangkok, Laos and Cambodia for two weeks. We met up in Bangkok on the evening of Saturday, February 6 and she flew out of Phnom Penh at night on Sunday, February 21; I left twelve hours later.
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Tag: travel
The photos from the trip to Qufu, Confucius’ home city, finished uploading to Flickr hours before I left for my Indochina vacation so I didn’t have a chance to write anything about them. It was a nice time generally, worth visiting if you have a free weekend in China. The nicest thing by far was the Kong Family Cemetery, which we didn’t have nearly enough time to wander around in. Photos from that trip can be found here.
Once the photos from Bangkok, Laos, and Cambodia are loaded onto Flickr (all 1 GB of them) I will write about that wonderful trip with my girlfriend, the first time I got to see her in six months.
It takes a terribly long time to load anything to Flickr from within China, VPN or no, so my solution for getting these photos loaded is to send them to Kelsey where she can then download them and upload them to my Flickr account much faster and more reliably than if they were just uploaded by me. My webspace FTP is just as slow and unreliable from here as Flickr is and YouSendIt requires you to break the files into 100MB chunks, which would be too cumbersome in terms of each unreliable upload to send 10 different zip files. Ever to the rescue, Ubuntu offers a cloud storage service called Ubuntu One with up to 2 GB free storage. I was able to upload all the files to a shared folder in the space of a few hours, which can now be easily downloaded on the other side of the globe.
I have been watching Caprica as it comes out on the Internet. It’s a painful process however, as Hulu knows I am connecting through a VPN and therefore won’t let me watch it there. Thus it is up to very cheap and very slow substitutes like Megavideo to pick up the slack. Megavideo takes about five times as long to load as the length of the video itself. The pilot was good, then there were some less-than-stellar episodes but the most recent one, “There Is Another Sky,” was on par with the intrigue and quality of the parent show, Battlestar Galactica. I am looking forward to the development of Tamara Adama especially, as she brings an unforeseen wildcard into the plotline.
Finally: Tomorrow, March 1, marks one year since Kelsey and I began our relationship. For that, I blow a party noisemaker, alone in my room.
Immediately following New Decade celebrations, I got two hours of sleep and went to the airport for a short vacation away from the bustle of Beijing.
The trip was one that Arnab put together to check out some small villages outside of Nanchang, in the southern Jiangxi province of the People’s Republic. They are Luotiancun, Shuinan and Jingtai.
The vacationers included myself, Arnab, and his two Indian friends Swathish and Abhay. Our flight from Beijing to Nanchang was uneventful. I slept roughly the whole two-hour ride. Upon landing, we got a taxi to take us 30 km into Nanchang, and the ride was wild. There is no semblance of driving rules away from the major cities. Passing vehicles by driving into oncoming traffic is the norm down there, and no one goes faster because of it; gridlock is common on the smaller roads.
Arriving at the bus station at 11:30, we got a bus ticket for 14:00 to Anyi, the hub city from which we could reach the villages. In the meantime we ate a tasty and affordable lunch at a nearby restaurant, only about 23 kuai per person. As the only waiguoren (foreigners) in sight, we were stared at by everyone in the restaurant for a good ten minutes. On the way up the stairs, a girl who was coming the other way was heard to say “oh my God” in Mandarin when setting eyes upon our foreign visages.
We piled into the bus after waiting for about twenty minutes and a false start of getting onto the 13:50 bus. On the two-hour ride to Anyi I read a fair amount of The Razor’s Edge, an intriguing book Kelsey sent me.
At Anyi we got a taxi to take us to Luotiancun’s entrance. At the entrance there is a ticket office to get piao (tickets) for the stuff inside, but no one was on duty, so we were able to get in for free. The taxi driver was seemingly loathe to drive into the village because he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to turn around. He also talked to an old man on the road in the local dialect, which neither Swathish or Abhay (who understand Mandarin) could decipher.
We stepped out and started snapping pictures, as the light would only last another hour or so.
We walked up the main street in the village to see what we could. On the way we met a group of three students from Nanchang who were also staying the night in the village. My mates were taken with them, but we saw little of them for the rest of the trip.
The older village resident they were with directed us to a shop where we purchased a local batch of their honey liquor for the weekend’s enjoyment. It tasted pleasant, like a mix between port wine and brandy. The Chinese name for it escapes me, unfortunately.
We secured a room at the largest boarding house in the town, on the main square opposite the large pool. They served us dinner, which was tasty but overpriced due to a chicken costing 70 kuai. Nonsense! They were walking around the whole village like they owned the place. Surely a chicken could be had for 35 kuai or less. Oh well – you have to get ripped off somehow.
We spent the evening playing cards and drinking the honey wine and some beer. Nothing goes on in the village at night. Also, southern China has a tradition of no indoor heating and leaving the windows open even in the cold. Add in the higher humidity and a minor vacation from the stabbing dry frigidity of Beijing becomes only marginally more tolerable wet cold. We shut our windows and after thirty minutes or so our four bodies warmed the room up a bit. We went to bed at about ten o’clock, knowing that we would be waking up with the village between five and six. The blankets they gave us did wonders for me; after about five minutes I could feel my body heat radiating back towards me and I slept soundly. The others tossed and turned all night with the cold.
At six the next morning we were out wandering the village and taking pictures. Villagers were lively at this hour. We took our time enjoying what charm was left in Luotiancun, obviously both a benefactor and victim of foreign tourism and the investment of the government. The old rough-hewn stones which made up some of the footpaths were being replaced by gray bricks, and poured concrete shared space with pre-Communist houses. But Luotiancun’s layout and lifestyle were a welcome vacation from Beijing. Abhay and I went together while Swathish and Arnab paired up at a different pace.
The tree and the old mansion were my favorite parts. High on the list was the two kuai noodle breakfast when I shared a table with two women who were at least eighty years old, and the children who screamed and fled whenever I pointed the camera at them.
Between Luotiancun and the next village, Shuinan, there is a nice 500 meter long pathway that is a part of the old trade road in the area. A few people were working in the tiny farm plots, and at the end we saw a buffalo.
In Shuinan, Abhay and I caught a short but interesting episode: the duck parade.
The old man who was herding these hundreds of ducks got irate at us for standing in the way of his charge and snapping photos. It was a phenomenon we could not miss though; just thirty seconds after the sound of many webbed feet padding against the pavement began, the last delicious-looking bird waddled out of sight.
The rest of the village trip, all thirty minutes of it, was unremarkable. The old charm of Shuinan and especially of Jingtai, the last village, had been rudely uprooted and replaced by filthy, sad poured concrete and dirt runoff. Luotiancun alone retained enough of its old style to be worth the trip.
We got a taxi back to Nanchang, which was much faster and more direct than the bus would have been. We made it into the city in time for lunch, and we spent the rest of the afternoon on a short trip into the Buddhist temple and in a museum dedicated to the Nanchang Revolt. There was plenty of propaganda to go around there.
The evening consisted of a subpar dinner and playing more cards and drinking more honey wine; there wasn’t much desire to head out and party because our flight was to take off at 08:30 the next morning.
However, when we got in the taxi at 06:00 it was so foggy that a three meter visibility plagued us the whole 30 km to the airport, and the main road was shut down so the driver had to use a poorly maintained local road to get there. Our flight was of course delayed, not only because of the pervasive fog in Nanchang but because Beijing was experiencing its worst blizzard in 50 years. We whiled away the time slowly drinking overpriced coffee and beer and playing more cards. I noticed a foreign girl sitting lonely by herself in the airport and invited her to play with us. She was a Polish girl named Tosha who teaches blind and deaf children in Rome, and she was headed to Beijing as well to visit a friend. The plane boarded us at noon, but it was only to serve us lunch; we weren’t able to get out of Nanchang until 17:00 that day. After touching down in Beijing (whew!), the flight board showed that about nine out of ten flights to and from the capital were cancelled. Lucky us.
At the gate to the airport express train, the way had been shut by the police due to too many people trying to get through. After a while ten officers marched up and prepared to open the gate just enough to let a slow stream of people through, but in true Chinese fashion the crowd pressed their way hard and consequently forced the gates open wider and wider. Even with heavy police effort to shut the gate more, the opening would slide open on one side while it slid shut on the other. One man almost got into a fight with a police officer. It was kind of exciting.
The trip was worth it overall even though it wasn’t terribly packed with village exploits. Even what small time was had was a respite to the soul. Now I have mine and Kelsey’s trip to Laos and Cambodia in February to look forward to. There the weather will be truly warm!
On Wednesday morning, Arcadiy and I started out in Atlanta, Georgia, after eating lunch with Ben James and Willy B. We crossed the entire country in his white stallion. Last night we arrived in San Jose, CA, at the house of former LCP of AIESEC SJSU, Colin. He has continued on to Seattle; I am staying for two amazing weeks in the Bay Area.
Here is our entire trip that we just took:
Each night, except for in Salt Lake City, we managed to stay with AIESEC friends and have a great time. Also we hiked up to Dream Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park on Saturday (we would have continued up the trail to Emerald Lake but it was too snow-packed) and stopped off at the Sierra Trading Post in Cheyenne, WY.
This trip has been an intense experience for me. I have been to San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Denver, and Oxford before, but (with the exception of Oxford) it was always via airplane. Driving across the country, inch by inch and foot by foot and mile by mile, watching every blade of grass bleed into every forest and give way to the flat green plains of Kansas to grow into the rising highlands of eastern Colorado, abruptly interrupted by the titanic Rockies and moving on up north to pass over the moonscape that is Wyoming, through the unfamiliar Western terrain of Utah’s salt flats and Nevada’s heavy mountainous deserts finally giving way to Tahoe’s majestically beautiful summits rolling down to the Pacific coast has been a surreal and powerful accomplishment. I have come to understand and appreciate just how very vast and diverse this country is, and everywhere we passed by I thought of different histories, of 40 acres and a mule, of outlaws on the frontier, of buffalo massacres and Native American tribes, of Mormons crossing such an incredible distance to found Deseret and of the true end of the frontier coming from the western end as well. It has blown my mind and it has also been the very appropriate beginning to what I expect will be a wonderful few weeks enjoying freedom before I ship out to Asia (wherever in that even more vast land I choose to go).
Tomorrow Kelsey arrives and then we will go camping in Big Sur, we will stay with my cousin in Berkeley to hit up San Francisco, and we will go camping in Napa before Get Golden. I am ecstatic to be able to spend two great weeks in paradise.
More to come soon hopefully. I’m taking some pretty good pictures.
It only just hit me that, oh, I leave for the airport to go to Spain with my sister in a few minutes.
The first time I went to Spain it was like this huge movement and upheaval, but the next time I left the US for another country – to Istanbul, Turkey – it was more like sitting down in a room for 15 hours and then walking out in a new place. It wasn’t a huge upheaval, it was just there. I think that’s when I truly realized that travel had changed me at the core.
I like that a lot. I hope my sister will come to understand the same thing.