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