Travel Journal

Not just the views are breathtaking when you arrive in Lhasa, capital of what is now called the Tibetan Autonomous Region of China; it is also the thin air. With the area at an altitude of 3800 meters, I immediately noticed this. Walking with my backpack for a short while is an enormous effort now, with my heart pounding in my chest, taking desperate gasps of air while feeling a slight dizziness.

I found a nice though basic room in a Tibetan motel, in the old centre of Lhasa known as the Barkhor. It is where most of the Tibetans live nowadays, an enclave in the middle of what has been transformed over the past decades into a modern Chinese city. The Barkhor area is also Lhasa’s most authentic and atmospheric, its small alleys filled with stalls, the vendors selling yak butter and meat, cheese, fruit and vegetables, as well as clohing, souvenirs, gear for horses and religious artefacts. From a number of cassette- and cd-shops comes the sound of Tibetan popmusic, a quite catchy mix of traditional high-pitched singing with western beats. The houses and apartment blocks in the area are no higher than three storeys, the white brick walls are thick, and in front of the small windows are plants with colourful flowers, and at times white and blue cloths with auspicious symbols for protection, luck, prosperity. On the streets, there are the ordinary Tibetan residents, the men at times in brown suits, usually wearing cowboy-style hats, the women in dark clothing with aprons with elaborate patterns, and brightly coloured sleeves of their shirts. Then there are the pilgrims, spinning their prayer wheels, quietly saying mantras. Their dark clothes are dusty, they wear many different kinds of necklaces and armbraces, they seem oblivious to the busy life aound them as they are doing the clockwise route around the inner city, grateful to have reached Lhasa.

The first couple of days, I did nothing but acclimatise to the altitude, and I visited some of the many tea houses in Lhasa. Tibetans from all walks of life come here to socialise, to chat to eachother or to play card games. There were people of all ages, from babies with shoes that squeek when they walk, young boys and girls, ancient looking men and women, their faces very dark and weathered. For 3 jiao, the equivalent of 3 Eurocents, you can get a glass of sweet tea with milk. You leave the money on the table, and each time one of the waitresses in their white aprons refills your glass, she deducts 3 jiao from the amount on the table. In some places, you can get a whole thermos if you want, or one with butter tea, a stronger tasting variant that includes yak butter and salt. In one particular tea house near Barkhor Square, I bought a ticket for 2,5 yuan, and went into the kitchen to exchange it for a bowl of delicious putou, or Tibetan noodle soup, with yak meat. As you are eating or drinking, you sit among monks in their red robes, and pilgrims, with styles of clothing that reveal which part of Tibet they’re from, spinning their prayer wheels even when sitting down.

I visited many of Lhasa’s monasteries and temples. Having been to hundreds of Buddhist temples in many of the previous countries I visited, to step into one in Tibet is an altogether different experience. Perhaps it is because of the air of veneration, with the pilgrims quietly mumbling their prayers inside one of the many chapels. Perhaps it is because of the messy way the chapels are decorated, with so many religious artefacts and statues, candles and cloths, giving it such a cosy yet solemn feel. And then there are the beautifully elaborate thangkas, painted or embroidered religious scrolls that are displayed on the walls or hang from the ceiling, and the dozens or hundreds of katags, Tibetan scarfs made from white silk, that are wrapped around statues and objects.

In front of the Jokhang, one of Tibet’s most sacred of temples, the air is filled with juniper smoke, billowing up from large incense burners. Many pilgrims prostrate themselves in front of the doors of this holy place. They raise their hands, palms pressed together, above their head, then lower them to their forehead, and chest, before they lie flat on the floor, and once again raise their hands above their head. They stand up again, only to repeat this process many times. In fact, for many pilgrims it is the way how they travelled to Lhasa, prostrating themselves during their entire pilgrimage. For some, the journey to reach Lhasa took nine months, for others longer.

The Potala Palace, Lhasa’s most famous of sites, was built in the 7th century by King Songtsen Gampo. It has served as the country’s administrative centre, seat of government and monastery, and it was here, where the Dalai Lamas, from the Fifth to the Fourteenth, lived, until the Chinese took over. To see the Potala for the first time is something you’ll never forget. This Palace, this fortress, high up on Marpo Ri (Red Mountain), is a truly impressive sight, with its red and white walls, visible from most parts of the city. Climbing up to reach the palace is quite an effort in the thin air, and I paused occasionally to take in the stunning views of Lhasa and the surrounding mountains, and some much needed oxygen. It’s of little consolation that the Tibetan pilgrims seem to have as much trouble climbing up, their cheeks bright red from oxygen deprivation. The golden tiled roofs of the Palace are decorated with golden Tibetan umbrellas, and large cloths hang in front of the windows, decorated with auspicious patterns. Inside, corridors lead to elaborately decorated chapels, with dozens or at times hundreds of statues of the Buddha, of important scholars and their students, of Dalai Lamas. Pilgrims hurry from chapel to chapel, quickly saying their prayers, leaving a littlebit of money as an offering, or refilling one of the many lamps with a spoonfull of butter. There are huge libraries with sacred Buddhist scriptures, written on loose papers that are bound together in embroidered cloth and stored in wooden boxes. Underneath, there is a passage, and pilgrims walk crouched down underneath them, in the hope of obtaining knowledge for a next life. In some chapels, there are large chortens, traditional Tibetan Buddhist monuments, which here serve as tombs, containing the remains of previous Dalai Lamas. Some are several storeys high, golden and decorated with jewels.

After visiting the Potala, I walked through a small alley around the north side of the Palace, with hundreds of large prayer wheels along the wall. Inside each of these, there are paper rolls on which Om Mani Padme Hum is written over and over again, the Tibetan prayer that encompasses all Buddhist scriptures ever translated from Sanskrit. The pilgrims turn the prayer wheels to gain merit for a next life. Then, I came to a small park, and I followed the direction where Tibetan music was coming from. I arrived at a large stage, where a dozen actors in colourful dresses, mostly red and yellow, were performing Lhamo, or traditional Tibetan opera. It involved beautiful singing and dancing, and to keep the crowd entertained, it was occasionally interrupted by a play, at one point involving a man and a woman wrestling on stage. The crowd, around 200 people including pilgrims and monks, were delighted and even the actors couldn’t keep a straight face. The woman was victorious, and after the applause, more dancing and singing followed.

I visited the Norbulingka, the site of the summer palaces of the Dalai Lamas. The current Dalai Lama, His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, had his summer palace built here, a stately mansion. Now, it is a rather sad place to visit, the richly decorated rooms fitted with CCTV cameras to keep an eye on the crowds. It was from here that His Holiness fled to India after the Chinese invasion in 1959, where he remains in exile until this day, near the town of Dharamsala in Himachal Pradesh.

On a visit to the enormous monastery of Drepung, just outside Lhasa, with its beautiful views of the Kyichu Valley, I came across a group of men and women who were working on a roof of one of the buildings. They were stamping a cement-like material with poles, that had round wooden planks attached at the bottom. While doing this, they were singing beautiful Tibetan songs, while continuing to stamp as a way of keeping the rythm.

In the evenings, even in summer it can get quite chilly in Lhasa, and I would stay warm with frequent cups of sweet tea in one of the many atmospheric tea houses. One time, I found myself in an Internet cafe, sitting next to two monks who were playing a shoot-em-up game, and clearly enjoying it. But there are warning signs on the walls, as officially every foreigner needs to register with their passport before being able to use the Internet. Every e-mail in and out of Tibet, and even every text message and phone conversation, is being monitored.

After a number of days acclimatising in the capital, and trying to take everything in of this beautiful culture, I was preparing to leave Lhasa, and go on a tour to the south of Tibet.

Chengdu, the provincial capital of Sichuan province, is a nice and laidback city. Due to anti-pollution regulations, it is quite difficult to obtain a motorcycle licence here, hence the large numbers of bicycles and the dangerously silent electric ones, seen everywhere on the streets.

Like in the rest of China, recycling is big in Chengdu, but not in the way we’re used to it in many western countries. In China, no eyebrows will be raised when people rummage through garbage bins in search of plastic bottles or aluminium cans - it has become a way to earn a living for many.

I spent a couple of days exploring the city and the fantastic Sichuan cooking, although saying it is extremely spicy is quite an understatement. I quite like spicy food, but most of the Sichuan cuisine has such an enormous amount of chillis, chilli sauce and/or chilli powder, that it takes quite a while before you regain any feeling in your mouth, tongue and lips.

One morning, I took a bus and then a motor-rikshaw, which took me through small alleys of a village, to the Giant Panda Breeding Research Base, close to Chengdu. Those giant pandas are beautiful, and it is impossible not to find them cute. How they lean back as if in a lazy chair, and slowly munch on bamboo, holding it with both their front paws. There are a number of baby pandas, with nine months old already quite large, playing with eachother and tumbling down from logs and trees in the process. Companies had adopted some of the pandas, providing funds for their habitats, and giving appropriate names to the pandas like “Mei Mei". The US company Microsoft has done the same, but their choice for a name boggles the mind: believe it or not, one of the giant pandas is now called “Microsoft".

South of Chengdu, there are a couple of interesting sites to explore. One of them is near the small town of Leshan. There, looking out over the Min River, is the enormous Dafo, or the Great Buddha. A monk started work on this statue in the 8th century, and it took over 90 years to complete it, hacking it out of the red sandstone cliffs. From near his head, you can descend a tiny staircase to get to his feet, and there, one can really appreciate the scale of this 71 meter tall structure. Tourists gaze at the statue, a single toe bigger than a handful of adult men, and almost fall into the river when trying to get it all onto one photo.

Closer to Chengdu, Emei Shan is one of China’s four sacred Buddhist mountains. I went for a full day of walking over the mountain’s forested ridges, the small paths leading me to hidden temples, past waterfalls and small villages where the locals were selling medicinal herbs, mushrooms and roots. The walk was arduous, through dense vegetation, but the views of the lush green mountain slopes were wonderful.

Back in Chengdu, I would soon leave the China as I knew it, and fly to Lhasa, the capital of Tibet. Considered by the Beijing government as part of China, it couldn’t be more different than any part of China I had visited.

Datong is not as well known as other tourist hotspots like the Great Wall or the Terracotta Army, and this is strange, as around this relatively small industrial city, there are two stunning sites that are equally impressive.

I reached one of them, the Hanging Temple, in under two hours by local bus. Its Chinese name, Xuangkong Si, literally meaning “Temple Suspended in the Void", does it justice. Surrounded by cliff walls, it is built halfway up on a steep cliff face and it seems to defy gravity. Long wooden beams anchor the structure to the cliff, and there are wooden stilts supporting it. Narrow stairs and walkways (not something for those suffering from vertigo) connect the various halls, with, uniquely, shrines for China’s three main religions: Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism. There are small monks’ quarters, the beds have charcoal stoves underneath for heating in the cold winters. There has been a temple on this site since the Northern Wei dynasty, late 5th century. Over the centuries, the temple was destroyed several times due to floodings of the Heng River and each time, the structure was rebuilt higher up. Now, the temple is mostly Qing-dynasty (second half of the 17th century), and the river below has dried up after the construction of a nearby dam.

The next morning, I went to the Yungang caves, half an hour west of Datong. There are over 50 grottoes carved into the side of a sandstone cliff, dating back to the 5th century. Some of the caves have wooden facades as entrances. Stepping into some of the grottoes is a humbling experience, finding yourself suddenly at the feet of an enormous Buddha statue, the curved walls surrounding it filled with reliefs in extraordinary detail, carvings of Buddhas or Bodhisattvas, images depicting the life of the Buddha, and on the ceiling, flying apsaras. Some grottoes are more stunning and elaborate than others; all are quite intruiging. What is striking is the foreign influence in the carvings. Apart from Hindu deities, there are Persian symbols and figures and even Greek motifs. Sadly, due to the presence of two large coalmines nearby, everything is covered in a fine layer of coal dust. Shanxi province is famous for coalmining, it makes Datong one of China’s most polluted cities.

The following day, I went on another train journey further south. Something you will find on all trains in China is either thermoses with boiled water, or water boilers in every carriage, with Chinese continuously topping up their flasks of tea, or adding boiled water to their instant noodles. The boilers on this train, perhaps because of the easy availability of it in this province, were charcoal heated, with little piles of the stuff next to them. The scenery along the way was again quite pretty. We would pass small villages where the houses had mud walls, or at times consisted of rocks piled on top of eachother. The train stopped at the smallest of stations. Next to a tiny house, with the name of the village in large characters above it, would stand an ancient looking attendant, holding up a red flag, while one or two passengers got on. Usually, there would be a huge pile of coal near the station, ready for transport by one of the many freight trains with their hundreds of containers.

Eventually, I reached the small town of Pingyao, just south of Shanxi’s provincial capital of Taiyuan. I arrived around midnight, and an electric powered taxi cart took me through the narrow, deserted streets in the old city, and dropped me off at one of the many hostels. After waking up the owner, I was led into the courtyard of a typical Qing-era house, and checked into a small room with thick walls, mahogany window screens, and a bed raised up on a wooden platform. Tired from the journey but excited to be in this lovely town, I went to sleep.

The following morning, I explored the town, walked on the Ming Town Wall which surrounds the old city, went through little alleys with very old houses and visited many museums and temples. Pingyao is the site of China’s first bank, the Rishengchang, established in 1824, and it’s one of the first in the world where cheques were used. Many of the museums are beautiful in terms of their architecture, the houses in elegant Qing-architecture, the rooms with authentic furniture, small courtyards outside featuring small gardens and statues. But in terms of content, the museums tend to get a bit boring after a while, because of the lack of English commentary. Although you have to give them credit for trying, the commentary in English that at times is provided, is usually fraught with a large number of errors. In fact, you will find this everywhere in China (not to mention other South East Asian countries), even on government brochures and on large billboards next to highways. In menus, it can be a little worrying, like “sheet iron pig meat", and near displays in museums, quite mystifying and unintendedly funny, like this commentary, spotted in a museum in Pingyao:

“The song Dynesty.For dead people.Hope
they have food in tomb and a good accond
life vevy beewtrfuul And big peale for
food .rice wh ich is vevy rice in the wo
rld.”

In the evenings, Pingyao becomes even more atmospheric, the throngs of tourists gone, the streets and alleys tranquil. Red lanterns are lit over the entrances of restaurants and quaint houses, a single bulb over a foodstall at the side of the road, where a young man is cooking rice for locals, huddled together on plastic chairs. From the distance comes the charactaristic sound of the erhu, the Chinese violin.

After a couple of days, I went again by train, leaving Shanxi province and entering Shaanxi province, arriving in the early morning in the city of Xi’an. Here, I visited the site of the bingma yong, or the famous Terracotta Warriors. Housed in vaults built of earth with wooden supports and roofs, they were never intended to be seen, instead serving to eternally guard the tomb of emperor Qin Shi Huang, who ordered their construction in the second century BC. Discovered by peasants digging a well in 1974, it is now one of China’s most famous sites, and excavation is still going on. Vault One is the largest, with many rows with over a thousand figures out of an estimated eight thousand, a small number of horses in their midst. Each soldier has different features, expressions and rank, said to have been modelled after each member of Qin Shi Huang’s Imperial Guard. The layout is that of a modern army, with well guarded flanks, and even including a modular setup, with archers and cavalry units. In the nearby museum, some of the metal weapons found at the site are on display, made from sophisticated alloys, still sharp when discovered, and the arrowheads contained lead to make them poisonous. Also on display are two bronze chariots, each with four horses and a driver. The attention to detail with which these chariots were made is stunning, with even the driver’s knuckles, nails and fingerprints shown. Visiting the Terracotta Warriors was a very intruiging experience, but it is also an enormous tourist circus, with vendors yelling out “Hello! Water!", or shouting at you to visit their souvenir stalls, all selling the same items.

Soon however, I would leave Xi’an, and head yet further south, to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province.

Due to budget considerations, I had booked a seat instead of a bed on the train departing from Shanghai, and I would later regret this, as I hardly slept during the 14-hour train journey to China’s enormous capital.

After arriving in the capital in the morning, I quickly located a nice guesthouse in what is perhaps Beijing’s most atmospheric quarter of Qianmen, with its little alleys known as hutongs. The area has the intimacy of a village, even the sounds of the busy city all around it are reduced to a barely audible hum. The residents take advantage of the warm summer evenings and sit outside their houses, chatting to their neighbours, playing games, and as you walk past the small family restaurants, you smell the many different perfumes of delicious food. In the mornings, the appeal is somewhat less, with the locals performing their disgusting spitting rituals, and you try not to slip on the small pools of phlegm found everywhere on the streets.

As there were so many sights to explore in this city, with their historical, cultural or artistical importance, I allowed myself a full week to see as much as I could. My first stop was Tian’anmen Square, with its long and controversial history. The enormous square is surrounded by a fence, and there are guards standing on platforms, guarding every entrance to the square. To the south is the large Qianmen Gate, to the north Tian’anmen Gate with the famous picture of Mao Zedong, facing his mausoleum in the centre of the square. As you walk past the mausoleum, nearly half of the west side of the square is taken up by the enormous Great Hall of the People, home of the National People’s Congress.

Past Tian’anmen Gate lies the Imperial Palace, known as the Forbidden City, home to 24 emperors during five centuries of imperial rule. As everything in Beijing, past and present, seems to have been conceived and built on a grand scale, so was this Palace, a vast complex, and although a lot of the hundreds of buildings inside were unfortunately undergoing renovations in perparation for the Olympic Games to be held in Beijing in 2008, there was still so much to explore. As you enter the south entrance, you find yourself humbled by the sight of the Wumen, or Meridian Gate. The designation “Gate” doesn’t do it justice, for it is a huge building, from which the emperor would instruct his courts or inspect his army in times of war. Behind three of these gates, divided by large squares, there are several elaborately decorated ceremonial halls, before you get to the Inner City, a maze of corridors with the famous red walls. There are beautiful gates with at times a screen directly behind them, sometimes decorated with murals or Chinese characters. As you walk around these screens, you find yourself in a courtyard, and look out over living quarters of the emperor, the empress, the concubines or the eunuchs. Some of the buildings now have exhibitions in them, collections of artifacts or imperial possessions. In some courtyards, there are statues of animals for their symbolic power. At the north side of the Inner City is the Imperial Garden, which, after hours of walking, is a nice place to rest for a while, and admire the flowers, rock gardens, pavillions. After having left the Forbidden City through its north entrance, I crossed the street and climbed to the top of the hill of Jingshan Park, where I was rewarded with a beautiful view of the Forbidden City and the rest of Beijing. Unfortunately, due to the air pollution, most of the city is shrouded in a permanent layer or smog, resulting in a very hazy view.

There are so many interesting sites in and around Beijing that it would take too much time to describe them all here, but one of the nicest places must be the Yiheyuan, or Summer Palace, located in the northwest of the city. Its collection of stunning Imperial houses, halls, temples and covered walkways with beautiful murals, together with a large lake, makes for a pleasant retreat from the busy streets of Beijing.

Later in the week, I visited one of China’s most famous of objects, The Great Wall. A couple of hours north of the capital, I walked on a reconstructed section of the Wall, and admired the views of the Wall snaking around on the top of the hills as far as the eye could see, while gasping for breath from the steep climb.

As my week in Beijing was coming to an end, I had decided to go to the nearby town of Datong, and went to the central railway station to get a ticket. Due to the sheer number of people, and an astonishing lack of social etiquette, this can actually resemble a nightmare. At the station, all of the 30 or so ticket windows were open, and each had a queue of around 20 people, waiting to buy a ticket. As you stand in line, waiting for your turn, there are dozens of people simply ignoring the queue as they head straight for the ticket window. In many of the Western countries, this would cause an uproar in the queue, but here, nobody tells them to get in line. And then there are the attendants behind the windows, at times downright rude to the customers who have been waiting for half an hour to get their ticket.

Getting on the train, which I did at the biggest railway station I’ve ever seen in my life, the gigantic Beijing Xi Zhan (West Station) is a game of push and shove, with a dozen people trying to get through a single door at the same time, and at times trying to climb over people in the carriages to get to their designated seats. But once the train was underway, this all was soon forgotten, as I watched the beautiful landscape outside Beijing, of lush mountains and valleys with lakes and rivers.

In Shanghai, I got my first taste of a truly big Chinese city. After a 26 hour train journey from Hong Kong, long but comfortable as I had a bed, I arrived at the central trainstation and made my way to the old part of the city. As a lot of the lower range of hostels and guesthouses are not allowed to accept foreigners, I had a bit of trouble finding a place to sleep. But I eventually found a guesthouse, underground in a converted bomb shelter, with walls one meter thick and solid steel doors near the entrance. The shared bathroom in the guesthouse was also used to wash clothes and cook food, and it sometimes felt like I was having a shower in a kitchen, and occasionally found myself shaving next to someone who was chopping up beef for breakfast.

Outside, the narrow streets of the old city still gave the appearance of a village, with people going around on their bicycles, eating outdoors at one of the many small family restaurants, buying fruit or snacks at stalls, and further down was a group of men playing Chinese chess. A man on a bicycle sold crickets, hundreds of them, each in tiny woven baskets, and the noise was deafening. It’s a big hit, though, with many people getting one to get a bit of the sound of the countryside into their homes.

For how long this old part of the city will exist, remains to be seen, as a lot of the small houses and buildings have been designated for demolition, and all around the area are new, towering apartment blocks, with blinking red lights to warn oncoming aircraft. At night, many people, working during the day at one of the hundreds of construction sites, sleep on the sidewalk on thin straw mats next to building materials, with the huge cranes looming overhead, their silhouettes drawn against a sky that never gets completely dark.

Shopping is big in Shanghai, with the long Nanjing Road reportedly being China’s busiest shopping street. When you get tired of the shopping, or wrestling through the crowds, you can walk along The Bund, the boulevard alongside the Huangpu river, where large colonial buildings are looking out over the river, reminiscent of China’s colonial past. Across the river, the Oriental Pearl TV Tower stands out as Shanghai’s landmark, in the district of Pudong. Only ten years ago, this was the “wrong” side of the city, but with the help of enormous investments, it has been transformed into Shanghai’s commerce centre, with an accompanying forest of skyscrapers.

Going around in a city bus is one way to appreciate the scale of Shanghai, as the distances are just too great to go around on foot. One evening, the bus driver turned off the indoor lights and LCD screens while driving over the Nanpu bridge, so the passengers could appreciate the view of the huge city, with all its floodlit colonial buildings, skyscrapers, blinking lights and neon signs.

One reason alone to visit Shanghai is the superb Shanghai museum, at the edge of Renmin Park. The collections of sculptures, paintings, calligraphy, Ming and Qing furniture and ethnic minority arts, to name a few, are very interesting, and thanks to the excellent lighting, the decoration and English commentary, it is all a very rewarding experience.

After a couple of days in Shanghai, the capital of China was going to be my next destination, and I couldn’t wait to get there.

It was an excellent way to arrive in Hong Kong for the first time, as I did, by ferry from Guangzhou. After leaving the Pearl River Delta, as we drew closer to Hong Kong Island, the buildings seemed to rise out of the water, with the green hills behind them.

Although Hong Kong is officially part of China since the end of British rule in 1997, it couldn’t be more different from the mainland. Unlike China, people from most nationalities do not need a visa for entering Hong Kong, and although similar in value, its currency is the Hong Kong Dollar instead of the Chinese Yuan. The silly British custom of driving on the wrong side of the road takes some getting used to again. There’s an armada of double decker buses to complete the extensive and hyper efficient transportation service of the metro in the entire Hong Kong area, and there is even a quaint little tramline in the centre of the city itself. The population is mixed and multi-cultural, with its main Cantonese population, immigrants from the mainland, the Indian subcontinent, the Philippines, Middle East, Europe and North America.

Hong Kong consists of a peninsula with districts like Kowloon and the New Territories. There are a number of islands, most famous being Hong Kong Island, the administrative and business centre. Lantau island is where the busy airport is located, and there are a number of smaller islands.

I had chosen to stay in Kowloon, or the area of Tsim Sha Tsui to be exact. Near the waterfront, there is a beautiful view of Victoria Harbour and the city across the water, and as you look at the hundreds of skyscrapers, freight ships and ferries go by. The first evening after my arrival, a show called “A Symphony Of Lights” was on, held every Saturday evening during the summer months. A number of harbourfront buildings in the city were lit with different colours of floodlights, and synchronised to the music, a fireworks and laser show erupted over the buildings, a magical sight.

The next morning, I took the Star Ferry across the harbour to Hong Kong Island, and went into the city. Walking around in Central for the first time is a wonderful experience. I have always been interested in the modern architecture of cities, having made several documentaries on the subject. Hong Kong is a haven for people like me, and I frequently strained my neck, looking up at the enormous structures, skyscrapers of concrete and steel and glass, while trying not to bump into too many people. On a visit to the beautiful botanical gardens, I took the Central-Mid-Levels Escalator, basically a giant series of escalators and so-called travelators. It runs 800 meters up the hill, connecting the lower streets near the harbour to the residential areas, with towering apartment complexes on impossible slopes. There is also a lovely little funicular railway, called the Peak Tram, in operation since 1888, which brings you up the Peak. It’s a residential area with lots of green, and the views over the city, Victoria Harbour and Kowloon in the distance are breathtaking.

The architecture in the city is as diverse as the people, and some of the world’s most renowned architects have designed stunning buildings here. Like in China, most buildings have been designed with feng shui as an essential part of the preparations. Meaning “wind and water", it’s a form of geomancy, and it proposes the positioning of a building and even an ideal form for a structure, according to the spiritual attributes of a landscape and its surroundings. A striking building houses the headquarters of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation. Designed by Sir Norman Foster, it is more than 178 meters tall, and is supported on giant pillars. It has a transparent floor, and as you walk underneath it, you can look up into the heart of the building, a colossal glass atrium. The Lippo Centre with its awkward, bulging shapes is also an eye-catcher, designed by Paul Rudolph. And then there is the more than 367 meters tall Bank of China Tower, world-renowned and it features on Hong Kong’s bank notes. It was designed by I.M. Pei. However, for this building, feng shui was bypassed, and it’s therefor disliked by a lot of Hong Kong residents.

On another day, I took a ferry to Lantau island, almost twice the size of Hong Kong Island. It features a couple of older seaside villages, and as half of the island is designated as parkland, there are lots of green valleys, lakes, and hills with waterfalls. After the ferry had docked at the small town of Mui Wo on the island, I took a bus to the Po Lin (Precious Lotus) Monastery. Near the monastery, the Tian Tan Buddha sits high up on a hilltop, surrounded by a ring of Bodhisatvas offering various gifts to the Buddha. The statue is 34 meters tall and weighs 250 tons, and it’s the largest seated bronze outdoor Buddha in the world. As you look around, there are emerald coloured hills shrouded in mist, among a serene quietness, a nice change from the busy city.

During my stay, on 1 July, known as Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Establishment Day, the eighth anniversary of the region’s handover to Chinese sovereignty was celebrated. Thousands of people marched the streets, protesting for more democracy or in support of the Beijing government, and it once again showed the special privileges this part of China enjoys.

Although I couldn’t get enough of Hong Kong, and with a number of places left that I still wanted to visit, it was time for me to go back to the mainland, going on a 26-hour train journey to Shanghai.

Currently, China is experiencing severe floodings, causing over 500 deaths and leaving millions of people homeless across several provinces. What makes this tradegy even worse, is that this happens every year, with rivers incapable of transporting the huge quantities of rainfall during this rainy season. In Guanxi province, I saw some of the damage for myself, with large landslides that had destroyed roads.

Here in Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong province, parts of this big city were flooded due to the quickly risen level of the Pearl River which intersects the city. Shops, homes, restaurants and offices located near the river were affected, and although the floodwaters have receded, sandbags are still piled up near the entrances of metro stations, ready to be used again when needed. Although neighbouring Hong Kong has seen heavy rainfall, here in Guangzhou it has been more or less dry over the past two days.

I went out to explore a small part of the city, mostly on foot, occasionally using the efficient metro. A custom of a large number of Chinese is, very unfortunately, spitting. This is done with great fervour and after a long, audible preparation that is almost as bad as the spitting itself. The Chinese government has been trying to discourage this in view of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and thankfully, there is a “no spitting” sign on Guangzhou’s metro.

I went around town, explored a beautiful Buddhist temple. Although the People’s Republic of China is officially atheist, Buddhism is one of the most followed of religions here. I walked the streets, including some of the many shopping streets with blinking neon signs, sometimes having to actually wrestle myself through the crowds.

One of the reasons I stopped in this city for a couple of days, was to try the Cantonese food, for which this province is famous. People from other provinces in China joke that the Cantonese like to eat anything with legs that isn’t a piece of furniture, and anything with wings that isn’t an airplane. And indeed, in front of many restaurants, there’s usually a small zoo with live animals, ready to be selected by the customer, as the Cantonese demand the freshest of ingredients.

Most Chinese are quite loud, shouting at eachother during normal conversations, yelling at the top of their voice into their mobile phones, and in the restaurants it can feel like you’re dining in a packed football stadium. After dinner, the tables resemble battlefields, littered with the cascasses of slewn poultry, seafood, and what not. But the food is admittedly delicious. Having gone to restaurants where nobody speaks English, and with no menus in English available, I found myself sometimes having to rely on the choice of the waiter or waitress, as they pointed to something on the menu, and exclaimed “haochi!”, meaning “delicious!". These choices have always been fantastic, wonderfully scrumptious suprise dishes.

Another famous part of Cantonese cuisine is yum cha, also known as dim sum, known in Mandarin as dianxin. Usually eaten for breakfast or lunch, it consists of dozens of small delicacies placed inside bamboo steamers, wheeled around on carts by waitresses, and you pick what you like. Most numerous are all kinds of fried or steamed dumplings, beautifully presented and absolutely delectable. Then there are the various kinds of buns, spring rolls, chicken feet, custard tarts, et cetera. For each choice, you receive a stamp on a small card, which you bring to the cashier when you’re finished.

Tomorrow, I will be trying to make my way over the Pearl River to Hong Kong. In Beijing yesterday, Donald Tsang was sworn in as new Chief Executive of this special part of China, where the so-called “one country, two systems” principle is used, to indicate it is part of China, but retains a form of democracy, self-rule, and a legal system inherited from the British. But when I enter Hong Kong, the first entry on my Chinese visa will expire, and I will have to get Hong Kong Dollars, instead of Chinese yuan.

Discovering new countries, always starting over again when visiting an unknown territory, exploring its customs and attempting to understand its language, can be both very exciting and unnerving.

And so I arrived in Nanning, provincial capital of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, exhausted after a long train journey on two different trains from Hanoi, but excited to be in China, or Zhongguo, as the people here call this enormous country.

It was early on a Saturday morning, but the square in front of Nanning’s train station was already filled with people, opening their shops, having a smoke, reading newspapers, chatting, or exercising those interestingly slow gymnastics of tai chi. After a 15 minute walk from the station, I checked into what turned out to be a 2-star hotel, using mainly handsignals in communicating with the receptionists, who spoke no English.

Then, I went out to explore Nanning. I hadn’t known what to expect of China, but it certainly wasn’t this. This city with its new high-rise buildings, its center with luxurious shopping malls and huge department stores, cinemas, nice cafes and restaurants. It was like walking in Singapore, but everything was of course in Chinese, those extremely complex characters, completely incomprehensible to me. Hardly anyone spoke any English, the Mandarin phrasebook I carry with me proved invaluable. The funny thing is, once people see that I don’t understand what they’re saying, they write it down for me, but in Chinese. Nice, but not very helpful.

In this city, I also had my first taste of true Chinese food, not the westernised versions I’ve had in restaurants back home. Even at the cheapest of restaurants or food stalls, the taste of the food is so much more refined than in the other countries I’ve visited. It is absolutely delicious, and there are so many kinds of cuisines to explore in this huge country.

After spending a couple of days in the city, frantically trying to learn at least a little Mandarin, and recovering from somewhat of a culture shock, I was about to go further north in the province. I made my way to a brand new busstation, 3 kilometers from Nanning’s center, servicing the northern lines, and got on the most luxurious coach I’ve ever been on, including during my travels in Europe and Australia. I was astonished to find, for the first time in eight months visiting other countries in Asia, seatbelts for every passenger. After checking the tickets, a coach stewardess in uniform handed out lunch packs, drinks and snacks, and while we were heading to the city of Guilin, the newest movies from Hong Kong were shown on the LCD screen in the front. After a smooth four hour journey, I arrived in Guilin, and got on another coach to the village of Yangshuo.

Located on both sides of the famous Li-river, Yangshuo is a beautiful yet very touristy village. A little relieved to find a disproportionate amount of Chinese who spoke English, I explored the village, and gazed at the surroundings consisting of karst hills and peaks. Yangshuo is completely hemmed in by them, and one even had a pagoda on top, although it is baffling to think how anyone can get up there, seen the near-90 degree angles of the rock walls of the peak.

I went on a boat tour of the Li-river, and looked at the extraordinary scenery, the most unusual mountain ranges I’ve ever seen. They consisted of bizarrely shaped karst peaks everywhere you looked, covered with lush forests and bush. It is no surprise that, over the past centuries, so many writers and painters have been inspired by this unique landscape. A week later, travelling on a bus that would bring me further east, I saw the same scenery around Yangshuo once more, and this nightly landscape was even more bizarre. Backlit by the moon, the unusual shapes of the peaks and hills were perfectly outlined. This didn’t resemble a real landscape, it almost seemed as if a painter had gone to great lengths to paint an ever changing mystical landscape on my window.

After a couple of days, I went back to Guilin, and took two buses that brought me to Ping An, a tiny village high up in the mountains. I had to walk the last kilometer to the village, as cars, motorbikes and bicycles were not allowed in, and couldn’t drive on the tiny rocky path anyway. I checked into one of the highest situated hotels, and the view from my room was the most stunning I’ve ever seen, of dozens, no hundreds of levels of rice terraces carved out of the mountain. This was done some 700 years ago during the Yuan Dynasty, and ever since, huge quantities of rice and corn are grown here by the ethnic Zhuang and the neighbouring Yao people. After a short walk to a viewpoint higher up, even more of the rice terraces were revealed, what the locals call Dragon Spine Rice Terraces, because of the shape. Some farmers, tiny figures in this vast landscape, are planting rice. There are many waterfalls and small brooks, and the locals have used bamboo to build a complex irrigation system, with water continuously flowing into the rice terraces at the top, which then cascades down to the lower levels.

The village itself is quite picturesque, with very large wooden houses connected by a small, occasionally steep rocky path, with bridges over the brooks and near waterfalls, where Zhuang women, wearing traditional clothing, are washing vegetables. A Zhuang man, carrying a knife and some other tools in a woven basket on his back, is guiding a large ox on the small path. The man is wearing the conical hat which I associate with Vietnam, although there, only women wear it. But it rains a lot here, and the hat is very effective as an umbrella. On his shoulder, he is carrying a plough, which he will attach with ropes to the ox and use it on one of the terraces, to prepare for the planting of rice.

It is very peaceful here, quiet in this village, the air fresh and cool. Sometimes buildings and landscape are suddenly enveloped in clouds, and everything is white and faded. On clear moments, I made several walks to the lookout point, and just sat there and gazed. It is a stunning and breathtaking scenery, these terraces, the deep valley, the green mountains opposite.

But it was time to move on, as I did, heading to the large city of Guangzhou, in neighbouring Guangdong province. A city of millions, I couldn’t have picked a more different environment, but such are the contrasts in China.

The last city I visited in Vietnam is its capital, Hanoi. During my first visit to Vietnam, it was the starting point of my voyage through this country, and I instantly liked the city. If you forget about the mad traffic for a moment, the city is really charming with its old center with narrow streets, just north of Hoan Kiem lake. There, a number of streets are named after the products that virtually every shop in the street sells, like Hang Bo, with Hang meaning “merchandise” and Bo stands for “baskets". There is a Hang Manh for bamboo screens, and a Hang Muoi, for salt.

There are of course many family restaurants, with delicious food, served usually within a minute after ordering. And then the many coffeeshops, where you can sit down and relax, and watch life going by on the busy street in front of you. Many women, wearing the typically Vietnamese conical hat, carrying a bamboo pole on one shoulder with two baskets attached to it. They sell fruit or carry all kinds of goods. Across some streets, there are red banners with slogans in Vietnamese, reminding you that you’re in a socialist country: “Honesty, Nobility, Solidarity!", or “Long Live President Ho Chi Minh!". Every hundred meters or so people ask you if you want their motorbike taxi services, very cheap (after bargaining) and very fast.

Hanoi is also the city where you can see Ho Chi Minh, or Uncle Ho as he is fondly known, in the mausoleum built after his death. Next to the building, two large banners proclaiming “The Socialist Republic Of Vietnam Will Live On!", and “President Ho Chi Minh Will Walk With Us Forever!", facing the large square that is crowded with people and dignitaries on special occassions. Soldiers in khaki or bright white uniforms guard the mausoleum, and inside is the body of the late Ho Chi Minh, subtly lit in a glass sarcophagus, emphasising his thin white hair, goatee and his bony hands.

The mausoleum is surrounded by large botanical gardens with enormous trees and plants from all over the country, and they were well kept by a dozen female workers with those typical straw hats again. Further on, there is Unclo Ho’s presidential palace, his residential house, and his semi-residential bungalow, completely made out of teak wood, with a carp-filled pond in front of it.

Also on the mausoleum terrain is the famous One Pillar Pagoda, originally constructed by Emperor Ly Thai Tong, who ruled from 1028-1054, destroyed by the French upon leaving Hanoi in 1954, and rebuilt by the Vietnamese government. This small pagoda on an enormous stone pillar has a buddha statue in it, surrounded by flowers and other offerings, and incense.

There are a lot of Chinese influences everywhere in Hanoi, from the Temple of Literature, dedicated to Confucius, to the many Chinese gates, temples and pagodas in this city. The Chinese / Japanese style (fat) Buddha can be seen a lot here, and sometimes statues of Confucius, Vietnamese emperors, and occasionally the more slimmed down Thai version of Buddha. In the center of Hanoi is a Catholic church, a dark grey structure resembling the Notre Dame on the Ile de la Cite in Paris.

By now, I spoke enough Vietnamese to have basic conversations, and it helps enormously with negotiating to get the right price for transportation, or for that nice t-shirt you want to buy. Usually, the asking price is about five times as high as the actual price, and if negotiating doesn’t get the price down enough, the tactic of walking away helps. The vendor shouts out the lowest price, in the hope you turn around. Some people confided in me, in Vietnamese, that the asking price would have been much higher, if I wouldn’t have spoken in Vietnamese to them.

Unfortunately, after several weeks revisiting wonderful Vietnam, it was time for me to leave. My next destination was going to be China, and I was very excited that my explorations of this huge and unfamiliar country were about to start.

Nha Trang, on Vietnam’s south-central coast, is very touristy, and like most places in Vietnam, it has changed drastically over the past decade. It now has hundreds of hotels for the large number of Vietnamese and foreign tourists who want to spend some time in this pleasant city, and it seems that every week, construction starts on a new hotel, even more luxurious than the others.

I was excited to be back in this city, to meet some of the friends I had made during previous visits, and to see all of the now very familiar places, coffeeshops and restaurants again. The long beach is wonderful, and Nha Trang could almost be mistaken for a Mediterranean town, were it not for the many pictures and paintings of Ho Chi Minh, and slogans in Vietnamese like “Nha Trang Is The City Of Heroes", referring to the resistance during the American War.

In the evenings, young couples drive on scooters or motorbikes on the main boulevard along the beach, to see and be seen, and a special section of the beach is crowded after dark with parked motorbikes, where couples are kissing, as this, or even holding hands, is unheard of during the day.

From Nha Trang, I made a short excursion to Dalat. It is a cool mountain resort in the central highlands, and is a famous honeymooning resort for Vietnamese couples because of its climate and idyllic location. There is indeed some beautiful scenery to explore around Dalat, which I did on a rented motorbike, as I drove on winding roads through mountains covered with lush forests, visiting some large waterfalls a dozen kilometers away from the town.

Back in Nha Trang, I bought a ticket for a night bus to the small town of Hoi An. It is just south of the central Vietnamese city of Danang, and it is one of my favourite places in Vietnam. A Unesco World Heritage site, it is a very picturesque riverside town with narrow streets and old houses, many beautiful pagodas and Chinese temples with nice gardens. Some of the many wooden buildings date back to early 19th century. It is very touristy, but this doesn’t diminish the feeling you get, of being in an open-air museum of historical Vietnam, when you walk through Hoi An. The town is also famous for manufacturing clothes, and the hundreds of tailors can produce basically anything you want in 24 hours, including copies of your favourite shirts or trousers, in the material of your choosing.

After a couple of days, I travelled further north to Hue, located on either side of the wide Perfume River. Around Hue, there are a number of interesting pagodas and tombs of emperors to be explored. Close to the city, the Thien Mu pagoda is where monk Thich Quang Duc used to live. Although not famous by name, photographs of him were printed on the front pages of newspapers and magazines all around the world, as he burned himself to death in Saigon on 11 June 1963, in protest of the policies of the brutal South-Vietnamese Diem regime.

The old part of the city, on the north side of the river, is situated inside a moated citadel. It is here where the Imperial Enclosure and the Forbidden Purple City are located, home to the emperors of the Nguyen dynasty, until the end of World War II, when Emperor Bao Dai abdicated to Ho Chi Minh’s Provisional Revolutionary Government. Although much of the historical buildings and temples were destroyed during the American War, some of the residences, halls, palaces and gates have been restored, and are well worth a visit.

After visiting the Imperial Enclosure, I cycled around on a rented bicycle through the old city, and stopped near Tinh Tam Lake, where I enjoyed an absolutely delicious bun bo Hue, a local specialty, consisting of rice vermicelli and vegetables with beef soup. Another of my favourite dishes, sold everywhere in Vietnam, is pho bo, or beef noodle soup, to which you add some extra flavour by using the nuoc mam, or fish sauce, and of course chillies. What you’ll probably want to give a miss is the absolutely foul smelling mam nem, a different kind of fermented fish sauce and uniquely Vietnamese, it has the strongest stench I’ve ever encountered, worse than the already very unpleasant odour of the durian fruit. Both are, not unlike those British and Australian concoctions of condiments called Marmite and Vegemite, an acquired taste (to say the least).

After a couple of days in Hue, a long busride brought me to Hanoi, my last stop before I would go to China.