Sunday, December 15, 2013

Lao Cai to Hoi An

Vietnam!
To start, at the border from Lao Cai, I went towards Sapa, which was fairly interesting because of the hill tribe people wearing funny clothing and constantly trying to sell me stuff. I didn't even make it into town before people on motorbikes were following me, desperately trying to get me stay at their hotels.


After leaving Sapa, I spent the next 4 days on a roller coaster up and down climbing the same 40m about 100 times through northern Vietnam. The first day out of Sapa I stopped at a restaurant around 5pm (since it's dark at 5:30) and fumbled through ordering. I was then invited to sleep at the restaurant, and a short while later tons of people started showing up and I was treated to a second dinner for free.

So far in Vietnam Everyone has been friendly and generally interested in talking or asking questions, and I have had only minor trouble ordering food. I can read the script, but can't even begin to pronounce it. I think the first 10 times or so I tried to order Pho I ended up with something that was definitely not Pho, but was still delicious.

I survived the army of motor scooters in Hanoi, and wandered around the old town a bunch:



I found that the annoying thing about the roaming vendors selling food out of the back of their bicycles/motorbikes is that if you really like what they're selling you can never find them again.

Hanoi has some interesting museums, such as the army museum, which has lots of american fighters and tanks:


The Ho Chi Minh mausoleum was disappointing. It was a dead body. In a glass case.


Since I knew I would need to book a tour to see Ha Long Bay anyway, I decided to leave from Hanoi rather than riding to the bay first. Ha Long Bay is basically the Li river in China but it's a bay instead of a river and all the bottoms of the limestone formations are further eroded by the water.


As part of the tour we got to visit a floating fishing village. The village farms pearls by manually inserting plastic beads into oysters, then hanging them in a net underwater for a few years.


From Hanoi it was several days south to Hue along the QL1, mostly following the coast. This part of Vietnam is not too exciting because it's all entirely flat, with nothing but rice paddies still full of water. Hue has a large citadel full of the old imperial palace:


More interesting than that was some of the tombs built for the emperors, the last of which was finished in 1931.





From Hue it was a few days to Hoi An, where I've been waiting to get my visa extended before continuing. Hue has tons of old Chinese buildings that were used as meeting halls when it used to be a major port, and it has an interesting waterfront.









Monday, December 2, 2013

Macau and China

Blogspot is blocked in China and uploading photos through a proxy is too slow to work at all so it's been a while since I've updated. First, Macau: It's basically Vegas but better. Macau actually has some history to it, like the fact that all the signs have Portuguese on them but no one speaks Portuguese. It's also in a better location, and not in the middle of the desert.


The ruins of saint Paul's cathedral (and the hordes of tourists):


Of course it also has the massive casinos as well, and apparently it's surpassed Vegas in revenue:


I guess they always have the barricades up for the grand prix so it was a little bit interesting riding parts of the circuit feeling like I was in a video game (though I never timed myself):


And then we have China. Where to start? My first experience in China was that the map I had bought in Hong Kong apparently was using the traditional characters for city names, and all the road signs were using the simplified characters.

hmmmmmm...... which way to go?

Playing connect the dots with the major cities involved writing down and memorizing the pinyin for the cities I was headed to, because I might only see pinyin every 50km or so. Also, as I was was warned, the Chinese drivers are by far the worst I've ever encountered. I feel like I owe every other driver an apology as I've been too harsh on them for their bad driving behavior compared to the Chinese.

I wish I had a dollar for every time I saw a Chinese driver:
  • drive on the wrong side of the road
  • drive at night without any lights on
  • drive a car/van in the motocycle/bike only lane
  • blatantly run a red light 30 seconds after it turned red
  • merge onto a road without ever looking to see if they can safely merge (about one in every hundred will shoulder check)
  • honk at someone else (particularly when they're the one breaking the law at the time)
  • honk at someone when they're about to pull out into the street (because 99% of the time they wont look)
  • honk to signal that they're overtaking
  • make a sudden left or right turn on a motorbike or bicycle without looking over their shoulder (hence why they honk while overtaking)
  • stare at me while driving, instead of watching the road
Air quality in China: I wasn't even in Beijing and I still probably inhaled enough to considerably shorten my life. If it wasn't the car/motorscooter pollution, it was the trucks pumping out black smoke, or the hordes of people cutting stone on the side of the road, or the piles of plastic and other trash being burned, or the road construction dust. I'd say about 90% of the plants on the side of the road in China are covered in grey dust.

Hordes of the Chinese equivalent of lawn ornaments:


At least China has the scenery going for it. First I went towards Kaiping which is listed as a world heritage site because of 1500ish old tower-like buildings in the area.



From there it was a few days of riding towards Yangshuo to see the eroded limestone landscape around the Li river (which is featured on the back of the 20 yuan note). The weather was foggy most of the time I was there:




I spent a few days in the area, and during most of it I was constantly harassed by people trying to sell me things. When I wasn't on the bike I was being sold a bike. When I was on the bike I was being sold bamboo raft rides, or I was being flagged down and literally chased to buy trinkets and treats. In Xingping I couldn't make it 5 feet outside of the hostel without being bothered to buy things. 

Guilin is another city in the Li river area which still has a bit of its charm in spite of being quite modern.



The city has a well known landmark called elephant trunk hill. This is a hill near the center of town that juts out into the river and is vaguely shaped like an elephant trunk. It's on lots of postcards and pictures of the city and it's clearly visible from the sidewalk near the river. Actually, it would be visible but it's not since they've planted large trees in the way to block the view and try to force you to pay to enter the park that has an unobstructed view.

Guilin also has some well known rice terraces near it which are impressive only because of the steepness of the mountain they're built on:


since pretty much the entire southern section of the country is terraced:


Also these gates are generally everywhere:


On the bus ride back from the village to the main ticket office at the rice terraces I overheard some other tourists talking about when they asked locals for directions, they would give contradictory advice, just to encourage them to pay for a guide. From Personal experience, China is the only place I have ever had people refuse to give me directions. Several times I walked up to Chinese people with a map (that has Chinese characters on it) and repeated the name of the city I was looking for, only to have them mutter something in Chinese, not even look at the map, shake their head, and turn away.

From Guilin I decided to take the train to Kunming since I was going to run out of time on my visa if I spent 8-9 days cycling there. As I've experienced before, taking a fully loaded bike on public transport can be a hassle. First they wouldn't let me on the train with the bike and gear as it weighed too much. I had to fight to keep the bike and they shipped (at my expense) the rest of my gear which arrived a day later. Then once I got on the train, at three separate times I had the conductors come by and try to get money out of me, claiming that the bike was overweight and too big.

From Kunming I rode to the historic city of Dali, which was quite nice, but mostly shops:



It was two more days to ride to Lijiang where the old city is also a heritage site but is nothing but tourists and shops, so I only stayed there for a few hours:


I then spent a day hiking in Tiger leaping gorge which is supposedly almost 4000m from top to bottom but it didn't seem that deep, or maybe I've just been used to seeing gorges like this in central Asia:


I ended up having to take a bus from Dali back to Kunming before starting a 4 day, 450km race to the border where I arrived just in time to not get deported. I got to descend about 1300m on the last day which put me squarely in the tropics. All of these are banana trees:


Finally, in Vietnam


Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Bishkek to Hong Kong

Since I never did a proper summary of Bishkek, here it is:
The capital of Kyrgyzstan is basically like the rest of the country: very much former soviet, central asian, and all the drivers (particularly the minibus drivers) are trying to kill you. There are some nice bazaars with very cheap fruit and vegetables (30 cents for a kilo of tomatoes). Bishkek also has a lot of parks which was nice, and there was tons of western food as well since a lot of expats apparently live there. I can see why since it's a cheap and relatively modern city compared to the rest of central Asia.


The inscription says "We were fighting for communism"

Of course Bishkek also has the standard wide open squares, with more statues in them:

My flight out was at 4am on the 9th, so the day before I had a bike shop box up my bike, then call me a taxi to the airport where I managed to score one of two plugs in the whole place to pass the time on my laptop. I flew on S7, a Russian airline, that was actually quite pleasant. The seats were much better than the two flights I flew on Aeroflot a few years ago, and they didn't even charge me any extra for the bike though that was probably just a mistake on their part.

My flight connected in Novosibirsk, where since I didn't have a Russian visa they wouldn't let me through customs. I was ferried directly from the landing zone back into the terminal, where I proceeded to wait a solid 14 hours, again scoring a plug. The Novosibirsk airport is weird because since they only have a flight every few hours many of the shops open up shortly before the flight, then close down after. It was annoying that while I had my itinerary, I didn't actually have my ticket for the flight to Hong Kong, and since I couldn't leave the terminal I couldn't check in, and I had to repeatedly ask the security people before I finally had someone from the airline come, take my passport to the check-in desk, then come back with my ticket. Also about half the passengers on the plane were drunk. I was browsing through the duty free shop at one point and one of the attendants mentioned something about how I should buy some alcohol for the long flight.

I arrived in Hong Kong around 6am where things were much more organized, except the cheap bag I had bought in Bishkek to combine my 5 bags into 1 to save on luggage fees had come apart as I suspected it would so they had lost my luggage (at least I had the bike, camera, and laptop). Luckily the bag was at least in Hong Kong and I received it a day later. However, no bag meant no multitool which meant I had to take the train and a taxi to get to the place I was staying rather than put my bike together in the terminal like I had planned. Not wanting to go without the bike for what I had assumed might be a while (since the next flight from Novosibirsk wasn't for days) I bought a multitool and put the bike together, only to find the genius in Bishkek had forgotten the topcap to the headset. Of the four times in my life I have had a bike boxed up, twice there has been a missing part so I guess I should've learned by now to do it myself, even though he only charged me $4 to do it.

I made up an itinerary and applied for and received a Chinese visa (without needing an invitation letter). After that I figured I should probably apply for a Vietnamese visa as well rather than be forced to extend my visa in Kunming, where if I wasn't granted the extension I wouldn't have time to apply for the Vietnamese visa and I would essentially be forced to fly out of the country before being deported. This has left me with a lot of time to explore Hong Kong.

Hong Kong: A city that takes itself waaaaaaay too seriously.
Warning signs everywhere.

Signs denoting fines everywhere. $1500-5000 fine for smoking in most places. $1500 fine for feeding the pigeons. $1500 fine for eating on the metro.
A sign in a public park:

"No dogs, no skateboarding, no drying clothes, please keep clean, no cycling, no  loud noises [and no FUN!]"
I've been yelled at plenty of times now for riding my bike in a park, or on a waterfront promenade.
If you look closely in this picture you can see the guy walking towards me about to yell at me for riding here, because clearly a bike is a menace to society.

Batumi, Baku, and now Hong Kong. Places where no fun is to be had in parks. Jogging in designated areas only. Biking in designated areas only. Oh well, I make up for it by jaywalking which most people here don't do. It's not as crazy as Munich where I was the only one jaywalking, but still I'd say about 90% of the people here will obey the law and wait for the little green man before bravely crossing the street.

Anyway, some pictures from Hong Kong:
High rises in the middle of the jungle/beach:

Gigantic Buddha:

Both the old and the new near Aberdeen:

Some old and impressive temples:

There are over 12000 Buddhas in this one, keeping the ever burning incense company:

Interesting skyline:

Monkeys:

Avenue of the Stars:

The biggest thing I've noticed is that the drivers are mostly polite, and you can actually go more than five seconds without hearing a car horn. In fact it's quite rare to hear someone honk. After more than five months of constant honking, this is a welcome change. I've been told the drivers in the mainland are as awful as ever though, so I'm preparing myself for a return to the onslaught in a few days. My other impression with Hong Kong is that there are just too many people. I've decided I definitely don't like big cities. Also, It's quite expensive here compared to other places I've been. It's hard to find a meal for less than $50HK. The food that I have had tastes almost exactly like Chinese food in the US, with one major difference: bones. Stir fry, sweat and sour, curry chicken. All of it has had the bones still in it, which really ruins the eating experience.

While I've been here, I've had some work done on the bike. I got a new bottom bracket, new handlebar tape, and another rear tire. My handlebars no longer look like this:

After receiving my Vietnamese visa, I took the ferry to Macau, and I will shortly cross into mainland China, where I will probably get lost beyond all hope.