Jakey Jake

Sunday 23rd May
Today we arrived in Beijing at 1pm, the food on that train had been excellent, i really like my scrambled eggs with tomato We caught Taxis from the train station to our hotel, the rainbow hotel. When we arrived we thought we were in heaven, unfortunately the hotel has a good part and a bad part, and guess where we arrived?? and guess where we were staying??? The redeeming feature of this place was that the good part had an AMF bowling alley in it, so i got in some bowling, though never breaking 150 This afternoon we visited Tiannamen Square, its pretty big and its difficult to imagine all those tanks rolling over those poor protestors there. Wonder how long it took them to scrub the blood off the pavement?? now there are just a bunch of tourists (mostly chinese) and people flying kites and people selling junk. No sign of the massacre. Across the road is the forbidden palace. You cant really tell how big it is from the outside, but once youve walked through a couple of walls you get the idea. Its a very impressive and very imposing palace, the biggest in the world. The architecture is stunning. There seems to be a lot of hostoric buildings, gardens etc. Very many more than in Japan (although Kyoto has tonnes) After walking around there for a few hours, and seeing the intricate detail in everything that was the palace, i decided i wanted to get back to the hotel for some more bowling. Tonight we went to a chinese acrobatic microcosm. It was pretty spectacular. The way they can move and twist and blanace, still it wasnt quite as polished as the cirque du soleil.

Saturday 22nd May
This morning i was up early for a jog. it still amazes me how funnily they react. there was a group of military all serious standing around yellling orders at each other, until i ran past when they all stopped and stared and then giggled like they were 8 year old little girls. Anyway everyone was up for breakfast by 8.30, unfortunately the highfly pizza place wasnt open until 9 and the staff were sleeping on the seats of the restraunt. We got them up early…. oops… and we took seats while they scurried around trynig to get ready. we ordered at 9.15am, slowly one by one the meals came out. we were supposed to be ready for the warriors by 9.30, but my breakfast didnt arrive until 10.20…. arrrrrgh. eventually we were all done and on our way about an hours drive out of xian to the warriors. there are 3 main pits. pit 1 is the only one to be fairly extensively excavated, there are around 1000 warriors that have been realised rom the earth. pit 2 is still basically unexcavated and is pretty much a big hall looking down onto mounds of earth… interesting i hear you say… thats what i thought too. pit 3 was the smallest pit but apparently because the warriors were found facing each other, this was central command. As you can probably tell i wasnt THAT impressed with the discovery. dont get me wrong, its ok, and its pretty amazing that there aer around 7 thousand terracotta warriors each individually different, with different faces, shoes, clothes, armour, hairdos etc. but really at the end of the day, its one mans hommage to himself (read another omnipotent king) and he forced many people to work for his tomb. I guess each to their own though, and i am glad i went to see it, but we certainly didnt need 3 hours there…. you cant really even get close enough to the warriors to make out their individual styles, and you will certainly get harrassed near the entrance to purchase some warriors of your own (though if your into that you will certainly be able to get an excellent bargain – the supply is FAR more than is being demanded) anyway we went back to the nearby town for luch which was a massive banquet of pretty crap food. afterwards we were back to the train station for yet another overnighter to beijing, and the great wall…. oooh exciting.

Friday 21st May
This afternoon we arrived at xi’an at around 12pm. We shuffled ourselves to the taxi stand and got a cab to the victory hotel. we had a couple of hours to have a shower and get some food at the highfly pizza place around the corner, apparently they served delicious food, which i later found out for certain they did. after the 2pm meeting which started closer to 2.30 i left the group to wander around the town on my own. I think they find it a bit strange at times that i do my ownt thing, but the reality is that while they are a nice bunch i dont really connect with anyone all that well and i certainly like my own company at times. so anyway i toddled off to the bell tower and the drum tower. around the city there is an old city wall, around 12-14m high and it stretches around 13.7km. Its quite a nice little sity at 5.6million people, though its getting very hard to tell the difference between any of the citys, although you can certainly notice theres been more spent on them the further east you move. This city had all you shopping malls and markets and stuff.. the people still stare at you like your a lepper until they are about 15m past you and they yell out hello its quite funny. Anyway the teracotta warriors are tomorrow…. yes i know i said that yesterday but this time its for real. I had dinner around the corner at highflys and they were out of tables so they told me to sit next to some americans, whom they didnt ask if they minded anyway they were very nice, chris and his mother from kansas. Chris had come to china 3 years ago, didnt know a bit of the language, he got a job as a waiter in dali and he can now speak very fluent chinese, he seemed prettyy kewl and we had both stayed in chungking mansions in Hong Kong so we had something to laugh about.

Thursday 20th May
This morning we were off to see the pandas. The north of this province being their main environment, they have been rapidly declining in number and there have been many problems with breeding in captivity. It took about 40 minutes drive through the city to get there. It was only on this drive that you get to appreciate just how big a city this is, the pollution kind of stops you from getting a good visual idea when looking over the skyline. The pandas were incredible…. they had 4 baby pandas there, which pretty much kept us all fascinated for a few hours. I even got to hold one, it was soo soft and furry and cute, it was soooo awesome, best part of china so far. and all for the princely sum of 400 yuen. nowhere else could i have gotten a hug with one of these things This afternoon we were dropped off in the center of town to get lunch.. i had pizza hut…. mmmmm pizza. But the pizza huts here are more like your upmarket restraunt, and there were at least 6 people serving every 1 patron Then i stuffed around at the hotel for a while before we were to get on another overnight train to another chongsomethingorother place. I think its the terracotta warriors tomorrow. apparently they are prety kewl, we shall see?!?!?!?!

Wednesday 19th May
This morning i got up for another run. People just stare at you… its quite funny. you get used to it after a while, that and having your photgraph taken, i almost feel like some kind of star here heheheheh. After the run and brekky we caught some cabs to the jetty for the boat past the buddah statue. On the boat over there i saw some pigs floating down the river upsidedown, full of water. i wondered if they had been thrown in or if they fell in… either way i was glad i wasnt eating pork at the time . The buddah was MASSIVE…. but it failed to ignite any kind of response in me…. its another buddah statue (granted its the largest in the world). After the boat trip we got to walk around it… mmmmm yep. definatley no taj mahal, or angkor temples. After walking around we went back to the hotel and then back on a bus for a two hour trip to Chengdu also in Sichuan Province. This City has a population of 11.3 million people, thats more than in London or New York (i have been told) and its just another city in china. crazy…. We are here only for its Panda Breeding research Center, but that comes tomorrow. This afternoon i walked around some of the city, and surprise surprise its another city. Decent infrastrucutre, there are lights on the road intersections and other mod cons hehehehe but thats about it. anyway after a few hours walking, we were meeting up for dinner, apparently this place is known for its hot pots. These are boiling broths of chilli and other spicy foodstuffs in which you cook raw meat for consuming. Lets just say it was HOT… not for me so i called it a night pretty early.

Tuesday 18th May
This morning i got up early to go for a jog along the banks of the yangtze river, however you may have seen from the photos, there are massive concrete walls along the banks. You can climb the stairs, but on this dock there were only cablecars, and i couldnt be stuffed waiting for them (as well as paying) and they had closed the stairs so what else could i do but run along the docking block… people were looking at me quite strangley (even more so than normal, because im tall and foreign). Anyhoo i managed to do quite a few laps before getting hungry and needing brekky. Today we had a 6 hour public bus ride through some “terrible” roads as we were warned by our tour guide. While the roads were a bit rough and ready, they were sealed roads, the rough part coming from some pretty big chunks missing in areas. all in all though it was nothing like the road from phenom phen to siem reap in cambodia. that was appalling. The city we started from, Chongqinq city in chongqing province, was quite a bustling city with a mere 5.8 million people, bigger than any city in australia and yet just another city in china. sort of makes you comprehend the size of china. Although when i think about it, India seemed more densely populated, but i wonder if thats because clearly it has a smaller land mass, and the people are more extroverted in India??? China is much more clean and much more modern with infrastructure that india only dreams of having. Makes me laugh when i think of an article i read on the way over in the times international, where a journalist wrote “dont place so much emphasis on china for india is clearly going to be a much greater economic force”. Is this guy on drugs??? has he been out of his little hole and actually travelled any of these coutries that he is writing about???? honestly you just can say something as stupid as that, and whats more crazy is that it is published… can anyone be an “international journalist”???? Anyway enough of a tangent. The bus arrived in Leshan, a city in Sichuan province, with a population of 3.5 million, something like that of Melbourne. Its main attraction was a Massive 71m buddah carved out of the rockface where three rivers converged into one. We had a delicious lunch before we set out looking for a bank. The town struck me as a burgenoing city, with many department stores and shops, just your average city, somewhere between a saigon, with its poor infrastructure to a capital city in australia with pretty good infrastructure. anyway we decided to go out for drinks after dinner at a place down the end of the promenade. after two hours of walking we gave up and caught cabs back home.

Monday 17th May
Today we arrived at a place called the ghost town. The entire town was going to be engulfed in water when the water rose to its final height at the completion of the dam. The residents had mostly relocated to the other side of the river where they had new homes built for them by the government. It was funny to see these high rise buildings mostly abandoned, the bank had been reused as a restraunt and the town hall was the setting for food stalls. We walked through the town to another attraction. The main attraction was this place where there was a temple on one side for heaven and one on the other side for hell. Lets just say that if this is chinas mecca for cultural tresures, then they are in trouble this place was more like a third rate theme park, with lots of statues and dioramas, there was even a ghost train, that lasted about 100m in pretty muh a circle, that was the least scary, most silly thing ive ever been on. Back on the boat to catch some rays and do some reading Just looking forward now to dinner. Tonight is the last night on the boat, Ive quite enjoyed it, i think ill have to go on one of those P+O cruises at some stage…. i think it would be great

Sunday 16th May
Woke up this morning not feeling 100% but managed to make it to the 7.30 boat for the tour of the lesser 3 gorges. Its probably even more spectacular than the main 3 gorges. There is a tradition of puting peoples coffins in the middle of sheer cliff faces so as no one would disturb the remains. Anyway we caught these small boats that were man powered up a small river tributary. The men rowing used to do it in the nude up until 15 years ago, until tourists started arriving, though im pretty glad they wear clothes although one guy was rowing in undies and a suit jacket??? we got as far as we could by rowing up the stream before the men all jumped out and started dragging this boat further up the stream, trying to make sure the boat didnt get caught on rocks. I didnt really understand the whole point of this, although our tour guide was saying something about it being fun because you catch the current on the way back… mmmmm. These guys mustve been pretty poor, looked like they hadnt eaten in a long time, they ranged in age from 15 to 74 and they all looked like they were ripped, their legs were pure muscle, dman buggers, still i cant imagine it wouldve been much of a life to get it, dragging boats upstream. We eventually got back to the boat and i went back to bed. At around 2 we arrived at another place where the han dynasty had left some cultural relics, and the locals had built some sort of temple. There were a ton of stairs to get to this place and we got to the entrance where our tour guide turned to us and said “ok who wants to go in??” like we were going to turn back after coming this far. Mike is a pretty funny guy, but i dont think his english is all that great. So we all paid 50 yuen to get into this place that frankly i thought was crap. Sorry but it wasnt worth anywhere near 10 bucks to get into. So, disappointed i returned to the boat but not before picking up some fried potatoes with shallots and chilli, they were scrumptious We had been having buffet breakfast lunch and dinner on the boat, and aside from teh eggs, most of it was slop…. so it made a great change. Tonight i pretty much slept for 12 hours.

Sarturday 15th May
This morning i got up for a jog along the river. There were soooo many chinese exercising along the banks of the river. there was some equipment that looked like a childs playground that had people 4 deep queing to use the machines. Then there were the people dancing, or some form of tai chi or something… not entirely sure what it was. there were even old couples doing a variation of ball room dancing. After my jog and some brekky, we all went to the boat. Id never been on an overnight boat before, and we were going to be on this one for the next 3 days. It was quite a nice boat. There were lots of chinese people on it, although we never really saw them, they seemed to keep to themselves. We took over the top bar and viewing deck, which cost us 50 yuen to get a special pass entitling us to free cups of the best chinese tea ever made. Our first port of call was the new three gorges dam. When its finished in 2009 it will be the worlds biggest dam, holding back the worlds 3rd largest river. It was quite enormous. There were 6 locks which slowly took us from the bottom of the dam to the top of it, where we would continue our journey, the locks were gigantic and it took us about 3 hours to get from the bottom to the top. We spent pretty much all day sitting at the front of the boat watching the spectacular scenery of the three gorges. Even though the weather wasnt so great and there seemed to be a haze over the hills it was still incredible. Tonight we sat around and had a few drinks and i met some people from the other group, they were a bit closer to my age. we ended up playing drinking games all night and they passed out they were going to be in europe while im over there so i was going to do the running of the bulls with them.

Friday 14th May
The train arrived at ………. at around 7, we lugged our bags about 1km from the station to the bus depot where our guide hired us a private bus that looked like it was going to fall apart. After the driver spent some time fiddling with the electrics, the bus wouldnt start.. so what else do you do??? roll start it of course anyway we were on our way. It was a 5 hour bus ride to ……… . It was a pretty horrible day, very foggy and it was pouring rain. Spent this afternoon wandering around the town, and finding a supermarket and an internet cafe. I had dinner at the hotel restraunt, which was delicious but it was also like i had ordered for 4 people. The bowl of soup was soooo massive, that i managed to fill my little bowl four times and there was still over half the main bowl of soup left. There must have been about 30 dumplings too and a huge fish all to myself… it was ridiculous, and all this for just 40 yuen, or about 8 AUD. This evening i met some of the others in a bar called “yes” which had only just opened, and looked appealing because of its large heinekin beer entrance. There must have been over 6 people trying to serve 5 of us, none of whom could speak english. but the singers girlfriend could so she came over and sorted everything out for us. THey even ran down to the KFC which was about 2kms away just to get us some french fries. I was running low on cash so i decided to get some money from the hole in the wall. Unfortunately none of the banks in this town liked my card so i was a bit stuck as we were going on a 3 day cruise up the yangtze.