Shanghai: 29 degrees, humid Autumn afternoon.
Thirteen hours on two planes, two time zones, about 5400 miles later –
Melbourne: cool, crisp Spring morning.
Yangshuo ended up being a day trip from Guilin instead of a couple of nights as originally envisaged. I liked where I was staying in Guilin and couldn’t be bothered to move! The trip started with a short coach ride to Yangdi on the Li river. Then a couple of hours on a fake bamboo raft watching the amazing karst landscape slide by. The rafts take four passengers. Two coaches arrived at the pier at the same time so lots of rafts set off within a few minutes of each other. Our driver was something of a Michael Schumacher, slicing his way through the pack of rafts. The river is not very deep. In places the bottom, or the water weeds growing there were clearly visible. These were the calm undisturbed waters between the boats and the banks before the wakes from the flotilla churned up the surface, destroyed the reflected limestone stacks and turned the crystal clear water an impenetrable steely blue-grey colour. At Xingping we switched back to another bus for the short ride to Yangshuo.
The guidebooks are right; the landscape around Yangshuo is even more amazing than it is around Guilin. They were also right about the town being much more touristy. In some ways maybe not a bad thing – for the first time in China there were laundries everywhere, and internet cafes which have also been in short supply. Over lunch I met a, nay, the globetrotting mama. Heather and her family are on a westerly round the world trip. They had arrived in Beijing on the same day as me and have been to many of the countries I will be visiting. We traded advice on South America and South East Asia. I’m more determined now that Ecuador and the Galapagos will feature in next year’s travels.
The cheapest flight I could find from Guilin to Shanghai was 840 yuan, a soft sleeper train was 620 yuan and the sleeper bus only 480 yuan. They assured me the bus took 16 hours, the same as the train. They lied. It was more like 24 hours and it wasn’t as comfortable as the sleeper buses in Laos and Vietnam. Everything is relative though. The discomforts pale into insignificance compared to the privations endured by Ernest Shackleton’s unsuccessful 1914-1916 expedition to cross Antarctica. I read most of the account of the expedition on my Kindle while cursing the midget who thought that 5’8″(1.72m) is plenty long enough for a sleeper bunk and 2’6″ (76cm) is plenty of headroom. I would have read more were it not for the usual too noisy crappy movies they insist on playing on buses in Asia and the (also standard) lack of working reading lights.
With half a day less in Shanghai than I had expected the best thing to do seemed to be take an open top bus city tour. Having paid my 100 yuan I discovered there was a second city tour bus company with more buses and tickets only a third of the price. Hopefully they only covered a third of the sights too. With frequent hopping off and back on I only covered two thirds of the route shown on the map. By the time I’d had enough it had been dark for a couple of hours. Shanghai is one of the largest cities in the world so I didn’t even scratch the surface. It is also the largest port in the world and fully a third of all the sea cargo in the world goes through it. Compared to the other cities I’ve visited in China it felt much more modern. There are some ancient bits but the bits I saw were colonial or contemporary. The sense of hustle and bustle was much more urgent than anywhere else on my journey. I have to commend it highly to any photographers. Go at night. Take a tripod.
There are some photos from the Yangshuo day trip and Shanghai at Flickr.
And so the Chinese and Asian parts of my journey are complete. Next stop Melbourne, next continent Oceania.
Lots of people are asking me what the itinerary for my imminent round-the-world trip is. I launch into an enthusiastic spiel and one of two things happens:
Hopefully you’re in the second group.
I have an itinerary because I booked a OneWorld Explorer ticket and I had to name airports and dates. I have an itinerary because I had a rough idea of the places I wanted to go and approximately how long I might want to spend in each place. The itinerary is flexible and likely to change once the travelling starts. The ticket is good for upto one year. There are very few details filled in yet between the flights. There are some highlights and must-see/must-do things and lots of vague arm-waving inbetween.
Date changes are freebies, changing my mind on the routing will cost me money – about £100 per change. Sadly there is no reciprocity between the airlines and me in this respect. They have changed two of my flights already and did not pay me £200.
So the plan at the moment is:
Great, you were in the second group!
That’s the plan so far. I have just a few more days in the UK and then the tenants move into my house and I hop on a plane to Delhi. My transit visa for India arrived today, the Nepal visa is already stuck in my passport, I’ve had jabs against just about everything and I’ve sold or otherwise gotten rid of most of my stuff. Just another dozen or so boxes to go 🙂
I’ve got three more nights of tango to look forward to, one of jive and maybe one of West Coast Swing. And then several months of probably no dancing of any sort that I’m used to. Withdrawal symptoms here I come.
Have you done a trip like this or been to any of these countries? Are there any must-see places or must-do things you would recommend in the countries I’m visiting?