Soooooooo we are super duper belated in our blogging, as China has banned many websites including blogspot! AND facebook! We had so much more free time while there :)
To start, here are some much belated pix from Hanoi:
We left off en route to Shanghai from Hong Kong...
The train was long and painless. Sleeper trains are far superior to sleeper buses. We slept well, and arrived in China to chaos in immigration/customs. Man, the locals are not fond of queuing! Additionally, we witnessed an old woman relieved of her fruit at customs, and she consequently spazzed out and started shrieking and lunging at the officials. No one really cared, and it was an interesting contrast to our fruit smuggling experience in Chile, as well as how the ol' US officials would have handled things had this incident gone down on our turf. Anywho...
We figured out the metro, and eventually landed at our hostel. We checked in and went for a wander- unfortunately Shanghai is plagued with tons of construction as well, so the views of the infamous Bund and walks through the old streets were tainted by bamboo scaffolding and banging. We spent just a few days in Shanghai as it was not really what we expected, but we did do some quality museum hopping. The Shanghai museum is top notch!! Unfortunately we were SCAMMED outside the museum by a nice little couple who we had a great chat with and they invited us to come and drink some tea with them. It felt a bit scammy from the start but I guess we were trying to believe that people actually want to talk to us! A big tip off for the scam was when Oli told he guy about his hobbies and mentioned Jujitsu.. the guy FREAKED out and looked terrified. Anyway, we ended up at this tea house and were informed that we should try a lucky 6 types of tea, at 8 bucks per person per type... yea, over $100 for tea. We politely excused ourselves. Another Shanghai highlight was our Crab ovary and digestive tract filled dumplings. They tasted like meatballs, but I could not get it out of my head how many little crabbies it took to feel that heaving queue of people. Though they were tastyish, I was a bit disturbed. Also please note we have lost our HK and Shanghai pix due to a "card error". Yay for cameras!!
Next stop- Suzhou. The "Venice of the East" is sprinkled with tiny traditional gardens, and we had such a lovely time exploring. We loved it there!!! Great little alleys, and a fab museum designed by IM Pei. Maybe the nicest and most atmospheric museum of the trip!?!?
Flash forward to Nanjing. We took another overnight train there, once again found our way on the subway, and got comfy in our hostel. We were pretty lazy while there, lots of hanging out and reading. We did make it to the Nanjing Holocaust Museum which was extensive and very well presented. On the way home we were tourist-napped by a cab that decided to take us on a wild ride in the opposite direction we wanted to go just to jack up the meter, and then pretend he didn't know where the metro station was. Thanks, dude.
We choochooed our way to Xi'an from Nanjing, and settled in one of the 10 most amazing hostels in the world according to Hostelworld. Set in a small neighborhood but within walking distance to everything, the seven sages hostel was awesome!! Great food, great drinks, poor music videos but hey, Vittis isn't for everyone. While in Xi'an we saw a few museums, ate kebabs in the Muslim Quarter, and saw the Terracotta Warriors!!!!!!!!! Self proclaimed 8th wonder of the world, it really was a fantastic visit. We viewed the 3 pits backwards, saving the main pit for last. It housed hundreds of soldiers in formation Life size, and no 2 alike, it was just amazing. We had a blast!! Oli left the guidebook on the bus there so we had to kind of make up our own stories. Thankfully Beijing is covered in our Trans Siberian books!!
Long train to Beijing, on which we tried but failed to make spaghetti in my thermos, and slept lots. Arrived in Beijing in the early morning, threw our stuff in the hostel, and hopped off to the Mongolian embassy to get Oli's visa. Afterwhich we skipped around the city attempting to book tickets to Mongolia, finally having success at CITS for double what we expected to pay. Too many beers (thanks pops!!!!) and off to bed far too late.
Woke up stinky and thirsty just in time for our tour to the GREAT WALL OF CHINA!!!!! We had booked ourselves on the Secret Wall tour to the unrestored part of the wall; no tourists, no touts, and definitely no toboggans to ride back down the hill. Three hours of napping in the van were topped off by getting dropped off in the middle of nowhere with a little Chinese man who spoke no English, and the fog encroaching on us with every gust of wind. Oooooh this should be good! We had to hike up the hills for about an hour. It should have been no big thang, but after last nights shenanigans we were huffing and puffing and sweating like madmen. Our little guide wiped the sweat from my brow, chuckled, grabbed my hand, and dragged me up at twice the speed. Ouch.
Our first view of the wall was sudden, as we were climbing switchbacks and the fog was so thick we were seemingly in a bubble. Suddenly there it was. Our 6th Wonder!!!! Wow, very exciting times. We climbed along the spine of the wall, snaking its way up and over the ridge, with little watchtowers at the peak of each hill. We had an absolute blast scrambling over the crumbling rock, dodging trees and weeds that were growing right out of the middle. And eventually, the fog cleared, and we were blessed with the most outrageous views. Good times!!!
We have booked our flights back to the states... Our little adventure will be coming to a close on Dec 30. However we still have to drive across the US to finish our second lap of the world, so we have that to look forward to too!!
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