Yangshuo, China
Yangshuo, ChinaThe night before i went to the wall, i ended up drinking till 4am with the boys from Cumbernauld. I then had to get back up at 6am to go get the tour bus and head to the wall. Was rough.
Our first stop was a place called the ‘Sacred Way’ which was cool and had amazing statues but our tour guide spent way too much time talking about it all and everyone just wanted to get to the wall.. So after about 40 mins of walking round we got back on the bus.
We were then took to a jade factory, where they spent 5 minutes showing us how to tell the difference between real & fake jade which i cant even remember and then they left us in the shop for 30 mins hoping we would buy something. No one did.
Back on the bus and we headed for the Great Wall.
Just before getting the cable car we stopped for lunch which was amazing, took us to a restaurant at the foot of the wall and had laid out loads of chinese food on a rotating table and we could all just help ourselves!
We then went up on the cable car which ran right across the top of the toboggan run, was cool seeing everyone firing down the hill on the sleds. I really wanted a shot on the toboggan but when i got to the top the queue was like 200 folk deep and we didn’t have time. Was gutted.
On the wall there were two ways you could go. Left, which was the easy way but a longer walk or right, which was the more challenging route but short. So me and a french guy that was also on the tour took the challenging route.
We made it all the way to the end of the wall and then walked past the sign where it tells you stop and ended up walking some of the old ruins aswell, was cool to see.
Some of the sections of stairs on the way up were near vertical and i seen a few folk coming down the stairs backwards on their hands and knee’s was pretty funny.
After the wall they took us to a Silk Factory which was just pointless as we were all just wanting to go back to our hostels.
The wall was amazing but our tour guide rushing everyone and taking to all the other places spoiled it, if i ever go back ill deffo just get the bus there myself next time.
I arrived at my Hostel in Beijing around 3pm and checked in.. I head to my room, walk in and there are 2 guys still in bed! I say hello and get a “Awright Big Man” back. I say “Glasgow?” and one of them says “aye”.. “Where you’s from?”… “Whats it called? Cumbernauld!” is the answer i get! Was well suprised to have came all the way to China and im in a room with two guys from Scotland.
They had just arrived at about midnight and were still gubbed with jetlag so i left them to sleep it off and went and done some washing and grabbed some beers and took it easy for the rest of the night.
The next morning i went out for a walk and headed to Jingshan Park for an amazing view over the forbidden city!
I then took a walk right round the whole park which was cool, loads of old monuments and wierd characters kicking about.
After the park i just headed back to the hostel, met the Scott and Moff from Cumbarnauld and went with them to KFC. Afterwards we headed down to the Wangfujing Food Market to see some crazy food. As soon as we got there the first thing i saw was live scorpions on a stick which they then fried and rolled in spices if you bought some. So i got talked into buying some buy the guy on the stall and asked Scott and Moff if they wanted some too, they both shit themselves and said no, but after i got mine, ate one and told them they werent that bad, Scott eventually got one down him! They were pretty tasty, just tasted kinda like spicy chicken with jaggy bits.
The next night i went back to the food market to try some other stuff and take some more photos, i also went to another food market about 5 minutes away where they were selling similar stuff.
I ended up trying a squid / sleevefish on a stick which was was pretty good!
The next day i took a walk out to another park just beyond the forbidden city on the west side of Beijing called Belhai Park. It was much bigger than the last park and had a massive lake where you could hire pedalo’s and take a trip on bigger boats.
Again afterwards i went and met the Scott and Moff and headed down to Wangfujing which is like the Buchanan Street of Beijing! There we got hassled by scammers and watched about 70 folk dance outside a church, we were told that they do it to burn of their dinner and meet new friends, Was crazy!
The next day i headed for the Forbidden City, i left it kinda late which meant i missed the Clock Exhibition and the chance to see Mao’s body in the Mausoleum but it meant i missed all queues! which was great, just walked right in, no bother! Heard stories about people turning up at 8am and not getting in till 11 or 12. Couldnt be bothered with that.
I walked around the forbidden city but never had a tour guide so never knew what each part was, or what made each building different so it was a little boring. Later when i was chatting to a girl i met in Mongolia called Mada (spelling?), she told me that you could get an audio guide that only spoke when you got near an object, which would have been cool, since i thought it was just a running tape that you had to follow.
Will definitely get the audio tour for the Terracotta Warriors in Xian.
On the way home it got dark really quickly, so i stopped outside the forbidden city for a few more photos before heading back to the hostel.
Later that night Me, Scott and Moff went and bought 2 bottles of what we thought was vodka for 40 yen each (£4) but it turns out it was chinese rice wine. We played a card game called scabby queen where you have to get rid of all your doubles until one person is left with a queen.. The person with the queen had to drink 3 shots of rice wine. The wine was probably the worst thing ive ever tasted! Minging.
After drinking for a good few hours we headed down the the 24 hour mcdonalds for some food and on the way met this chinese break dancer guy and Scott & Moff challenged him to a dance off! was hilarious.
After food we headed back to the hostel, it was 4am and i was getting picked up at 6:30am to goto the Great Wall of China.
1. Babies dont wear nappies, they just have a hole in their trousers and shit in the street.
2. You cant flush toilet paper down the toilet, you have to put it in a bin next to the toilet.
3. People all meet up in the street and dance to burn off their dinner. They do the same 16 step dance over and over.
4. Suncream has skin whitener in it, as if you are seen with a tan it means you are poor as only farmers have tans.
5. You can buy chicken feet in the supermarket. I tried a bit of one on the train to Xian and it didnt really taste of much, still minging though when you look at it.
I arrived in Ulan Bator at 6am on the Trans-Siberian and got picked up at the station by the lady from UB Guesthouse.. She picked a few of us up and took us to the hostel.
Once at the hostel we met Mr. Kim who runs the place and he got straight down to business. Organising a tour and pretty much forced me onto one, by not showing me any other options, it wasnt until i spoke to other people that i realised their were loads more options to choose from.
After picking a tour Me and a couple from the hostel Maxime & Jill went out and had a walk around Ulan Bator to get some food and see some sights.
There wasnt much to see apart from a temple which was already closed and a huge square with a few statues.
Afterwards we met a french guy from the hostel and powerwalked to the outside of Ulan Bator to try reach a huge Monument to watch the sunset but we only got half way there, so stopped on a bridge and watched it set.
We then had a long walk back to the hostel in the dark as UB has very few street lights. It was very sketchy as we had been warned about pick pockets and i had my camera with me and could see people eyeing it up.
The next day we left for Terelj Park at 6am and had the sketchiest drive out there ever, at one point a bus had forced us into oncoming traffic and all cars just had to stop until the bus moved on, Mental.
Once we got to the park we got showed to our Ger which had 4 beds inside so Me, Maxime, Jill and a guy from Amsterdam called Richard shared.
We went out and climbed about some rocks and explored the place for a bit. The camp was surrounded by huge mountains and massive cliffs which was cool.
Later in the day we went horse riding which was really cool, our guide was a 15 year old boy called Kana and his dad told us Kana owns over 100 horses and hires them out to different camps elsewhere in Mongolia, but because of wolves he only keeps 10 at out camp.
My horse didn’t seem to like the harness in its mouth so it was constantly just shaking its head up and down trying to get it out. It made me feel very nervous, felt like it was just gonna shoot of any second. Kana also kept smacking it on the ass with some rope which made it run quite fast for a while, was shiting myself.
After a while i started getting a hang of it and got to a gallop (i think).
Didn’t take my camera on the horse incase i fell off or something and broke it but i wish i had now.
The family we were staying with had 3 dogs, and one was just a puppy probably less than a year old, so Richard named him Bobby (Tin Tin’s dogs name in Holland) and let him stay in the ger with us for the night, the next day we were told not to as he will just get used to the heat and when winter comes he will just die because he’s not used to the cold. The next night it snowed and Bobby just clawed at the door all night, felt so bad haha.
Apparently the dogs are kept outside to scare away wolves that would come and kill the horses at night.
On the first night the dog that looked like a wolf wouldn’t stop barking and we reckon wolves were probably near by.
On the second night it went from around 25 degrees during the day to like -5 or -10 degrees at night and then snowed. Was crazy seeing 2 extremes in the space of 2 days.
We were also joined by a couple from London, Simon and Rosie, who were really cool. We ended up playing a card game called Golf which was good and drinking a good bit of vodka.
On the 3rd day we left around 1pm and headed back for UB in the snow, the drive wasnt nearly as sketchy as it was on the way out. I thought it would have been worse because of the snow but it was fine.
Here is all my footage of the my journey on the Tran Siberian Railway from Moscow – Ulan Bator – Beijing.
Woke up from a shit sleep, can’t get used to all these new timezones at all! need a few days in one place i think.. can’t wait for Mongolia.
I got up ready and looked out my cabin window, wasn’t much to look at so had something to eat, then went to get coffee and about 20 feet away from the window in the corridor was Lake Baikal! It looked more like the ocean as you can’t see the other side from where we were.
After Lake Baikal we started heading towards Ulan Ude where we would then cut of onto the Trans-Mongolian route heading for Ulan Bator.
At Ulan Ude i went into the station shop to buy some food and beers and saw they have a russian version of Desperado’s but also noticed the same company do a ‘Beer and Coke’ combo! didn’t bother try any cause it would probably be minging.
Once we were passed Ulan Ude the landscape changed so much, big rolling hills, huge lakes.. probably one of the best things I’ve ever seen! don’t think any photos or video will do it justice.
Vincent also left this morning at 5am to go take his clients round Irkutsk for 2 days, then to Mongolia for 2 days.. so i think we will end up back on the same train again.. hopefully not the same cabin, cause as he was working, he was a bit boring. So now i have the carriage to myself till Ulan Bator.
Got 6 Hours to wait at the border crossing from Russia to Mongolia and then another possible 3 hours at Customs on the Mongolia side… Good Times.
Jetlag (Trainlag?) is really catching up with me today, woke up at 10 and as I’m looking at the time on my phone, Vincent tells me that we just crossed another timezone meaning it was now 11. Once we hit Mongolia though we go back an hour meaning the time will be GMT + 8 Hours. Passed through a lot of small towns full of cool log cabins, all painted up traditional russia style. We also passed through the Taiga and were really close to the area where the Tunguska event happened, which was one of the largest pre-atomic era explosions ever recorded. It destroyed 200 squared kilometres of forrest instantly, shockwaves were registered on seismic and the light from the blast could be seen throughout europe. No-one knows for sure what caused the blast but people reckon it was a meteorite.. Im sure my mate Sean probably has some weird conspiracy theories about what happened.
Watched ‘The Way Back’ before bed, so that i could maybe recognise the spot they cross the tracks near Lake Baikal when we pass it tomorrow.
Woke up and Vincent tells me we are now in Siberia and will cross the Asia / Siberia border back and forth about 4 times today. He said his GPS just started working today as in Russia they break the signal to the satellite. He then showed me the iPhone app he has for tracking himself, it was pretty cool.
We stopped at a few stations today that i can’t remember the names of except for Omsk.. The ladies were cutting about like usual trying to sell some food and beers but I’m all stocked up so stayed clear of them. Not much happened after Omsk we got to the Baraba Steppe which is which is a massive wetland in Siberia full of Bogs and Swamps. There is a massive forest in the distance but apparently if you were to try to walk towards it you would never get there as it is just clumps of trees that look close together from a difference.. The guidebook says many have died because of this and the sheer lack of landmarks. In spring it is nicknamed hell as the cloud is usually grey with clouds of Mosquito’s and Gnats.
We have also now passed two timezones today so we are now 8 hours ahead of UK time and 4 hours ahead of Moscow time. Managing to keep up with it alright, sticking to Vincent’s rule by going to bed at local time.
Got woke up in the morning by Vincent going through all his bags of food.. but it was 9am anyways so i got up to see what was outside, there wasn’t much to look at just forrest’s full of birch tree’s… So i got myself some coffee and sat at the window with my guidebook trying to work out where we were using the kilometre markers. We were ages away from anything cool so i went out in the corridor to take a few photos of inside the train and met a few more folk. I think that because I’m in first class I’m away from most of the people my age which sucks but some of the extra’s make up for it. There is an old guy from Leeds two doors down from me and he’s pretty cool! Spent about an hour talking about the film ‘The way back’ and he told me one of his friends was travelling on the train years ago and had met a guy who had been caught up in the 1905 war in Japan (If i remember correctly) that had walked the full length of the railway from Vladivostock to Moscow to get away from it all. Pretty mental.
Later we stopped at Balyezino Station for about 30 minutes and i went outside to take some photos and buy some food from the ladies at the station.
I bought some chicken and potatoes which were roasting so must have been freshly cooked, but when i got back on the the train the chicken was still pink inside so i just binned it.. bummer! We then set off again and went passed more forrest, little towns, old industrial areas and the some of the biggest grassland areas ever!
I have also now just figured out why Vincent is so OCD about everything, how he knows so much about the train and why he is so over prepared. He is a freelance tour guide on the trans-siberian and has 2 clients on the train who he is feeding as well as himself. He uses a GPS system so that his clients family can see where they are and also for insurance purposes so that he can hit the emergency button if anything bad happens. He says that he has taken the train over 170 times and has covered the distance equivalent to the moon and back and says he’s on his way to the moon again. So i am pretty lucky to be sharing a cabin with a guide!
About 5:30ish we stop at a station called Perma 2 and i head out for some more photos and buy some pastrami and bread to make a sandwich with.. When we get back on the train 10 minutes later Vincent tells me that we have passed through two timezones and that the time was now 7:45pm… About 8:30ish the sun started to set, so i had a beer and emptied my camera of all the photo’s and videos i had taken. I asked Vincent if he finds it hard to keep up with the changing timezones and he says ‘Yes!’ but says he has a rule he likes to stick to by going to bed when you should goto bed instead of the time you want to goto bed otherwise when you get to Ulan Bator or Beijing you will be knackered and need a full day of sleep to get back to normal.. So i went to bed at 11.
My Cabin.
The train @ Balyezino Station ( i think )
The train at sunset
