From Sao Paulo it was easy to jump on the legendary luxury Brazilian buses up to Rio de Janeiro. Unfortunately we ever so slightly miss timed the departure with resulted in us arriving in Rio after dark (something which we successfully avoided for the most part). The bus station in Rio was really dark and had homeless, drug addicts everywhere – clearly we had rolled into a favella. Luckily I found us an overpriced taxi company at the station which for around £20 would take us to the safety of Ipanema. As trivial as this may sound, the taxi was the first half decent car we had been in for the whole 6 months – it was less than a year old – I couldn’t believe how solid and clean a new car was, it even had that ‘new car smell’!

Arrived at our chosen hostel, Girl from Ipanema (another Lonely Planet recommendation) and met the lovely owner hanging out on the porch. It was down a tiny little lane with plants and benches scattered around – with a gate at one end and no access out the other.

The hostel was just a house without a front door, we got two decent looking beds and headed out for dinner. It was great! 10pm at night, eating a huge pizza, with a beer at the side of the busy street in Ipanema with some of the most beautiful buildings we had seen.

For the next few days we explored Copacabana and Ipanema neighbourhoods. It was a fantastic 4 days winding down and getting ready to come home. Its an incredible city and the landscape just makes it that little bit more amazing.

My emotions were everywhere over the 4 days in Rio as I looked back at the trip, thought about coming home and what I was going to do.

Still, I would do every single bit of it again in an instant and I will remember every minute of it. To be continued…

THE LAST SUNSET OF OUR TRIP! Lush! So much fun, so many memories, so much still to see.

Nice temperature

Women exclusive cars in the tube

Rather a plush area is Ipanema!

A huge chocolate tart and a creamy coffee - heavy enough to cause me a heart attack. Yum!

The LONG trip from Peru to Brazil, via Bolivia.

Argentina - Chile - Peru - Bolivia - Brazil

After 4 days in beautiful Cusco, Peru at 3300m above sea level with crippling altitude sickness I decided it was time for us to get down to lower levels. We got a 14h bus to La Paz, Bolivia and then a 20h bus to Santa Cruz, Bolivia at a much lower 417m. We did have to rise to levels above 4000m on the journey to La Paz – the highest city in the world but we didn’t hang around in La Paz and got a bus out of their after just 4 hours.

Ironically the bus journey from La Paz to Santa Cruz was by far the worst bus journey in 6 months. I knew that journey’s in Bolivia were bad as the roads are rough, non existent or frequently blocked by mud slides but nothing could have prepared us for it.

We paid just £13 for a 20 hour journey and when the bus pulled into the station 30mins late I knew why it was so cheap…

• The bus was an old work horse that had been through a lot since it was built, sometime before I was born no doubt! It had no toilet, no interior lights and smelled like a farm.

• A boy, less than 10yrs old had snuck onto the bus and popped out from behind our seats about 1 hour into the journey. He sat in the aisle next to me the entire journey, occationally sleeping with his legs under our seats. I wish I knew enough Spanish to ask him where he was going and why but I couldn’t so just smiled and gave him some of my crisps – in an attempt to build some rapport and stop him stealing my stuff.

• We never really got going as the driver kept stopping to pick up more and more passengers – I ended up with a huge old lady in traditional dress sitting practically on top of me and sleeping with her face right next to mine. She got off in the middle of nowhere at 1am.

• At 3am we stopped at a major drug search point and I was dreading being hassled as I was too tired having not slept a wink yet. Luckily our passports were just examined for a little and then we went on.

• At 3.30am I spotted our first crash – a truck that had slipped off the road into a ditch. It was pitch dark and the busses and trucks just ploughed past blowing bags of pollution into the poor driver’s face who was just sitting at the side of the road. Audrey said “Lets hope it reminds the driver to be careful.” (It is important to note that emergency services don’t really exist in countries as poor as Bolivia, particularly outside of a major city – a crash is your own problem and if it’s a bad one you will need to try and flag down another vehicle for a lift to a hospital. Trucks and busses are usually robbed of all their goods when they crash – in South America at least. In India they tend to be set on fire if there are any deaths associated with the crash!)

• At 4am we stopped, pointing steeply downhill. We had been winding down through the jungle on a road of rock and mud for hours and I was sure that we were going to come across something bad soon.

Then we did.

A truck just 5 busses in front of us was revving hard, smoke billowing out of its exhausts. I could see that it was stuck and blocking the road, it had become stuck on a switch back turn and couldn’t move on the slippy worn rocks. The drivers all turned off their engines and it was just silence. We were deep in the jungle in a queue of trucks and busses which was growing by the minute. We could actually look out the window which opened fully and see a trail of busses all the way up the road, all sitting in peace with their lights off. Our bus was eerily quiet, the sound of the jungle and the stuck truck revving was all I could hear – Everyone else was sound asleep around me. After the sound of a few air horns in the distance, trucks started to squeeze past the stuck truck – dicing with a 100m drop into the jungle on the left and a huge unstable truck on the right they crept past. They sound of the trucks and their trailers rattling past our window in the pitch dark made the situation even spookier. Finally we got going after about 45mins – the truck turned off his engine and gave up – presumably waiting the 2 hours until sunrise to reassess his situation. The roads are so dark and full of diesel pollution which hangs in the air like mist – it is no place to attempt a recovery.

• After a full 20 hours and 2 more drug check points, one where we had our bags searched, we made it to Santa Cruz! Hooray.

We were so relived to arrive in the lower lands AND our bags weren’t stolen from the hold which was remarkable!

Few days in Santa Cruz and then off to Sao Paulo and Rio. Boom.

Watching sunset atop the dunes in Haucachina, Peru. A bizzare oasis town.

Haucachina, Peru. A bizzare oasis town with a green pond and lots of bars...

Haucachina, Peru

Haucachina, Peru. Population: 150! Tourists: 1000+!

The Plaza in Cusco, Peru.

View across the rooftops of Cusco, Peru.

The lovely narrow streets of Cusco, Peru.

Crossing the Peru - Bolivia Border. This is taken from the bridge looking towards Peru.

Peru - Bolivia border town.

The bus from hell!

Looking at another bus from hell.

Audrey looking happy to be crossing into Bolivia. Or just tired?

Sunset at Haucachina, Peru.

On a walk around Haucachina, Peru.

Coming home

It is less than a week until we arrive back in ‘Broken Britain‘ and I’m pretty damn excited about catching up with everyone. The 6 months has flown by faster than I could ever have imagined, we have seen and done so much it is hard to actually reflect upon it yet.

One thing I can say for sure is that we are both changed people. I no longer see Borders as boundaries and really like the idea of getting out of the western bubble. Some travellers go around with a negativity and are always comparing things to “home” which only gives an shallow view of the world. On this trip I feel we have had a very rounded view and have had the chance to compare each country to the other. My sense of “normality” has been blown away and now it’s impossible to say what I expect from a place.

It’s been fun to go with the flow, something I don’t generally do.

When I return home it will be great to look back and see how we are less developed than we think and also take clever ideas from other countries and implement them.

One thing I warn you all to do is avoid saying that it’s time to get back to reality. I hear this over and over again from other travellers (usually younger). I see travelling as the closest to reality as you can get. If I were at home it would be wake up, go to work, come home, eat dinner, bed and it’s all pretty straight forward. For the past 6 months we have had to speak in different languages, use different currencies, find food and accommodation, arrange transport, stay safe in places with little or no emergency services and generally ‘live’ out of our comfort zone. It’s about as real as you can get. If I were sitting by a pool sipping ice cold beer everyday for the past 6 months then I would be away from reality, but I didn’t.

So yes, to summarise, looking forward to returning home and seeing everyone but not so sure about the UK anymore. I think somewhere with more of a sustainable economy, less drugs and violence is more my thing. See you all on or after May 8th.

Highlights of the trip:
- India and our death defying car tour through the central regions.
- Visiting tea plantations in Malaysia on bikes.
- Kicking back in Langkawi at a 5 star resort, with Christmas day on the beach.
- Scuba diving in Koh Tao.
- pretending to be millionaires in Hong Kong and Singapore.
- arriving in china and having to communicate with a pen and paper
like pictionary pros.
- trekking the Great Wall in the snow with 8 others.
- Sydney with Susie
- cycling around Angkor watt ruins for 7 days.
- getting to know the locals and be part of the community in Pisco.
- visiting the Taj Mahal.
- horse riding through the desert in Chile.
- building a house for a family of 5 Peruvians.
- living out of a 18kg backpack and never ever unpacking.
- shooting some of my favourite photographs ever.
- eating dinner in restaurants with so many rats running around that I
have actually become used to the sight of them.
- drinking single malt scotch on the 89th floor of The Hyatt, Shanghai.
- Getting a tailor made suit in Hoi an, Vietnam.
- Yoga at sunset on the rooftops of Varanasi, India.
- celebrating Chinese new year in Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam.
- eating lunch in a 5 star hotel surrounded by drunk men shouting at
each other whilst a wrestling match where opponents are only allowed
one leg on the ground played on TV. Nanning, China.
- Finding ourselves in a 2 room family home full of mice and
mosquitoes, deep in the flooded Indian countryside just 2 days after
leaving Glasgow!
- St Patricks day in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
- Sand boarding the dunes in Huacachina, Peru.

Ok I’ll stop now, I’m starting to sound like the back cover of a Lonelyplanet.

2 weeks working at PSF rebuilding Pisco after the 2007 earthquake is coming to an end. We have just over 2 weeks to get to Rio on the other side of the country which is NOT enough time. I would love to stay here for much much longer if time allowed but sadly we have to leave PSF and our new friends here to fly home. We both thought about changing our flight but we do miss home too so its been a tough few days dithering about…

The last 2 weeks in Pisco, a run down dump of a town on the coast of peru has been one of the most memorable and enjoyable 2 weeks of our 6 month trip.  The best thing about being here is that we can actually feel part of the community which we haven’t had anywhere else on our trip. The people here all know that we are here to do good so we are accepted. The organisation is great too – the 80ish people are always changing, new people come almost everyday. Some have been here for months and others like us just stay for 2 weeks.
Going to hardware stores and buying things whilst speaking spanish is something I didnt expect to be doing on this trip, nor did I think I would be building a house for a family or constructing a roof for a school. I have really been fully integrated in projects and even contributed some of my own money to buy matraseses for the kids in the house we built.

We held a small party lunch with the family of the pink house on the day of completion and they told us about the earthquake. It was pretty shocking stuff. They said it happened at night and when they woke up everything was shaking and it was pitch dark as all the electricity went off. A woman and her baby died in the house next door. The family said they were ok because their house was made of ‘adobe’ which is basically mud bricks which disintergrated in the earthquake. The next day a representative from the ministery came round and gave everyone in the town 5 pea pods! Yes, 5 pea pods as food after the disaster. They laughed telling the story of a hotel at the end of the street which fell down and when people went looking through the rubble they found a fullscale cocaine factory in the basement! They also told us that all 5 banks in the Plaza were robbed and when the police ran out of bullets they just had to stand back and watch as looters stole all the money!

I will stop writitng now and let the photos do the talking…

Our completed pink house

The kids bedroom with new bedding.

Buying the new matrasses

Hungover door making at 8am

Out with the local fishermen one sunday morning

Epic winding roads in the Andies - This is looking down around 1200m...

Chile
Our first stop was Santiago for a few days. This HUGE city is beautiful and full of things to see and do. We did a handful of touristy things like the funicular lift up past the city zoo to the huge Virgin Mary atop ‘the lung’, a large hill in the middle of this sprawling city.

Once we had ticked off many tourist attractions we got down to eating lots of delicious food. One of the culinary delights of Chile was the ‘Italiano’ which is just a bog standard hotdog brought to life with the addition of 3 sauces: ketchup, avocado and mayo to make the Italian flag. These hotdogs can be found in any restaurant and many will tempt you in with a plastic version in the window. Yum…

The Finecular in Santiago

Audrey on the finecular

Me and Mary looking out over Santiago (Through the smog...)

Very cool sculpture in the background

One of many buses

San Pedro
The highlight of the journey up to Peru was the stop over in the desert for a good nights sleep. We planned this stop in advance over Facebook to meet up here with a friend we met earlier in Mendoza. San Pedro is beautiful and well worth the visit. It is nothing more than a few hundred concrete and wooden single story buildings in the middle of a rocky desert basin, but the attraction is the many activities on offer day and night – things like Rock climbing, Star gazing, Horse riding, 4×4 ride over to Boliva and Sand boarding are all available pretty cheaply. Without all these activities the town just wouldn’t exist as there is nothing else to do. It seemed only right to book one so I picked horse riding out to Death Valley – great fun and a good way to see off a hangover.

We also visited a swimming pool, which was more like a Butlins Holiday Park from the 1970’s that had been taken over by gypsies. We cycled out to it in search of a nice pool to relax at but it was quite a disappointment as they had no sun loungers and the toilets and pool hadn’t been cleaned in some time!

A slightly less luxurious bus

Beautiful San Pedro. Ok, Its not much of a looker but its nice and peaceful.

Cycling around the long desert roads

A waste of water if you ask me...

Drinks in the Sand mountains near Death Valley

Cowboy

They call me a horse whisperer

Chile – Peru Border Crossing
Crossing at the Arica crossing to Peru was a unique experience. We arrived at 5.30am in Arica bus terminal thanks to the weird timetables of Turbus and then had to search for the ‘International Terminus’ which is where all the collectivos that take you to Peru depart from. Now to clear this up for anyone planning the same journey, a collectivo is just a normal saloon car with 3 seats up front and 3 in the back – usually an old American Ford. These cars gather by the hundred in the Terminus filling up the passengers and then shooting along the arrow straight road to Tacna with a slow baggage and search and passport stamp at the border post. Quite why this journey over the border cannot be fulfilled by a few busses is beyond me – one reason was that it is quicker through passport control with a group of 6 people, rather than an entire bus load of people… Who knows, it seems like an inefficient and polluting way to get people the 60km from Arica, Chile to Tacna, Peru.

Peru
Looking out the window as we drove the Pan American Highway for 16 hours aboard a Cruz Del Sur bus, equipped with Security Guard, WIFI, Fully Reclining Seats, Kitchen, TV’s, 2 toilets and proper meals Peru couldn’t have looked more like India if it tried. It is so similar: The insane poverty, the tuktuk’s, the markets, the roads or lack of, the ugly buildings and mountains of stinking rubbish. The only thing they don’t have is the cows, oh and religion!

Views over Pisco (aka. Bagdad)

We arrived at Pisco Sin Fronteras, an NGO in Pisco helping to rebuild the town after the 2007 earthquake. It is a really cool place with around 80 – 90 people all working 9 to 5, 6 days a week. I got myself involved in building a house for a single mother of 3 children aged 10 to 18. The first day I dug out a trench for a water pipe to delver water to the new bathroom and then day 2 I installed a sewer system with 2 other guys. Then day 3 I took on the task of installing electricity to the house, all on my own. They had previously had an extension cable plugged into the next door neighbours and only 1 light for the whole house – the extension cable was so hot from overloading and it was hardly an ideal solution. They will have lights and plenty of sockets in 2 days time when I finally plug them into the mains. It’s really amazing to see how these basic improvements can improve the lives of the family dramatically.
We will be at PSF for 2 weeks before heading down to Rio either by Air or overland (hopefully by air as it’s a long way!).

Digging for the sewer line

I can use a jack hammer like its a paintbrush

The pink house is the one I am working on this week.

Connecting up the sewer line, with its 5cm drop lol...

Pisco market - our hardware store...

Those rocks were my idea. They keep the water in the shower and look great. Plus they are free...

2 hour stopover (Burger king feast) in Auckland, New zealand.

I spoke to my Gran today on Skype and the first thing she asked me was “are you looking forward to coming home”, my answer to her was yes and no. After the call I immediately boarded a 6h bus to Cordoba which gave me more time to think about the question. One half of me can’t wait to see my family and friends but the other half of me does not feel much desire to go back to the UK as a country.

Thanks to hundreds of hours of travelling I have had plenty of time to gather my thoughts and pinpoint a few things that bother me most about the UK (these are of course generalisations): The people are overly polite, shy, drink too much and are cheap.  A plethora of rules and regulations has removed the need for common sense and the weather is the only topic of conversation. Worst of all, we laugh at people who do things differently from the norm; in Asia strapping a chest freezer to a motorbike and calling it an ice cream van is a business idea, at home I doubt anybody would be brave enough to even try. Observing the cultures and business practices of over 10 countries in the past 4 months I feel that the UK is a country of dreamers and introverts. In many other parts of the world, Asia in particular, you will find doers and extroverts everywhere. An argument for this could be that in the UK we have a huge benefits culture. Much of the world’s population has no benefits and therefore no choice but to make money which results in creativity (and undesirable things like theft).

I have really become to love the world and see outside the borders of Europe. Hopefully over the next few weeks before I return to the UK on a *fingers crossed* upgraded BA flight I will have had even more great experiences and learnt how much really is out there waiting to be discovered.

Buenos Aires
This leads me nicely onto Buenos Aires where we stayed in a proper party hostel for a week and where Audrey celebrated getting even older!
We really could not have expected anything more different from BA. When we arrived it was like driving though any big European city. Even the climate is similar. It was really quite beautiful and I recommend you Google the city and peruse the images, I would normally post lots of my own but the constant threat of pick pocketing makes taking my camera outside quite undesirable…

Old school metro trains in BA are made of wood and shake like hell

Celebrated a big St. Paddys night in BA.

Cooking with our new fluffy friend in Cordoba

Audreys Birthday steak and champagne

Second most expensive bottle on the menu... Champagne is cheappp

All but one of our hostels has had a BBQ which is great fun, Even if it does take about 2 hours to cook a steak the 'Argentinian way'. I love the BBQ culture!

View from our balcony in BA.

A horse festival thing in Rosario.

MORE BBQ

The 4 photos below are of the La Recoleta Cemetary in BA which is an incredible collection of buildings with basements. Inside the buildings are the coffins of the deceased family. It was really incredible the amount of effort that had gone into these miniture houses. Definetly worth a visit. Here is a link to more useful information http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Recoleta_Cemetery

Some had been vandalised and were even more spooky...

Pressing on
After spending five sleepless nights in BA (Parties kick off around 12pm and clubs open their doors at 2am) we began our epic journey across Argentina to Chile, Peru, Bolivia and Brazil. In Argentina we visited the cities of Cordoba, Rosario and Mendoza which are all really unique and beautiful. The accommodation has been great too, spending many a night in huge old Spanish colonial mansions for under £10.
Buses or flying are the only two options for getting around South America as the train network has become a series of rusty lines running across the county. We chose buses because of our budget but it’s ok because they are huge, cheap, fast and reliable so it is very easy to get to each of our planned destinations.

View Larger Map

Mendoza wine tour
A highlight of the South American leg has been the wine tour we did in Mendoza – a HUGE global exporter of wines, mostly red. We met a great group of people in our hostel and hired bikes the next day to take us around the ten’s of wineries in the area. It was a great way to drink excessively, ride dangerously and have fun. Many of the wineries we visited had great tasting tours whilst others were simply selling bottles so it was a mixture of education and heavy consumption, one place even sold Absinthe in hefty shot glasses which was a great idea. We stayed out in the wine district well into the evening drinking free wine at the bike shop with the owner and his employee who was from Barnsley and had the strongest accent. It was a great day and a memorable one.

Not the smoothest of rides...

Forward Planning
In a last attempt at securing some volunteering work before we return home I sent an email off to a volunteer disaster reconstruction organization that works in and around the city of Pisco, Peru. The organisation, Pisco Sin Fronteras works to improve the living conditions of families affected by the 2008 earthquake by building and improving homes. It sounded like the ideal volunteering job for me as I love construction and it would be a fantastic opportunity to use and improve my skills whilst helping others.
The organisation accepted Audrey and me straight away so in the next week we will be making our way up to Pisco for 2 weeks of hard labour in an earthquake disaster zone.

Arriving in Sydney was a huge culture shock for us, it was the first time in 4 months that everyone spoke English, and we weren’t the only white people. The shock started in the airport and continued for the rest of the week as we adjusted to the fact that we could speak to everyone around us without the language barrier.

The hostel we had booked online for the 5 days was very average. When we arrived at our room we found Susi, Audrey’s cousin, half asleep in bed! It was really great to see her and we spent many hours trying to catch up on all our stories from the past few months.

On day two after a short walk around the streets it became apparent to us that we were in the red light district, a look at the map confirmed this. However, Kings Cross is a really trendy area and not as bad as you would expect – during the day…

We did a handful of typical sightseeing things in the short space time we had in the city:

• Took the Sightseeing Bus around the city.
• Watched hundreds of surfers flop on the rubbish waves at Bondi Beach.
• Ran the length of Manly Beach twice and then had dinner on the esplanade.
• Visited the Opera House and took the standard photos.
• Walked across the Harbour Bridge.
• Rode one lousy ride at Luna Park (A small and overpriced theme park)
• Ate a whole side of raw salmon at the Fish Market (The second largest market in the world)
• Had a private tour of the Maritime Museum.

We could have happily doubled the length of this list but Sydney really stretches the purse strings – mostly due to the poor performance of the £. And for us coming from Asia it was even more of a shocker as the prices were around 3x higher. It wasn’t the most enjoyable week for my wallet and it has certainly taken a hit.

I ended up spending an entire day walking the scummy student streets of the Glebe area in search of the post office where my replacement SIM card from Vodafone UK was supposed to be delivered to. It turns out that the postal system in Australia is pretty rubbish and not one of the 3 post offices I visited could find the package. So I leave Australia without a SIM card and wishing I hadn’t lost my phone in Vietnam.

I really felt at home in Australia which was what I expected, it was great to get back to normal restaurant etiquette, Audrey and I haven’t eaten our food at the same time since we left home as they always bring out the dishes as they are cooked, and getting a menu each instead of one to share is always nice… Drinking the tap water was a novelty as was not being stared at and photographed, their must be hundreds of Asian school girls with a photo of me on their phones now.

The city was really fun to be in and the sightseeing bus was great for an initial orientation. Sydney seems really liveable and I can see the attraction of emigrating. There is a really great feel created by the huge melting pot of cultures, the beaches are obviously a fantastic reason to go too, the sand is so soft and clean.

The landmark Coca Cola sign at Kings Cross http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca_Cola_Billboard

Bondi Beach

Ferry to Manly

Feeding the fishes

Luna Park – It has that creepy themepark feel to it, you can just imagine the wheels falling off the ride and crashing into an inferno. And that did happen in 1979 if you read on: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_Park_Sydney

I will return to Oz for a holiday and with more money. It is and a fun place to be, likely made even better by having plenty of dollars in hand!

Well Beijing was soo difficult to live in because of the language barrier but Shanghai is the complete opposite! It is one hundred times more international and this makes a huge difference to our enjoyment.

The hostel was great and more like a boutique hotel than a hostel – still expensive in comparison to south east asia, at around £10 more per night, but well worth it as we were in a great location and had hot shower, heated AC and breakfast. Check it out Mingtown Etour Youth hostel

Upon arrival in Shanghai after a 12 hour train went to one of the highest bars in the world and one of the most expensive too. ‘Cloud 9′ bar on the 87^th Floor of the Jin Mao Tower – more like a millionaires bar – with a minimum spend of £15 per person… Well worth it though as we sipped whiskey at 1000ft with a group of noisy Russians at the next table. The building is so high that you actually look down over the other skyscrapers. The Jin Mao tower is the fifth tallest in the world by roof height and the seventh tallest by pinnacle height. How cool is that. Beats the socks off any other skyscraper we have been up on this trip.

The building on the left is the Jin Mao Tower, the building on the right is The World Financial Center. The latter being the tallest in PRC.

Enjoyed the old town and massive Chinese markets where we picked up some epic bargains such as the stupidly big Chinese fabric lanterns that we got and had to take on the plane as hand luggage!

His hand actually moves with every second!

Bund Sightseeing Tunnel

One weird of the more weird things to do is ride the odd ‘Bund Sightseeing Tunnel’ which is basically a cable car that goes through a tunnel under the river. It was like a disco and they played bizarre sounds on the journey. For £4 it worked out at about 5p per laugh – but it was so bizarre!!!

Did lots in the 5 days

Met up with Alex Duncan, the brother of a good friend who is living and working in Shanghai. He had some interesting stories to tell about living and being an entrepreneur in the city. It sounds like a really exciting place to be.

The 5 days we spent in Shanghai were jam packed with walking and photo taking. I was determined to get some final Asia photos before flying off to Sydney but it was overcast for 3 days which made most photos rubbish. I did get a few though.

We enjoyed the time we had in Shanghai and it was pretty obvious that the city could indeed be a more important financial centre than London in a few years. Huge new buildings that split the skyline were popping up everywhere and fashion names such as Gucci and Louis Vuitton had multiple shops in the city.

The dust spots make the sky more interesting… (off to clean the camera now)

The last supper… in China.

Lots and lots of walking around the mostly deserted streets of Shanghai

A visit to the French Colonial District where artists are abundant.

The first time we have experienced rain in 2 months!

Couldn’t resist a dinner at Pizza Hut one night at Peoples Square. This was the ‘small’ pizza that the waitress kept insisting would be enough for us. I ordered LOADS more after this appeared on our table…

The Shanghai Museum. The museum itself was beautiful but the exhibits were just so boring. 
“I would rather have acupuncture on my eyes than look at anymore chinese calligraphy art work.”

Aud’s wearing the hat I told her to buy that she hates.

Maglev

One final highlight was the magnetic train or Maglev which shot us the 19 miles from the city to the airport in just seven min’s. We hit a top speed of 430km/h which makes it the fastest train in the world. For £4 a ticket it works out pretty good value for money. Read the Wiki here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maglev_%28transport%29 Believe it or not, the UK used to have a Maglev train too, only we scrapped in 1995… Typical.

It was so fast that I could hardly hold the camera still for this photo. 

The end of our Asian Adventure

Flying out of Shanghai signalled the end of our epic 3 month adventure across Asia. We have seen, eaten and done so many incredible things in a relatively short space of time that I am not even going to attempt a summary. I am pleased that I have also learned some valuable life lessons which I will never forget.

My interest and understanding of this part of the world has grown rapidly and I will happily visit Asia again and again. Each country is just so unique and it is impossible to describe ‘Asia’ without going through each country individually.

All our belongings are still with us and our kit is still intact – my bag is proving to be a really good choice. So far so good…

Here is a map of our journey since we left the UK which I threw together in an overpriced cafe in Shanghai, the dots indicate a flight (Click on the map for a bigger and better version):

South America is the next adventure…

Well not quite but I think we are starting to ‘like’ China! After staying in Beijing for 6 days in a really homely guesthouse and exploring the sights like a local, on public transport, we are accepting this weird and wacky country where nobody speaks English and where they eat EVERYTHING that once had a heartbeat.

China would be much more enjoyable if we had a basic understanding of mandarin as hardly anyone and I mean anyone, like 1 in 100 people, understands a single word or sound that we make. Even our hand gestures don’t seem to work here, all across Asia when we have wanted the bill it is easiest to use the word “check” and if that fails a quick scribble in the air with a pretend pen usually does it but not in China… Instead you will get a blank expression or on one occasion a pen!

Unlike others we have met here in Beijing we haven’t had any “I hate China!” moments, despite the staring, horrible food, communication issues and being frequently lost.

Our hostel the “Beijing Downtown Backpackers Accommodation” was a great place to stay, it was warm and was the first time we have seen radiators since leaving the UK, and had a few friendly travellers. Oh and free breakfast! We felt really at home here.

The Great Wall

For me the highlight of Beijing and possibly Asia has to be The Great Wall hike that we did which was just breath taking. In the same way I felt about the Taj Mahal photos just don’t do it justice. I have chosen a few of my favourite photos from the 6.5km hike for this blog post and will put up a few edited ones on Flickr in due course.

Our trip to the great wall was to an un-restored section around 10km in length. Hardly any tourists go to it because it is difficult to walk and the access roads to it are not very good.

We were so lucky to have been only 2 of 6 to walk the 6.5km that day. It took 4 hours and the rest of the group struggled with the steep steps and snow but Audrey and me raced way ahead. A lady in the group even said we were “very fit” which was nice considering we have had little exercise for 3 months! As you will see from the photos, nobody else was their which made it extra special and even more dramatic. The dusting of snow made the wall stand out really well too – it stretched off into the horizon in both directions.

Fishy Dinner

One night for dinner I chose a proper local restaurant thinking that it would be fun and cheap. Well I’m not sure about fun but it was interesting – the place was full of Chinese couples in big puffer jackets, chain smoking and wolfing down platefuls of food left right and centre in a room heated only by the steam rising off the food. As usual the staff didn’t speak a word of English and the menu may as well have been a blank sheet of paper. I used my super useful translation app on my ipod and asked “What do you recommend?”. The lady instantly pointed at something as if we would suddenly understand what the scribbles on the page meant, we agreed with a few head nods and she disappeared. A few mins later a young girl appeared from the kitchen holding a big fishing net and wriggling inside it a large catfish like fish. She held it up and we approved it with a few more nods.

Half a beer later we got our fish in a big school dinner like stainless steel pot, bubbling away and surrounded by vegetables. It was a tasty fish; its very recent death probably had something to do with it.

The bill was £14 which was steep considering the restaurants “ambiance” but the lady managed to explain that it was done by weight so we paid and left.

Never to return.

Over the 6 days we have found a good few places to eat that have English translated menus which means we can order what we want and have a good laugh at the translations, how about “A tender beef loin wilted in the weary heat” or “Milky potatoes roasted over a fiery hell”.

Beijing’s sights

The city has many, all are huge and most are hard to find.

• The Zoo

A really nice Zoo and worth the £1.40! We saw the Giant Pandas and lots of other animals. The tigers were getting fed huge chunks of meat when we saw them too which was amazing as I have only seen tigers sleeping and looking really lazy in Zoo’s before.

• The Summer Palace

We visited the “Summer” Palace in the snow, how ironic. It was a rubbish day to visit as it was 99% humidity and therefore freezing. Still an amazing place and absolutely huge!

• The Forbidden City

We visited the Forbidden City which was really interesting, the Clock Museum was my favourite. They had clocks made over 200 years ago with hundreds of moving parts putting on crazy shows every hour that still entertain and amaze today.

• The Tiananmen Square

A hugely famous, and huge square where many demonstrations have taken place over the years, many deadly. It is also the biggest public square in the world!

• People Watching

Not and official sight in the guide book but fun. Watching how people go about life in the city is really interesting. The number of pickpockets is insane though – the man below is one of hundreds of “Volunteer Security Persons”.

Bye Bye Beijing

Currently shoehorned into the top bunk of a sleeper train to Shanghai. Arriving in approximately 10 hours time. Cant wait to see what it has in store for us. Still cant get over how incredible The Great Wall was, you must visit it.

Here is a map of our Chinese travels, all done on Sleeper trains:

View Larger Map

Hong kong, similar in many ways to Singapore is a city of entrepreneurs. Everywhere you look is a new gleaming building or the construction of one. You can practically smell the money. The city is super clean, verging on clinical after the Bird Flu outbreak but, unlike Singapore it has genuine character too. In amongst the new glass buildings is crumbling old concrete ‘mansions’ or tower blocks, riddled with cracks and ‘decorated’ with rusty old air con units and drying clothes. The star ferry is a fantastic example of this unexpected old in amongst the new. The star ferry is ancient and links up equally ancient piers still operated mechanically with levers and pulleys – it connects up flawlessly via tunnels and over passes with the modern MTR system. The peak tram and regular trams also aincent, meander through the modern concrete and glass skyscrapers.

I have said through out this trip that no matter how much I have come to like a place it has never been somewhere I would like to live. Glasgow has always been ‘home’ but, for a variety of reasons Hong Kong is somewhere I would be willing to live for a few years atleast.

We really enjoyed our time in HK and did a lot in the 4 days. Here is a summary:

• Checked into the lovely, cheap Dodal hotel just off Nathan Road, Kowloon.
• Sailed on the Star ferry to and from Central many times.
• Met Mike Pickles and old friend from school for brunch one day, he has been a freelance photographer for the past 7 months in HK.
• Spent a small fortune in the Golden Square Electronics Mall.
• Rode the Peak Tram up to Victoria Peak at sunset and ate a great chinese dinner at the top.
• Sailed on a ferry out to Cheung Chau, one of the smaller islands, 20 mins from central.
• Watched the lightshow from the Avenue of Stars, Kowloon.
• Managed to avoid buying anything camera related, though the temptation was strong.

When we arrived in HK our first port of call for cheap accomodation was the Chungking Mansions. After looking at a few places we practically ran out the door because it was like a prision. The building was insane! Wikipedia it here for a better description: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chungking_Mansions

Our hotel, the Dadol! Much nicer than anything in the manisons mentioned above and only a little more expensive at HK$450. They even made our rooms up each day which is the first time we have had such a service during the trip. We highly recommend this hotel if you are in HK and looking for cheap accomodation, it is  just off Nathan road, on Kimberly Road. Dadol Hotel Website

The world famous Star Ferry. A total bargain at HK$ 2 per person.

Sunset over central. (The only day when it was not foggy)

Fantastic name for a street!

Nice Anime wedding characters!

Old face… New face! Pretty sure she just cracked a smile and did something with her hair.

Dinner at The Globe, fantastic food and a ton of British and Belgian beers! Highly recommended to us by my friend Mike and now highly recommened by us too. The Globe Website

The peaceful island of Cheung Chau, only 20 mins on a ferry from Central too!

Cheung Chau harbour

All aboard the Peak Tram!

Atop the Victoria Peak. Freezing but worth it for the view.

Electronics are just TOO cheap.

PS. No Facebook or Twitter in China which sucks.

The only way we could get from Hanoi to Hong Kong without spending a small fortune on a train or plane was to take a bus from Hanoi to Nanning, a smallish city two hours into China, and then make our own way to Hong Kong from their.

A bus from Vietnam to China seems quite difficult to come by, we figured it’s not really on the tourist trail and that not many people would be patient enough to go  overland and instead take a plane. It took a good hour or so scouring the internet but I eventually found a bus costing about twenty times less than the cheapest plane, randomly sold by hotel Hung Ha in Hanoi.

The bus was small and the driver was really enthusiastic about using his horn which becomes wearing after a few hours. After 8 hours we made it to the ‘Friendship Pass’ in a mountainous region between Vietnam and China. We were escorted off the bus in the middle of a car park 500 meters from the Vietnam border post by the host and shown onto a funny little 12 seater golf cart. The cart took us 30 seconds to the Vietnam post and we got off to have our passports stamped – this is when everything began to go really pear shaped.

Inside the Vietnam border post was two stamping windows with three men behind them, sounds pretty standard so far, but the thing was that about 60 people all wanted their passports stamped at the same time, including us. It was carnage, with people pushing and climbing over each other with wads of passports for all their friends. People were just stacking them up on the counter in front of the men and shouting in a language which I didn’t understand. I obviously didn’t want to be stuck in this building all day patiently waiting my turn like a typical British person would do so I too began pushing and shoving which, as with most Asian countries is easy for me as nobody comes higher than my shoulder! After 50 mins of shoving and holding my place at the window with mine and Audrey’s passport in hand I eventually got the guard to stamp them by waving them in his face until he took notice – this could have ended in 2 ways, he could have refused to look at them and ignored me for the rest of the day, which would be typical of the Vietnamese, or as it did go, he could have stamped them and carried on with his day. Thankfully my rather rude and risky tactics worked and after pulling a HUGE smile he did stamp them and we were on our way. When I left the window there were still what looked like hundreds of passports all waiting in huge piles waiting to be stamped. I don’t even know how people ever get the right passport back! I certainly wasn’t risking adding my passport to one of those piles.

The China border was slightly friendlier and civilised, but still not living up to its name as ‘Friendship Pass’ – they even had fancy fever scanners for detecting people with suspected Avian Flu.

After getting stamped out and stamped in it was time to board another golf cart, this time it was a yellow one as opposed to a green one, we drove for a few minuets past lots of serious looking Chinese soldiers with guns and I saw a few camouflaged sniper huts on the hills around the road into china – It was very James Bond..

Nanning

A further 2 hours on the bus, where we were given delicious canned baby food, and we arrived in Nanning at 8.30pm in the dark. As always we didn’t have a clue where we were getting dropped off but it soon made sense as for once the drop off place was in our photocopied fake Lonely Planet book!

After going around five hotels and being told in CHINEESE, a language which I am obviously fluent in, that they were full we eventually stumbled upon the Railway Hotel which as you might have guessed was right next to the station… Check-in wasn’t the easiest as the lady spoke no English but our combined effort with a pen, paper and some creative drawings eventually got us a cheap as dirt room on the 14^th floor.

Finding the room was hilarious as we couldn’t figure out from the lady’s handwriting what number our room was so we tried them all. After getting a red light at every other door in the corridor we reached our room right at the end… It was a surprise when I opened the door and discovered that the bathroom was actually constructed with floor to ceiling glass and offered no privacy what-so-ever! We had a goldfish bowl for a bathroom.

After a fabulous sleep we booked a rather expensive sleeper bus from Nanning to Hong Kong, leaving at 8.30pm that evening. Unfortunately this meant we had a few hours to kill in Nanning… Walking around was pretty uncomfortable as we were probably the only white people in this city of 2.5 million and Nanning felt like it had never heard of the word ‘Tourism’. Crossing the road at one point we witnessed a pickpocket steal a guys phone 3 feet in front of us, the poor victim turned round and looked at us before jumping off his electric scooter in the middle of a busy junction and running after the thief. It was weird to have witnessed such petty crime – we thought the guy was his friend playing a joke on him until he turned around and ran away!

Lovely greyand cold Nanning from our hotel

We visited a strange Chinese art museum and had a Mc Donald’s for dinner as it was the only English translated menu we could find out of about 10 restaurants. Then as night fell we got onto the best sleeper bus of the trip so far.

Nanning to Hong Kong aboard the world’s best sleeper bus

I haven’t been a huge fan of sleeper busses ever since we got our first one in Thailand over two months ago. The bed seat things are always just that little bit too short for me to get comfortable in so I have spent tens of hours sitting up wide awake at night looking out the front window at the horrific driving whilst everyone around me sleeps like a baby. It has been far from ideal but I have put up with it because they are just such a cheap way to get around.

However, my prayers were answered when we boarded the bus at Nanning. It had just 29 full sized, completely flat, sprung mattresses! Audrey and me even had two next to each other. It was the best journey and I slept 10 hours all the way to the China – Hong Kong border. Passport stamping was painless and quick, as you would expect at a China to China border at 7am!

Check out the Chineese network name. Wild!

We got onto another bus on the Hong Kong side, one which drives on the right this time, and scooted off to Hong Kong International Airport with great views across the mountains and of the Hong Kong Marathon which started at 5.30am believe it or not.

A much needed and surprisingly tasty Burger King breakfast at HK airport. I’m still a Mc Donalds man though.

HK Airport

Finally after 2 days we reached Hong Kong and it felt great! The city of Nanning was probably a great example of what a typical Chinese city is like but it was pretty terrifying, nobody spoke English, the buildings were huge and the streets were heaving with people. Hopefully when we travel to Beijing and Shanghai they will be more tourist friendly.