China

I am now going to go backwards in time and fill in some of the gaps of what I have been doing in the last few months. So i'll start with china.

As I wrote ealier there was a bit of drama getting my visa for china sorted out, but I did finally get my passport back and and made it to Hong Kong. Unfortunatley I didn't have any onward ticket booked due to the last minute date changes. I tried to buy a ticket at the airport in hongkong but this turned out to be just extremely expensive, so I ended up catching the train into Hong Kong and then getting an international train to Guangzhou - a large city a few hours from Hong Kong but inside mainland china. From there I bought a ticket to Biejing which turned out to be very cheap - so it was worth the effort.

I finally made it to Beijing where I stayed for a couple of days with Sitt. I had already been to beijing before and done all the touristy type stuff so I just spent my time there hanging out with Sitt, meeting his friends, going out to dinner and bars and that sort of thing. I did spend one day walking around a traditional chinese area, with a nice lake and some of the last traditional housing left in the centre of Beijing, which was pretty cool.

After a couple of days in Beijing Sitt and I headed down to Chengdu , in Sichuan province, South western china, which is famous for it's spicy food, it's tea houses and the world's largest panda reserve. Although it is a huge city (9 million people) it is actually quite chilled out. The people are calm and friendly, and there are some nice parks and cute little tea houses everywhere.

We meet up with a friend of Sitt's (another Rebecca) and her sister down there and the four of us stayed at a lovely, but noisy, hostel together (which had two very cute piglettes as pets). We hired bikes from the hostel and spent most of our time there biking around the city, checking out temples, parks, drinking tea and just hanging out. It was great to be there with Sitt and Rebecca, as they both speak mandarin. It made life a lot easier and we got to speak to a few locals, and try out some local food and do some stuff that would have been impossible if none of us could speak the language. One day Sitt and I went out to visit a "museum" of Maoist paraphenalia run by an old local man. He was hilarious and the musuem itelf was just the back section of the guy's house, which was stacked full of pictures, statues, old ads and propaganda posters and everything else with Mao on it.

One evening we all went to see a Sichuan opera which was excellent - having seen a Beijing Opera last time I was in China I knew what to expect - it is not much of a opera - more like a show of costumes and acrobatics with not much story. But it was extremely well done and the costumes were amazing.

One the last morning before I flew back to sydney we went to the panda reserve. It was huge and there were heaps of pandas around - several babies and a large number of adults. They were so cute. And they ate so much. They eat up to 40 kg of bamboo a day and just while we were watching a group of 4 pandas demolished a large area of bamboo!

China