Things To Do In Jianshui

At the moment, I’m sitting in a coffee shop in Sapa, Vietnam, sipping a milk coffee and trying to get up to date in my writing. I’m only a few days behind. As far as posting . . . well, that’s a different story. It’s October 29, I’m getting ready to write about October 24, and I don’t think this will get posted until around November 7. We’re getting closer, though. Stupid Chinese restrictions.

Okay, the 24^th. After spending a few days in Kunming, the group headed off on a four-hour bus ride to Jianshui. After several overnight trains, we could do a 4-hour bus ride standing on one foot. Anyway, we were heading towards Jianshui and if I knew about only the Stone Forest with respect to Kunming, I knew even less about Jianshui.

We arrived early in the afternoon and after some clean-up time, we all went to lunch. I forget the name of the restaurant that we went to but it was so good that we ended up eating both lunch and dinner there the next day. There was nothing fancy about the food – we had chicken, beef, pork and local vegetables – but everything was delicious. Afterwards, we went on an orientation walk. There really wasn’t much to that because Jianshui is a rather small town. During lunch, I had heard about two things that interested me – the Zhu Garden and the local Confucius Temple. Since we had the entire next day in Jianshui, I figured I would see them then. I figured wrong.

Our orientation walk went straight to Zhu’s Garden, which was very close to the restaurant at which we ate. It cost about six dollars U.S. to enter. The garden was the private garden of the Zhu family, which came to the area poor and then became rather prominent. The garden is about 20,000 s.m. It also has a hotel in the complex. I walked around a bit with everybody, but to be honest, I wasn’t particularly impressed. I got bored and, thinking it was the end of the orientation walk, I went back to the hotel. I figured I’d have some coffee, maybe take a nap, and go to the temple the next day. I figured wrong, once again.

I received a text message from the tour leader wondering where I was and if I was going to the temple. Since everybody else was going to the temple, I thought I would too. We headed over to the Jianshui Temple of Confucius, which was originally built in 1285. As much as I was bored by Zhu’s Garden, I was impressed with the Jianshui Temple of Confucius. There were dozens of structures and many plaques with explanations of each structure in English, which is always a plus. One of the more interesting things I learned was to look for bomb damage because the complex was bombed three times by the Japanese in 1941.

Later, we met for dinner, which wasn’t as good as lunch. People were talking about what to do the next day and, frankly, there wasn’t much else in Jianshui that interested me. There was a nearby village that some people were visiting. There also was a local bridge, which interested me a little more. I figured that I’d decide what to do the next morning at breakfast.

Hot Pot in Kunming

After getting back to Kunming from the Stone Forest, there wasn’t much left for us to do. One person went to a temple and another to a provincial museum, but neither of these activities appealed to me. In fact all that appealed to me was a little nap and some shopping for some provisions for the next few days – instant coffee and toilet paper. (Note: Once again, I have no photos that are germane to the post, so I'm just going to post some previously unpublished photos of China. Enjoy.)

At dinner, we met once again for dinner. This time, we had a Chinese specialty – the hot pot. Evidently, the hot pot is trending all over the country and this was our first chance to partake. The hot pot was similar – in a sense – to the meal we had the day before, but with significant differences. The basis of the hot pot is to cook your meal while you eat it. It starts with a soup boiling on the table, which has an oven top wired to it. We had two soups – one spicy and one mild. While the soups boiled, we selected about a dozen meats and another dozen vegetables to cook in our hot pot. Most of the stuff was pretty mainstream. Our meats included beef, mutton, fish balls, squid and pork. Another thing that it included was duck tongue. Among the vegetables was the standard Chinese lotus root. We also put together our own little sauces for the meal. I used a tad too much chili oil and it meant that everything I ate would be spicy regardless of the soup base from which I pulled my food, but that was fine.

The meal was very good and a lot of fun. Among my favorites were the fish balls and meatballs which went very well with the sauce that I made. The vegetables also were outstanding and cooked quickly in the boiling soup bases. I tried the duck tongue – I figured that since I love duck and I love tongue, duck tongue should be particularly awesome. Unfortunately, it wasn’t particularly awesome. It was okay, but not particularly awesome. On top of that, there were a lot of bones and cartilage, so it was really more trouble that it was worth. That aside, however, it was a very good, if spicy, meal.

When we finished, it was still kind of early. The girl who had tried to get into China without a visa finally arrived with the group during dinner. After dinner, she and I went to a bar for some more Chinese beer. On the way, she stopped off to visit an ATM where she became the second person on this trip to leave a bank card in an ATM. Unfortunately, she didn’t realize this until about 24-hours and 400 kilometers later. She’s not having a good week.

In the morning, I tried the breakfast at the hotel in which we were staying. It was good, not great. I had some cold fried eggs (and they’re really not all that bad cold) as well as some fried dough sticks and some potatoes and onions. That’s about all the time we had to spend in Kunming because shortly before eight we were in taxis once again on our way to the bus station to catch a bus to Jianshui. That was earlier this morning and I’m damn close to catching up at this point. We’ll get to Jianshui in the net post.

Road to Kunming

The trip from Hong Kong to Kunming started off with a three-hour train ride from Hong Kong to Guangzhou, home of the 2010 Asian Games, which I believe start in a few weeks. We took the subway from one train station to another and then had to go through Chinese immigration again in order to go to the mainland. The main drama occurred because one of the people in our group hadn’t realized that she needed a Chinese visa to travel into the mainland. Glad it wasn’t me. (She ended up getting a visa and joining us a few days later.)

The trip from Guangzhou to Kunming was long. Damn long. It was a 25-hour train ride from start to finish. Despite this, however, the trip wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been. Thanks to the proper recipe of cold medication and Advil PM, I have been able to knock out at least 10-hours on all of the train trips.

We arrived at the train station in Kunming at around 3 pm and took some time to clean up after the epic train ride. Afterwards, we took a little walking tour of Kunming. The tour took us to the Bird and Flower market (guess what was sold there) and culminated in a trip to a pretty (and pretty touristy) garden with a lake that has a name that I can’t think of at the moment. It was nice, especially at night, and afterwards, we cabbed back to the hotel.

Along the way, we stopped for dinner. We stopped at a place for a local specialty. I’ll look up the name to be sure (I have no internet at the moment), but it’s something like Over The Bridge Soup. (Note: I looked it up. It is Over the Bridge Soup.) It was a soup in which we were given a bowl of hot water and vegetables. Along with this, we were given noodles that had been pre-cooked and a plate of raw meat and vegetables. The soup was near boiling and the point was to put the raw meat and vegetables into the soup and let it cook while you stirred everything around. I had chicken and pork. It was good, but it did things to my stomach that I may never forgive. In any event, it was a proper preparation for the next night’s hot pot.

After returning to the hotel, it was a little early, so a few of us decided to go to a bar down the street and have some more Chinese beer. We had a few too many, but we didn’t have huge plans that were very early the next morning, so a little hangover wasn’t a big deal. Just having a hangover from Chinese beer was a miracle all in and of itself.

The next day was our only full day in Kunming. Now, Kunming doesn’t have a whole lot of tourist attractions, and the big one is a few hours away. That attraction would be the Stone Forest. Since we weren’t doing anything else in town, all of us hopped on a two-hour bus from the hotel to the Stone Forest. The Stone Forest is an area with thousands of limestone hills and columns shooting up from the ground. It was an interesting area and provided some great views but after walking around the area for approximately three hours, we had all decided that we had seen enough limestone for one day.

Final Chinese Passing Thoughts Entry

As I write this, it is October 24 and I am Jianshui. Yep, that’s still in China. After about four weeks in China, tomorrow will be my last full day in China. It seems like as good a time as any to do another passing thoughts entry on China. It may be my last chance, so here it goes.

Chinese Beer: Why is Chinese beer like having sex on a boat? Both are fucking close to water.

Chinese Food: I think I’ve had to write about Chinese food in every one of the passing thoughts entries. The farther south that we have moved into China, the less Western the food has gotten, as well as having gotten much spicier. Most of the best meals that I have had in China are meals that I’ve had in the past several days.

Chinese Hotel Amenities: I’ve stayed in cheap hotels all over the world and several in China. China’s freebies in hotels and hostels are unique as far as I’ve seen – at least compared to the U.S. and Europe. In every hostel, there are free toothbrushes with toothpaste and combs. All of them. There’s also hot water, but that’s another topic.

Hot Water: You can get water boilers or boiled water in every hotel and on every train. It also is pretty common at many tourist attractions. This is huge because you can’t drink the water here, at least not until it has been boiled, so it provides safe drinking water. Also, it means that I can always have instant coffee in the morning and the instant coffee here isn’t half bad. It also means that you can eat practically any time because of the ramen noodles, but that’s another topic.

Ramen Noodles: It’s everywhere. It’s cheap; it’s convenient; and it’s good. The noodles are primarily sold in buckets with little packets of seasoning. I’m not sure how much I’ve eaten, but it’s eaten by almost everybody on the overnight train rides because it’s an easy way to have a hot meal while traveling, thanks to the boiled water that is available. You also see a lot of people here sitting on the side of the road eating it in touristy areas. I’ve developed a whole new respect for the ramen noodle.

Chinese Potato Chips: In the west, we usually flavor our potato chips with things that we put on potato products – sour cream and onion, cheese flavoring or salt and vinegar. The potato chips in China, especially the Lay’s brand, are flavored out of the most random things you can imagine. Among the flavors of potato chips that I’ve had since I’ve been in China are: Red Chili, Blueberry, Hot & Spicy Fish Soup, Cucumber and Lemon Tea. Some are kind of good, some are kind of gross, but all are kind of interesting.

Soft Drinks: There are all of the typical soft drinks available here, though bottled tea appears to be much more prominent here. There are two that I have fallen in love with here. First is a Minute Maid grape and aloe soda. It’s basically a grape soda – it’s green, not purple – with aloe. It also has a lot of pulp in it. It’s very good. The other is milk tea, which is basically sweet tea with milk. There are various brands of it that I’ve tried. My favorite is the Kirin brand but, shhh . . ., it’s Japanese.

Okay, I guess that’s enough for now. There may be more, there may not. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Big Buddha Obsession

I also walked around Kowloon Park in Hong Kong. I think it’s the city’s largest park, but if it isn’t, it’s up there. There was a nice-sized pond and a lot of area to walk or even jog if you’d prefer. I didn’t see anybody there jogging, though. What I did see was a lot of older people practicing Tai Chi. The low-impact stretching exercises were going on individually and in groups. It was a little disconcerting because there were dozens of people doing this and I felt a little out of place. No problem, though. I suppose I was destined to feel out of place from time-to-time while I was in China.

In my final afternoon, I decided that I needed to see the Big Buddha. Even though I had never heard of the Big Buddha 24-hours prior, I had heard people talking about it all morning and I decided that I needed to see it too.

Since I’m tired of sending you to Wikipedia every time I write about something of which I’m ignorant, I decided to actually do some homework this time. Hong Kong’s Big Buddha is the Tian Tan Buddha. It is the world’s largest outdoor bronze Buddha, or at least it was until 2007. This ancient structure (he said sarcastically – it was completed in 1993) sits atop a hill on Lantau Island in Hong Kong. It would sort of be reminiscent of Cristo Redemptor in Rio de Janiero except it doesn’t actually overlook the city.

Seeing the Buddha on top of the mountain truly is amazing. What I found just as amazing, however, was the trip to the mountain. After travelling on the subway for about 45 minutes, I reached the Tung Chung station. From there, it was a short walk over to buy a ticket for the Ngong Ping 360. The highlight of the Ngong Ping 360 is the gondola lift from the Tung Chung station to an area close to the Big Buddha. The trip allows you to cross the Tung Chung Bay and then mountain hops on Lantau Island until you reach the Ngong Ping plateau. The trip takes about 25-minutes, and since I was alone in my car, I had nothing to do but take in the scenery and it was pretty thrilling.

There was a problem, however. I got to the Big Buddha late and I didn’t have time to climb up to the monument. I had a meeting at 6:30, so I had to settle for only going to the steps that rise to the Big Buddha. I had another problem, as well. The weather was crappy and the sun was behind the Tian Tan Buddha, so all of my pictures were much darker than I’d like. Anyway, I was able to get Big Buddha out of my system.

After our meeting, we went out to dinner. It was a Chinese restaurant, but the food seemed kind of western to me and I ended up just eating chicken fried rice because it was the best I could come up with in the ordering process. That was fine, though, because I was getting ready to embark on 27 hours of travel to Kunming beginning early the next morning, so I really didn’t want to play too many experiments with my tummy.

That pretty much ended the trip to Hong Kong. We went on to Kunming (where I am at the moment) and I will pick it up from there in another post.

Hong Kong Light Show. With Lasers.

Coming down from Victoria Peak and across the harbor, we returned to the port for the Hong Kong laser/light show with about thirty minutes to kill. If I had to guess, and of course I don’t, but if I had to, I would say that we had maybe a thousand or so people around to watch the show. We got what turned out to be good seats on a little walkway overlooking the harbor and waited for the show to start.

The light show started and it was, let’s just say not overwhelming. The music was loud – mostly classical music – and the pre-show announcements were in English, Mandarin and Cantonese. (I’m sort of guessing on that, but I think it may be correct.) The show consisted of the music, with lights around certain buildings in the Hong Kong skyline pulsating in time with the music. While this was going on, other buildings across the harbor were shooting green lasers or white lights into the sky. With the haze over Hong Kong, every time I saw the white lights shoot into the sky, I half-expected to see a Batman logo in the middle of it. The show lasted around fifteen minutes and there was a grand finale, which wasn’t particularly grand, and that was that. If you are in Hong Kong and have fifteen minutes to kill at 8:00, you should see the show. You definitely shouldn’t come to Hong Kong for the light show, though.

At night, we went to a local food market for dinner. There was nothing spectacular about the food. Our guide made fun of me because I wanted fried chicken pieces and bean cheese, so I had a stir-fried shrimp dish. It was good, but I think I’d have preferred the bean cheese. Anyway, one thing I found amusing was that Chinese girls in red uniforms were working the crowd getting them to try San Miguel beer. I spent the entire summer drinking San Miguel beer in Madrid (it’s a Spanish beer), but evidently they are marketing it heavily in Hong Kong at the moment so I was able to take a break from the Chinese beer for an evening and relive my summer in Spain.

That was it for the first day in Hong Kong. I still had no idea what I wanted to do the next day, but I did play on Facebook and my websites for a while because it was the first time since I arrived in China that I had access to any of them.

The next day, I walked around the financial district because I wanted to see what it looked like in comparison to western financial districts. It looked pretty much the same. People in suits, lots of fast-food restaurants for businessmen on the go, skyscrapers that refused to let in the sun, younger women in suits with inappropriately short skirts, taxis, taxis and more taxis. It looked like New York or Boston or London or . . .. I went to Starbucks for some tea and saw a couple of job interviews taking place. I guess that makes sense since space is at a premium in Hong Kong and not everybody has an office to him/herself in which to interview people. It reminded me of interviewing for a job in Washington, DC back in the 90s. Anyway, my view of Hong Kong’s financial district was “same ol’.” (Note: The photo isn't from the financial district. I just like it.)

Hong Kong Skyline

After a badly-needed shower and a short rest, we all met downstairs at the Goodrich Hotel for a Hong Kong specialty – Dim Sum. Of course, this meant having a bunch of different Chinese foods passed around on a turning plate as we all picked from them. Come to think of it, most of our group meals in China have been like this, but this was our first official “Dim Sum.” The best of the Dim Sum samplings were the dumplings – a barbequed pork dumpling that was not very spicy but was satisfying nonetheless, and a bean paste dumpling that was quite sweet.

After our late lunch, we went on a walking tour of Hong Kong. At least of the part of Hong Kong in which we were staying. I don’t know Hong Kong that well so I can’t tell you exactly where it was, but our guide told us that our neighborhood wasn’t in a particularly nice part of town and I know that we weren’t on Hong Kong Island. (I think we were in Kowloon. Is that a place? I think that’s right.) Anyway, we walked around for about 40-minutes, coming upon an area with really nice stores – Tiffany’s, Cartier, 7-11, etc. We ended at the harbor near the big clock tower that marks the end of the Eurasian continent. (I’ll look the name of it up and put it in here. KCR Clock Tower? Something like that. Anyway, I’ll let you know.) (Note: I looked it up. KCR Clock Tower is correct.) From this site we could get a really great view of the Hong Kong skyline from across the bay. It was quite impressive, though I still prefer the Shanghai skyline because of the uniqueness of many of the buildings in Shanghai.

Nearby to where we were at, we caught a ferry across the harbor to Hong Kong Island, as we were all determined to go to the top of Victoria Peak to get bird’s-eye views of the island. The ferry ride took about 15-minutes and was pretty enjoyable, giving us alternative views of the city. We arrived on the other side and negotiated our way to the tram station, where we caught a tram up Victoria Peak. This was one of the most interesting tram rides that I’ve ever been on as it went up the hill, towards the peak, at what seemed to be a 45-degree angle.

We got to the peak around quarter after five. It was a den of tourist-related capitalism, including a Burger King and a Starbucks, as well as dozens of over-priced souvenir shops. We walked around for a while trying to determine the best places from which to get views of the cities and pictures thereof. We found a little nook and stayed there for a little while and caught some great views of Hong Kong at dusk. At this point, we decided that it would be a shame to come to Victoria Peak and not get some night views of Hong Kong, especially since it was closing in on six p.m. and the sun sets here around 6:15. We found a little non-Starbucks coffee shop and hung out there. (I had milk tea. I’m falling in love with milk tea.)

As darkness approached, we ventured back towards our little sightseeing area to look at Hong Kong in the dark. The wait proved to be well worth it as the Hong Kong skyline, like every other skyline, I suppose, is much more impressive when the millions of lights therein are illuminated. (Sorry about the blurry photos, but I have better ones from across the bay for the next entry.) Other than the scenes, however, there wasn’t much else in which we were interested on the peak, and we wanted to catch the Hong Kong harbor light show, so we turned around and headed down the peak.

That seems like a good stopping place, doesn’t it? We’ll pick it up from there later.