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This summer I took a three week backpacking trip to China with my wife, which was loads of fun and opened my eyes to a couple of things. This is an account of just some of our (mis)adventures.

Note that all the experiences and reports are purely my own and can be absurdly wrong in the grand scale of things. All the photos in the post were taken by my lovely wife (Ragne Kabanova) with more available at norvidia.com.

Guangzhou

We touched ground in Guangzhou (ex-Canton), the rumored food capital of China. The proverb goes that Chinese eat everything that runs that isn’t a car and everything that flies that isn’t a plane. My first impression was that they eat everything that swims:

Another impression that you get when you come to Guangzhou is “Wow, now I know what smog looks like!”. I never imagined that besides the health troubles smog would actually block out the sun! Guangzhou is permanently engulfed in a cloudy/foggy mantle and the locals don’t see sun more often than once-twice a month. I guess this is what London looked like at the turn of the previous century.

Guangzhou is also a commercial city, with endless streets selling everything you can imagine:

Some of those things are eatable as well, though you might wonder why would anyone bother:

Not entirely sure why snake penis wine is better than plain old snake wine as I didn’t get to try either of them there. However what I did get was a Chinese haircut :)

Another impression you get from China is how hard is it to communicate when you not only don’t share a language (almost noone spoke English), but also the alphabet. Although Chinese names and addresses can be rendered in English letters, most Chinese will not be able to read them. They are also likely to not (or mis-) understand your pronunciation of place names. Therefore the only way to navigate there is to have things written in Chinese (guides and maps are some help here) or call a Chinese friend and ask him to explain. It’s also common that you can call the hostel and they’ll explain the taxi driver where to go.

In fact, after returning to Estonia we met a Chinese guy, who said that the best way to pronounce the names is to scream as aggressively as you can. Thinking back this might actually have worked and perhaps the main reason for the problems with pronunciation was European politeness :)

Yangshuo

After two days in Guangzhou we moved on to Yangshuo, a place famous for its hill scenery:

Yangshuo is a nice place to chill, but hosts the most foreigners we saw in China. This meant that to eat genuine Chinese you had to walk off the main streets, where every other place offered pizza and pasta:

Of course if you walk far enough from the main streets, you might end up on the Chinese market and see just how fresh do they like their food:

One of the most interesting things we got to try in Yangshuo was the “Thousand Year Old Egg”. Basically a fresh egg is wrapped in herbs and buried in the ground for one to three months. When you take it out it’s rotten fermented and you can eat it uncooked. That is if you have the guts to do it:

Unlike what you’d think the communistic stuff was almost invisible and didn’t bother us in the slightest. If anything it was fun:

The end to the slow days of chilling came on the last day in Yangshuo, when we tried to order the plane tickets to get to Shanghai. On that very day the only website you could reasonably order plane tickets from (ctrip.com) went offline. We had to be in Shanghai the next day, so we tried everything we could. We ordered the tickets from another site, but in a kind of catch-22 it informed us on the order tracking page that we need to fax in a copy of the credit card and allow one to three days of processing (at 8 pm in the evening in pretty much the middle of nowhere).

With nothing much to lose we decided to get up at 5 am and take a taxi to the airport (a two hour ride) to try and get tickets in time for the 11 am flight. When we got there the airline booth was closed and the ticket office offered us only full-priced tickets, which was much more than we could reasonably afford. In the last attempt to solve things I called the airline hotline from my mobile and let them speak with the ticket clerk. Like magic the discounted tickets appeared, leaving us to wonder if we persisted through some kind of scam or just a weird type of bureaucracy.

Luckily we could ponder that while flying east, where Shanghai and Hangzhou were preparing a different kind of welcome for us (to be continued).