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

1. Russia. It is very cheap and very comfortable in long distances. You have train attendances and a samovar with hot water in each cart. Trains are not fast but there is no need because distances are just too large and cities are one overnight hop from each other. Trains are extremely punctual because trains have a very flexible schedule and a lot of margin. The bad part is that the system is outdated and very complicated to use if you can’t read cirillic. You cannot buy tickets online.
2. Italy Trains are old, dirty and slow but it is very cheap and you pay by kilometer.
3. China. This is similar to the Russian system, but totally new. They have cheap, modern sleeper trains for the long distances. These ones have a similar configuration to the Russian trains but cleaner and newer. They also have a lot of high speed trains. Those ones are cheap, fast and new. It is the railway system with most modern technology on the rails and they even have magnetic trains that can travel really fast (450km/h). The bad thing is that you can only buy tickets 10 days in advance and only from the departing point and you cannot buy tickets online.
4. Japan & South Korea. Fast trains are really fast and cheap (With special tourist passes)
5. Germany. Tickets are expensive. Trains are the main transportation system… and it seems to be overloaded. The train system is a monopoly and there are not a lot of long distance bus routes. The people is forced to alternative methods like car sharing or hithhiking, which in my experience are sometimes more reliable that trains. The good part about the German system: it’s extremely foreing friendly because there is a lot of information available about what is going on with your train. It is a very developed train system that operates like an traditional airline with all the advantages and disadvantages.
6. Austria. OBB has all the features of BAHN.DE. But it is even more expensive.
7. Spain. Regional trains are very slow and expensive. Fast trains are very fast and very expensive and frequently fully booked. All tickets reserve a seat which increases price and makes impossible to take the train if there are no seats left. I traveled frequently in fully booked trains with a lot of seats left because people didn’t show up. The website is a complete disaster.

The big locomotive in Ulan Ude, Russia

Puerta del sol in New Year's eve

At midnight all the Spanish families are watching television and all the channels broadcast the same thing: The belltower on the Square of Sol in Madrid. Those who live in Madrid congregate in Puerta del Sol and eat the grapes before going partying until after sunrise. When I was a little child I always ate the grapes at home watching the people having fun in the Square of Sol. A couple of years ago I started to eat the grapes at weird times. At 18:00 in the afternoon when I was in Canada and early in the morning when I was in Beijing. But this year I was going to do it right. We went to Sol to have the grapes in the place where you are supposed to eat them.

It was quite an experience. A lot of people, yes, 20000 souls according to the newspapers. I’m quite used to that now that I’m living in Shanghai. Fortunately the people was not drunk and it didn’t look dangerous at all. Most of the people were foreigners but I could hear some Spanish voices. Maybe tourists as well. I doubt there are many Madrileños celebrating Nochevieja here, most of them prefer to have the grapes at home with their families.

The next night we went to a must-do tourist activity in Madrid. A Flamenco show. This was my second time in a Flamenco show and I must recognize I like it. This is a video you can see to have an idea of what Flamenco is about, but you need to be there to feel the waves and the special energy that the dancers and singers transmit to the public.

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.

Highlights of the trip:

• We rented an economic, cheap car. We got a huge American vehicle. We drove it for three days up route 101 following the coast.
• We discover that Walmart doesn’t have fresh fruits/vegetables section. When asked, they point to fruit in cans and frozen vegetables.
• We tasted amazing doughts Vodoo Doughts @ Portland
• We had an outdoors bath in Bagby hotsprings. We were naked in public in America. Legally!
• We camped in a beach looking at the Pacific Ocean
• We drove over the skyhigh bridge that connects Oregon and Washington state.
• We camped next to a creek in a forest and we were close to being eaten alive by bears. Luckily they butchered salmons instead.
• We ate the best cheese macaroni ever and we visited the first Starbuck in the world in the pike market in Seattle
• We had central american food for lunch with Luis in Seattle. It was really good
• We rode the Amtrak from Seattle to Vancouver. Yes, there are trains in America. It was our first trip in a Diesel train because the line is not electrified. Amtrak’s train carts are manufactured by Talgo, an Spanish brand.
• I had a reecounter with Tim Hortons’s boston cream drought but somehow they don’t taste as good for me as some years ago.
• We went to a (heavily uncensored) comedy show. It was my first time in a live comedy show and I really like it!

The route we followed:

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