TravelStream™ news feed for member bethverde on TravelPod's free travel blogs service http://www.travelpod.com/syndication/rss/bethverde en-us Copyright ©2009 TravelPod.com Fri, 18 Sep 2009 09:18:19 -0400 http://www.travelpod.com http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/bethverde/8/1250625814/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/bethverde/8/1250625814/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/bethverde/8/1250625814/tpod.html Fri, 18 Sep 2009 09:18:19 -0400 The Big Trip

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Salang, Pahang, Malaysia

"Are you relaxed yet?" Dan keeps asking me."Are you?" I ask back."I think so," he says, scratching at yet another mosquito bite. "Things keep biting me."Here we are in Malaysia, in a secluded village on a tropical island. This is the beach reward we promised ourselves for three years in China, when all of our other foreign-teacher friends went on vacations to Thailand or the Philippines and we chose more remote, colder places to visit like minority villages or Gansu province. And for a relaxation site, we have chosen well...we are at Salang Village on Tioman Island, more a cluster of resort bungalows than a village.  Eddy, the manager of the Puteri Salang Inn, where we are staying, mentioned relaxation three or four times when giving a tour of the property:"Here's the hammocks, for relaxing. The TV room, relaxing. Here is free tea and coffee relaxing.  You can take a mat to the beach for more relaxing..All relaxing here." Eddy himself doesn't seem to do much relaxing other than watching European soccer highlights on satellite TV at night. The first day here he plucked green coconuts from one of the trees on the property and showed the guests how to chop them open, drink the milk and then spoon out the insides. The rest of the time he's busy cleaning, gardening and answering questions. He rented us some masks and fins and we went for a long snorkel from the beach to the point and back.  Monkeys were teasing tourists on the shoreline, seagulls screamed us away from their nests on the rocks, and underneath were shoe-sized parrot fish, tiny schools of stripy fish whose names I forget, and, the highlight, a two-foot long sea turtle who swam along underneath us for a few minutes. Tired out and stung by little jellyfish, we retired back to the beach for lunch.  Are we relaxed yet?We came to Tioman Island from the nation's capital, Kuala Lumpur (which we are still trying to figure out how to pronounce correctly—until then, we'll use the initials, K.L.) K.L. was a pleasant stop. We stayed in a very basic and reasonably cheap hostel (Backpacker's Traveler's Inn) in Chinatown, and spent our time doing a little shopping and a lot of eating. Malaysian food is a fusion of Malay, Chinese and Indian cuisine—a different taste for every meal. We go back to K.L. for another two days at the end of the week before heading to Indonesia for four weeks. Happy travels everyone!
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/bethverde/8/1249301731/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/bethverde/8/1249301731/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/bethverde/8/1249301731/tpod.html Mon, 10 Aug 2009 09:53:55 -0400 The Big Trip

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Zunyi City, Guizhou, China

Our Big Trip really started years ago, for me in 2003 when I left my job as a reporter in Florida to take up English teaching in Prague and for Dan in 2002 when he went on a vacation to Switzerland and decided the world was so vast and beautiful that he didn't go home. The Europe trip turned into the China trip, with lots of little trips thrown in--Egypt, Morocco, Hong Kong, Australia, the US. We started traveling and haven't stopped. We don't want to stop. That's what this trip is about: The spark that started our interest burning to create this bigger Big Trip might have been in Prague, the snowy, wintery night I booked my round-the-world ticket that would eventually take me to China. "Hey Dan" I think I remember saying, " Wouldn't it be nice just to take a ticket like this and just go. Not work, just go.""Um, sure," he probably replied. Okay, so maybe that doesn't sound like such a grand beginning. But little things grow to big ones and it started us thinking. The first year or so in China we lived in Guangdong province where the food was wonderful, the shopping extensive and the multitudinous, expensive wonders of Hong Kong only a weekend trip away. We lived large, saved absolutely no money and loved it.  But our travels around China just gave us a hunger for more. Our first long-distance trip in China, to Xi'an, made us think about following the Silk Road for a month. For two months. Finally, we were up to thinking about traveling for three months without working. But when?  We needed to start saving. Eventually, the idea of three months of traveling morphed into more and more months on the road and we changed jobs to Guizhou, a much cheaper place to live. We started to squirrel away our nuts for the winter and decided we'd do the Silk Road in pieces, during our vacations from work. Instead, we'd channel our Big Trip into exploring Southeast Asia, India, maybe even South America if we could get that far. At present, our itinerary starts in Chongqing, China, a short distance north from Zunyi.  On the 18th, my mother and father and Dan's mother and step-father will join us for a trip down the Yangtze River. We'll see the Three Gorges, the grand dam and a few other attractions along the way.  After the boat, Dan's family will fly back to Australia, to meet up with us in Bali in October. My parents will stay on, and we'll go exploring a little more here in China.  We hope to see the Terracotta Warriors, the cave houses, the Great Wall, and the Inner Mongolian grasslands. On the 13th we fly out of China on an extremely cheap AirAsia flight to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. We have yet to make plans what to do with our week there, but I hope it involves beers and beaches. After that, we will go to Indonesia for a month, eventually meeting up with Dan's family to celebrate a wedding (not ours; we have made a solemn pact that people who start bugging us about that owe us dinner!!!).From there, we'll head to Perth to have a nice long visit with Dan's relatives before making our way back up to SouthEast Asia early in 2010.  From there.... we don't know yet!So, welcome along on our trip!  Happy reading!* * * P.S. We have also started our own website, www.alaskankangaroo.com. We planto put more pictures, more stories and our itinerary on that site. Please follow along!
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/bethverde/7/1243948499/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/bethverde/7/1243948499/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/bethverde/7/1243948499/tpod.html Mon, 03 Aug 2009 09:14:49 -0400 Spiced Up: Beth and Dan Experience China, Part II

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Chishui, Guizhou, China

Chishui's forests were primeval--right down to the pterodactyl-sized mosquitos dive bombing us as we stepped under the fern-and-bamboo canopy.The city built on the red rocks of northeastern Guizhou has been a goal for Dan and I since we moved to Zunyi.&nbsp; It's one of the ten taxi driver questions we field as we go through traffic to work on Saturday mornings:&nbsp; Where are you from? How long have you lived in China? How much money do you make? Can you eat spicy food? Which is more developed, America or China? And,&nbsp; Have you been to Chishui yet?&nbsp; I exaggerate only a little. For this trip to one of the most famous parts of our region, we decided to invite along a friend. We had a rare three-day weekend when the Chinese staff were also free, so we extended the trip to them. One of the teachers, Coolio, decided he would like to come.&nbsp; We had a little bit of a shock the next morning when he got to the bus and announced that he hated long bus rides (this one was 8 hours on a good day, according to our information). He managed, however, and liked the trip well enough to go back a few weeks later with an old flame.Chishui town wasn't much to speak of, but we found an out-of-the-way hotel just off the street where the bus station was that rented us rooms for 40 RMB per night. Ours even had an attached bathroom and hot water.&nbsp;&nbsp; Hotels weren't the reason we'd come so far through the mountains though, so we beelined for the closest attraction to town, a park of waterfalls and bamboo a 30-minute bus ride from the city. We slapped mosquitos and clicked our cameras happily until nighfall when we realized that, uh-oh! the buses had quit running. We got some of the friendly park employees to call us a driver and got into town without too much damage to our pocketbooks. The next day we took another bus to the main attraction: The Bamboo Sea. For us, this was the real thing, the green stalks of bamboo towering mysteriously over misty lakes, kung-fu acrobats ready to descend on unwary travelers and kick some Tang dynasty butt.&nbsp;&nbsp; We were surprised then, when the people at the park (and another couple that we were carsharing with from the village where the bus dropped us off) told us that that wasn't worth seeing. Instead, they said, we should go look at the <i>suo luo fern, a kind of fern tree that has remained mostly unchanged for millenia.&nbsp; We took everyone's advice and did both. The bamboo sea, rippling along the top ridges of a mountain, really was as cool as we thought it would be, and, as a bonus, probably because of the unflattering descriptions by the ticket sellers, completely deserted. Dan, Coolio and I walked along the slippery paths and took photos of the bamboo and the mist agog, mostly in&nbsp; silence except for the birds and crickets (and droning mosquitoes). Marvelous!Later, we went to the foot of the mountain to walk through the fern forest. The fern trees looked like props for Jurassic Park, and their setting in a steep, red-rock canyon along a small creek made them even more impressive.&nbsp; The taxi drivers were right, Chishui was a must-see. ***WHAT IT COST* Bus from Zunyi-- 106 RMB* Hotel for two--40 RMB* Minibus to SiDongGou--5.5 RMB* Bus to JinShaGou--11.5 RMB***TIPS FOR OTHER TRAVELERSThis region is gorgeous. If you like hiking and nature, spend more time than we did!
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/bethverde/7/1248787602/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/bethverde/7/1248787602/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/bethverde/7/1248787602/tpod.html Mon, 03 Aug 2009 06:04:28 -0400 Spiced Up: Beth and Dan Experience China, Part II

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Zunyi, Guizhou, China

There's enough to see and do in China to last lifetimes of travel.Over the years, Dan and I have done our best to see as much of the Middle Kingdom as we could in the time that we had. Amazingly, that time in China will total three years next month. When we arrived in 2006 we intended to stay for a year or so. One year melted into another as we unfolded more and more ideas of where we could go and what we could learn. However, part of being a traveler is knowing when to move on, and so, with our latest work contract expiring this month we are getting ready to say "<i>Zai jian" to China.In our China time, the first one and a half years based in Guangdong Province and the rest here in Guizhou, we have been lucky enough to travel over a huge part of this intriguing land, taking in minority cultures, world-class scenery, mind-bogglingly ancient historical sights and the most modern of cities. We have traveled to the southernmost and westernmost cities--Sanya and Kashgar--visited regions bordering Burma, Laos, Pakistan, Kyrgystan and Mongolia. We have slept on the Great Wall and in treehouses and in yurts, eaten scorpions in Beijing and dog in Guizhou, climbed a sacred mountain to watch the sun rise and seen the sun's eclipse in Zunyi, participated in minority festivals in little-known villages and sung along with the Backstreet Boys and Jackie Chan at upscale karaoke bars. We have tried to get a handle on the head-wrenching language of Mandarin Chinese. With apologies to the myriad teachers we have had, if it isn't beautiful when we speak, at least we make ourselves understood and forge friendships with the exceptionally friendly locals we have met on our travels and at home in Zunyi and Foshan.We have internalized some of the mannerisms and habits of the culture--a secret horror at people eating with their hands, the compulsion to accept gifts with both hands, a need to change our shoes at the door for slippers. What once seemed awkward (picking up flat, slippery rice noodles with chopsticks, meeting people without being able to ask their names) now we do as a matter of course.We've learned so much about this fascinating, changing nation and the people who so famously over-inhabit it. And, mostly, the more that we learn the more we realize how much more there is to inquire into. And for that reason we're not just intending to hop on a plane and leave as soon as we get our final salary. Dan and I are embarking on a final tour of China starting August 18, when our parents arrive in Chongqing to join us on a cruise down the Yangtze River. After the boat ride, Dan's family will fly home (to meet us later on this year, in Indonesia) and my mother and father will stay on in China. With them, we shall go on another pilgrimage to the Terracotta Warriors in Xian, a hunt for the cave dwellers in northern Shanxi province, a trip to the Inner Mongolian grasslands and hopefully another bamboo raft ride down the Li River in Yangshuo before leaving the country on September 13. Dan and I will then be flying to Malaysia for a short trip, followed by a month in Indonesia and a few months catching up with his family in Australia. In early 2010, we hope to head back north to SouthEast Asia and India.I thank you for reading our blogs as we traveled and taught our way through China. I hope you will also join us on our new blog, The Big Trip.Happy travels, everyone!
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/bethverde/7/1248274368/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/bethverde/7/1248274368/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/bethverde/7/1248274368/tpod.html Wed, 22 Jul 2009 11:16:15 -0400 Spiced Up: Beth and Dan Experience China, Part II

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Zunyi, Guizhou, China

"I'm having a fun day," I thought as I watched seven normally quiet young adults struggle with brown construction paper and not enough tape.I was turning my English class into a little science experiment. Our goal: To create a projection device so we could track the solar eclipse arcing across China without burning our retinas. Some cities north of us would experience a total eclipse, while we would see a partial one at around 9 a.m. Not much English was involved in the invention process, I was sorry to note, but I hoped that the little project would at least work as a team builder to help them feel more comfortable talking to each other in subsequent activities.After ten minutes or so of cutting, folding, rolling and biting off the rolls of tape, we were ready to go. The students' products looked more like chimneys in children's drawings or thin-capped mushrooms, but we gathered them up anyway and climbed the stairs to the school roof. At first, there were sighs and moans. "It's too hot," I caught one girl mumbling. Then, I picked up one of the chimney/mushrooms and put a piece of white paper on the ground. Angling the top of the awkward, floppy thing toward the rising sun by holding it above my head, I finally caught a white, gleaming crescent on the paper. "It's working!" a girl yelled. "Come here!""Grab a pencil, draw it!" I said.&nbsp; Another student found a pencil and sketched the sun's outline on the paper.&nbsp; As the eclipse progressed, the early-morning sunshine darkened into a yellow twilight, and the students frantically angled and sketched with their own tubes. And suddenly, they remembered to speak English, too. It was a beautiful morning.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/bethverde/7/1241612700/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/bethverde/7/1241612700/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/bethverde/7/1241612700/tpod.html Tue, 02 Jun 2009 11:15:55 -0400 Spiced Up: Beth and Dan Experience China, Part II

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Turpan, Xinjiang Uygur, China

Sun Wu Kong, the Monkey King of Chinese legend, was coming through XinJiang on his way to fetch back Buddhist sutras from India, when he and his master Xuan Zang were blocked by an impenetrable wall of flame rising from the desert.Not that an impenetrable wall of flame is any barrier for a magic monkey. According to the story, the classic <i>Journey to the West (four volumes of verse, which I am reading, very slowly, in translation), the Monkey King puts out the fire with a magic fan-he needed to put them out anyway, since another part of the story says he started them by knocking over a brazier in heaven. Anyway, the flames turned into a great red mountain, which still burns fire-red when the sun hits it. Unfortunately for us, the day we drove by the Flaming Mountain a wind whipped up too much dust to catch the reds and oranges it's famous for. We did get to see the Monkey King however-or at least a big statue of him-at the site designated by whoever designates such things as the 'perfect' place to look at the mountain, for a fee.We weren't just after red mountains, though. Dan and I and our new travel buddy Rene who we'd met at the train station on arriving in Turpan, were off in a hired taxi to see a system of Buddhist grottoes and another ancient, ruined city. The highway arched around the Flaming Mountain, and we saw some of the fire color come out in the hills around the Bezeklik Thousand Buddha Caves. These grottoes were hollowed out and painted to honor the Buddha about a thousand years ago by the royal families of Gao Chang, then-capital of the then-province in what is now XinJiang. This was a few hundred years before the local people converted to Islam, the latest religion brought to them on the Silk Road as Buddhism itself had been before it. The Turpan basin, though famous for growing grapes and fruit, is the hottest place in China. The dry weather and their out-of-the-way location on a low cliff facing a flank of the fiery mountain sheltered the Buddhas statues and their thousands of attendant Buddha paintings for years. Then, last century some German explorers and amateur archaeologists came and pried the statues off the walls (or the heads, if that's all they could get) and took them back to Germany, where some were unfortunately destroyed by the Second World War. The little bits that survive in situ are still interesting; the fact that the ceiling paintings of a thousand seated Buddhas was still so bright after a thousand years amazed me. From the grottoes we drove to see Gao Chang, where the founders of Bezeklik had once thrived. Now, no one lives there, and I was again made curious by a city whose citizens had disappeared even though the area around it was obviously habitable. Pleasant tree- and ivy-lined streets full of laughing children and bustling street markets surrounded the 5-kilometer city walls. But inside those walls we found only dust and crumbling buildings, going back to the dust and mud that they were once constructed from. What had caused these people to build again outside the city walls but not again within them? Luckily for us, as visitors, they hadn't. We didn't have too much time to ponder the history of Gao Chang, however. Rene had a train to catch to Beijing that evening and we were trying to get to Urumqi, so Rene hired a donkey cart to drive us to the most interesting part of the complex. I wandered through the broken buildings, feeling small in the enormity of history and wishing they were as well preserved as the ruins we saw the day before in Jiao He. I tried and failed to estimate how many people could have lived in a city as big as this.We came across another temple or two-it was hard to tell if they had once been joined into the same temple-- and then took a donkey back. After a brief argument with our taxi driver about whether or not we'd give him more money than originally agreed on (nope, sorry pal), he drove us back to the bus station and train station respectively and we headed off for Urumqi and our plane back to Guizhou province. ***WHAT IT COST:*Taxi for a day: about 200 RMB (going to the train station 50 km away brought the total price above that)*Entrance to Bezeklik: 40 RMB per person*Entrance to Gao Chang: 40 RMB per person*Donkey cart to the middle of Gao Chang: 10 RMB each way***TIPS FOR OTHER TRAVELERS:* Every taxi driver in Turpan (it seemed) was willing to hire out for the day. Some of them seemed more reliable than others (like the guy who left the other people at Jiaohe even though he had their purses and snacks in his car). The average taxi on the street is much cheaper than the travel agent/drivers who ambushed us at our hotel. However, bargain with your taxi driver and get it clear. Write it down if possible. Our driver was amiable enough in the first part of our trip, but he then tried to get the price up as we were driving back to town. He also had never visited Gao Chang and got lost while trying to find it.*Photos aren't allowed inside the Bezeklik grottoes. They're really strict about this.*The donkey cart man thought he was quoting a per person price and we thought he was quoting a per-trip price. Bargain.*We also visited the karez, a museum detailing a unique way of irrigating in the desert.&nbsp; The karez concept is interesting, but the site is less so. It was also 40 RMB to get in. *The Astana Graves were under reconstruction and closed to visitors.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/bethverde/7/1241526120/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/bethverde/7/1241526120/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/bethverde/7/1241526120/tpod.html Sat, 30 May 2009 13:00:32 -0400 Spiced Up: Beth and Dan Experience China, Part II

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Turpan, Xinjiang Uygur, China

While the sun made its way down behind the far hills, I crouched by a rock wall in a long-destroyed temple in the middle of the Jiaohe Ruins and imagined. What had happened in this place? I examined the crumbling wall. Were these striations and grooves in the rock from the wind alone? Could an army have destroyed this, or was the destroyer the oldest kind of enemy--time? Half-left houses, their dark doors and windows eyes in melting giants' faces, leer at us but the city doesn't seem sad. It's a playground, a carnival of history. Here, Silk Road caravans rested on their way east or west. A dozen empires ruled and fell. Religions waxed and waned. How many people lived here? I wondered as Dan and I walked. We found the largest temple, as impressive in size as some of the ones we saw in Egypt. A few foreigners hurried in and out on whirlwind tours,determined to take in the Jiaohe Ruins' 2,000 years of history in forty minutes before their tour bus stranded them. Dan and I ignored them, entranced by black beetles crawling out of their hidey-holes as the shadows grew longer. I noticed that the smaller bugs came out first, then the bigger ones. Maybe that's how you get to be a big beetle, by being slow. A map and historical description near the park's gate describe Jiaohe's high-sided rocky island as 'a willow leaf' pointing north. The residents, who were ousted by the Mongols in the 13th century, lived far above the flowing waters, protected by high cliffs on both sides of the river. The main gates led visitors up through the residential districts to the government buildings and then out to the temple district on the very tip of the willow leaf . The monasteries probably housed tens of thousands of Buddhist monks, centuries before Islam made its way along the Silk Road to XinJiang. Inside, a few scratched Buddha bodies decorate the niches in the main temple, though their heads have been souvenired, perhaps by 19th century Western visitors. In places where the wind has been kind, scraps of faded paint remained in the niches and doorways. Eventually, even the intermittent tour groups disappeared, and we worried about being locked in the park. We had seen some archaeologists or technicians restoring a few walls near the entrance, and so we hurried to see if they were still there. They were packing up so we too took our leave, finding a cab driver in the parking lot who was waiting for a few people, but willing to abandon them (we discovered their purses and snacks in his car!) for a few minutes to take us back to town. *** What it cost: *Entry to Jiaohe: 40 RMB each *Taxi to/from Jiaohe: 15 RMB there, 20 back. *** Tips for other travelers: *Bargain with the taxi drivers-we asked around and found huge variations in price *The park stays open at least until sunset *Getting to Turpan from the train station (which says it's Turpan, but isn't) can be negotiated with a taxi driver. Usually it's 20 RMB per person, and the taxi takes four. There's also a local bus which stops somewhere near the train station parking lot. It costs 7 or 8 RMB.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/bethverde/7/1241438880/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/bethverde/7/1241438880/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/bethverde/7/1241438880/tpod.html Wed, 27 May 2009 01:09:36 -0400 Spiced Up: Beth and Dan Experience China, Part II

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Kashgar, Xinjiang Uygur, China

"But we don't need a tour," Dan told the man again. The would-be guide was still puffing from his mad dash to work on his bicycle. He arrived at the Kashgar Old City ticket office a few seconds after Dan had bought the tickets and immediately started talking. I tried to stay out of it by messing around with my camera, hoping this guy was no more pushy than most tour guides. Not that we have anything against tour guides, but we had decided to go to Kashgar's Old City in defiance of our budget. We had already spent our alloted money, but when Dan read me the Lonely Planet section about the Old City we decided to take the plunge, even though the price had gone up from 10 yuan listed in the book to 30 yuan each now. To put it in context, that was sixty yuan we could translate into several days' worth of breakfasts or a few days of dinner. "We don't want a guide!" Dan told the man for the fifth time, raising his voice.&nbsp; "But you might get lost," the man said.&nbsp; Dan smiled and pulled out his pocket compass. "No, we won't." The guide looked disconsolate, his shoulders sagged. He tried once more: "Anyway, it's free." My ears perked up. Dan's did too. "No money?" he asked. I was suspicious. "No money," the guide said smiling, understanding he'd finally gotten through to us. "No money." "Why didn't you say so?" I muttered to myself, and then smiled at Dan. Score! So, without further argument, the guide, whose name I wish I'd gotten, led us into the twisting streets of Kashgar's Old City. A haphazard-looking mass of old and new buildings made of mud brick, red brick, wood and some cement, the Old City impressed me. It had the same feeling as the souqs in Morocco and the back alleys of Egypt: Old and exotic. Heavy wooden doors blocked us from peering into most homes, but we could get a feel for the way people lived here. Every few turns we came to the thin minarets and complicated brickwork of a community mosque. A man with a donkey cart sold vegetables at the far end of the hill complex, and public-service graffiti in Arabic writing was scratched into some of the walls. China as I've never seen it before. The main streets were wide enough to ride a three-wheeled cart thorough, though alleys only wide enough for two people walking abreast shot off in mysterious directions. The houses that made the walls of our labyrinth jutted up at uneven heights. When one house had been built up until it was no longer sensible to build skyward, some families chose to build widthwise, bridging the alleys below and joining together two houses that had once been opposite. Children played in the shadows of these archways, kicking soccer balls and waving at us to take their pictures. Just when I thought we were hopelessly lost, the guide gave us a good tip to navigating the old city: Octagonal paving bricks indicated a through way, rectangular bricks meant a dead end. He didn't seem to consult the bricks though, as he took us along the route of our tour. Despite the misunderstanding at the beginning, his English really was excellent. As we walked he threw out statistics and anecdotes: About sixty percent of the residents of Kashgar live in the Old City, he said, which seemed impossible until he explained that the old city didn't just include the section that you needed a ticket to get into. Eighty percent of women in Kashgar were unemployed, just working out of their homes or taking care of the children. If the women were home alone then they would leave both of the double doors shut, but not locked. If a man was home, then one of the doors would be left ajar, with a curtain behind it, so that other men would know it was safe to visit without risking a cultural and religious <i>faux pas by being alone with a non-familial woman. We visited a few of the homes in the neighborhood, including one of the oldest. Five hundred years old, it had been taken from the original owner during the Cultural Revolution and made into a house for widows. We met some of the widows sunning themselves and drying their laundry in the courtyard, as curious about us as we were about them. We warned the guide that we didn't want to buy anything, but he took us to the homes of some local artisans, assuring us we were under no pressure to buy. One of the most interesting was a metal working family. They created copper kettles and dishes sitting on the floor and beating sheets of metal into shapes and then scratching traditional designs into the shiny surface. I was about to ask the price of one when the guide told us that each set of a teapot and washing bowl took about three days to make. Obviously out of my budget. Another house was a restaurant of sorts, where for a few RMB we could have sat at a big table full of small dishes of dried fruit and nuts and enjoyed a panorama of the city from their grapevine-entwined balcony. The guide showed us small niches in the walls where, a long time ago, Buddhists would have put their statuettes to worship. But, when Kashgar people converted to Islam in the 10th century, these niches fell out of use. Now they put flower vases there or other designs. Another house we went to sold local embroidery, and another, traditional musical instruments. We looked at the shelves of beautiful wares and carefully avoided mentioning prices-a sure way to start bargaining that would indebt us into a purchase. The houses we visited were built on a courtyard plan with the, bedrooms and kitchen circling it. Different generations lived on different floors, even in the basements. The television and a big bed or carpeted platform seemed to have the place of honor in the courtyard, where people could sit in the cool shade and take refreshment. After a few hours of wandering through the streets, learning about the buildings and the residents---small plaques above the doors indicated households where no one engaged in 'separatist activity' lived--and taking pictures of the local kids, we went to catch the train to Turpan. As we said good bye to our guide, I gave him a free English lesson: "Next time, tell the visitors the tour is included in the ticket price." Walking away, I heard him repeating, "included in, included in."
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/bethverde/7/1241353200/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/bethverde/7/1241353200/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/bethverde/7/1241353200/tpod.html Fri, 22 May 2009 11:45:09 -0400 Spiced Up: Beth and Dan Experience China, Part II

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Kashgar, Xinjiang Uygur, China

What must these people be thinking of me? I wondered, as I squatted in the dust of the Kashgar livestock market trying to get a portrait of a distraught camel calf. Uighur, Kazahk, Kyrgyz and Hui ethnicity ranchers (guessing by their hats) stood around Dan and I, watching bemused as we exclaimed over the animals. A few yards farther into the fray of donkeys, cows, sheep and the occasional two-humped camel, a little boy wearing a traditional round-peaked felt hat regarded us in disgust as we took pictures of his donkey and cart. We were out of place here, the few straggling tour groups and touring individuals who made it to the outskirts of Kashgar for a glimpse of working history. Seeing money change hands over a few just-shorn lambs, two teenage boys desperately trying to catch a willful donkey so a potential customer could assess it, a bescarfed woman smiling privately to herself while she counted her takings, I could imagine away the cell phones and watches, the knock-off Nikes and Adidas shoes and believe that we were seeing the same dusty market hundreds of years ago-the camels to be taken on a caravan across the desert, the lambs and cows a measure of personal wealth, even more than they are today. I was reminded of a State Fair in the US, though there doesn't seem to be any ribbon-giving here. Children clung to their sheep and cows, begged their fathers for a few coins to buy an ice cream with. Dan and I picked our way through the cows to the donkeys on the far side of the large brick-wall enclosure, past the wall seemingly designated for the public toilet, and over to the lambs and sheep. We were constantly in the way--a donkey brayed wildly and rushed at us, a truck full of lambs started unloading its cargo over our heads. I kept my scarf over my camera when I wasn't taking pictures to keep it clean-ish, but soon our faces and arms were covered in grit. On the right side of the animals small restaurants were setting up, boiling water in huge kettles to pour their guests never-ending bowls of black Pakistani tea. They spread carpets out on the ground or arranged three-legged benches for their customers who ate bowls of long noodles in mutton broth or sticky carrot-and-mutton pilaf. We ate breakfast and watched the crowds. Dozens of children helped their fathers and mothers get the beasts tethered and then beelined for a shack selling hand-made ice cream and apricot ice and blaring out what looked like a Uighur soap opera from a 14-inch TV and a jerry-rigged megaphone. Men in Western suit jackets and traditional hats grouped together to discuss the merits of this ram or that ewe. A few tourists wandered like us, some of them travel-weary, some looking fearfully at their shoes to avoid the droppings starting to cover the ground, a few wearing white outfits and sandals and seeming to have confused which continent they were visiting today. After breakfast we decided to try the ice cream too, at one yuan for two small cones, scooped up from a quickly diminishing pile. This ice cream is churned in something like a converted washing machine, from milk and honey and ice. The treat cut through the dusty heat like ice down my back, and we prayed the ice was made from filtered water.We stayed around the market, watching it fill with restive livestock until the sun got hot enough to convince us to relocate.Our next stop was the cooler, covered avenues of the Kashgar Grand Bazaar. Reputedly once the largest market in Asia, it's still a fun though scaled-back experience. The sidewalks outside were overflowing with people. Sellers spread carpets, baskets or boxes out to hawk locally-grown fresh and dried fruit. Others held fistfuls of hangers, trying to entice us to get skirts or underwear. Unfamiliar household appliances caught our eyes--could it be a donkey brush? A child's toy? Later, we deduced, it must be for poking patterns in the naan bread. Inside the market, at the front, a few aisles of tourist wares delayed us for awhile in the afternoon, but we also explored the well-organized pavilions in the back, selling hardware, building supplies, clothes and other necessities. Not quite tired enough, we walked back to our hotel and past the Kashgar Old City, a walled-off mud-brick city-within-a-city. It would be our destination for tomorrow, before the train to Turpan.
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/bethverde/7/1241784720/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/bethverde/7/1241784720/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/bethverde/7/1241784720/tpod.html Wed, 13 May 2009 12:20:15 -0400 Spiced Up: Beth and Dan Experience China, Part II

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Lake Karakul, China

Above us, glittering ice sliced the pale blue sky, the brilliance of both veiled by yellow dust swirling in the canyon our taxi traversed.To the driver's amusement, we bumped our heads against the windows and emitted long series of probably nonsensical words: "Wow! Hey! Checkitout! Lookee!" Goodnaturedly, he stopped and I tried to photograph the enormity of the Pamir mountains, rough peaks sheathed in snow and ice standing many thousands of feet above us. The drive to the mountains from Kashgar had been exciting, something new each time I turned my head. First, we followed the lush, poplar-lined corridor of farms around Kashgar. Not far to the right or left, though, the farms made way for desert, and rolling swells of sand and rock traced the horizons. We stopped for breakfast at a market town called Upal, eating naan bread, cold lamb roast and bananas and watching farmers jolt by on flat, two-wheeled carts pulled by donkeys and ponies. The local architecture were flat, square houses of brown mud-brick enclosed by courtyard walls of the same material. Often, we glimpsed green-tiled minarets signaling mosques among the houses. After Upal, the country became more and more wild, with farms and mines tucked in large stretches of barren, stony foothills. The road followed a river, and near one settlement a farmer was herding his camels across it. Later, we saw sheep and yaks. Even later, the vegetation seemed too sparse to support any cattle. After about three hours, the road led us up to a high plateau, and we left the yellow dust caught in the canyon behind us. In front stretched a long, wide, shallow, sandy-banked lake ringed by snow-capped mountains. Beside the road overlooking the lake, braced against the wind, stood a collection of square metal bunkers and rickety stone cottages. Tables outside displayed a variety of collector's rocks, the cloths beneath the rocks flapping. We stopped, our driver warning us that the Kyrgyz people would ask for high prices. "Kashgar Sunday Market, cheap!," he said. And they did ask. One leathery man followed me while I took pictures, holding a small Omega pocketwatch with a bubble face. I looked at it once, cursorily, and he took a ballpoint pen from his pocket and carefully scratched out a number on the heel of his palm..5...0....0... 500 RMB! I made a face of horror, and backed away, only to be caught by the next table's seller. He wanted 50 yuan for a small bracelet. I smiled and walked farther uphill, taking pictures. More sellers came, from where, I wasn't sure. Out of the bunkers? From under the tables? Soon, Dan and I had a crowd of salespeople around our taxi, even as we were shutting the doors and driving away. We each bought bracelets, for the novelty of it, after some extensive roadside haggling, finally getting 10 RMB for each. The driver looked at our purchases: "Kashgar Sunday Market, eight RMB, nine RMB. Kyrgyz market, 10 RMB. OK." Another hour later, across the rolling hills, we reached our destination: Lake Karakul and its sentry, the 24,800-foot Muztagh Ata. Its name means the Father of Mountains, our driver told us. He spoke some English, Mandarin, Uighur, Kyrgyz and Tajik, and chatting to him about the local people and scenery made the long drive even more enjoyable. We had arranged to spend the night in a yurt on the shore of the lake, owned by some Kyrgyz people, and to ride shaggy camels around the icy waters. First, the family took us into one of the yurts (cement permanent dwellings; not tents) and we sat cross-legged on carpets around a cylindrical stove that simultaneously heated our tea and baked round flat savory naan bread for us to eat. The Kyrgyz people made special yak milk tea that should help with altitude sickness, Alim, the travel agent we arranged the tour through had told us. We weren't feeling too bad, just short of breath in the thin air, but we drank the tea and ate the bread happily. I was thrilled to be in a yurt, and tried not to stare at our hosts too much. The family hosting us had long, oval faces with cheeks whipped pink by the wind from the lake. A ten-year-old girl wore a baseball hat covered in gold sequins, but the other women had triangular head scarves tied loosely over braided hair. The men wore tall Russian-style fur hats or baseball caps and army-style jackets or coats. After tea and a trip or two to the three-sided rock privy by the lake, we mounted two shaggy camels and started the bumpy, rocking three-hour trip along the lake shore, led by a teenage son of the Kyrgyz families. The first hour of the trip was fantastic. Ice crystals tinkled in a broad sheet on the far northwest side of the lake, adding music to our scenery. The lake water changed color with the direction of the wind and the position of the sun. The peaks poked up to the blue sky, and the world felt enormous.The second hour I started to notice the muscles in my upper legs. We walked in the shadow of a hill and without the chill wind off Muztagh Ata, the sun started to broil us. My camel followed Dan's, but wanted to get ahead, so kept putting its shoulder, and thus, my right foot, up Dan's camel's bottom. The third hour, we walked back toward the yurts, Muztagh Ata behind us. The views were just as breathtaking as the first two hours, but my legs were truly painful, and I started to feel muscles I'd forgotten about since the last time we rode a camel, in 2004.By the time we got back to the yurts, Dan and I were happy we'd opted to go to the lake instead of the other trip we'd considered-a two-day camel trek into the sands of the Taklamakan desert. We had more tea and bread in the yurt and endured a showing of the hosts' handiwork that we didn't want to buy. Later, we took a walk by the lake, trying to catch the sunset before it got too cold to handle and then went back to eat salty vegetables and rice and sleep under heaped blankets and carpets in the yurt, surrounded by the driver, the hostess and her husband and the village's children. In the morning, Dan got up to catch the sunrise on the lake and snow but I didn't feel well so I slept in a little. After more bread and tea, and more displays of the Kyrgyz handiwork, we left for Tashkurgan, the westernmost city in China and the closest one to Pakistan, along the Karakorum Highway. Tashkurgan's people are mostly Tajik, the driver explained to us as we drove along. We were going near the border to Tajikstan, he said, was we passed some hitchikers. "Have you been?" I asked him in Chinese. He laughed. No, he said, in English. "No passport!"The main sight in Tashkurgan is the Stone City, an ancient, ruined fortress, that rises on a bluff in the middle of a green valley. Standing by the half-fallen walls and staring out to Muztagh Ata one one end of the valley and the road to Pakistan on the other, I imagined Silk Road caravans coming in to the lush valley and enjoying the trees and water, paying their fees and dues to the controllers of the fortress before starting the arduous ascent that would take them by Lake Karakol and eventually down to the trading hub of Kashgar. We ate lunch at a small Tajik restaurant where all the staff and patrons looked more Hungarian or Romanian or Russian than the standard idea of "Chinese" and then drove back to Kashgar, ready for the next day's Sunday Market at the Grand Bazaar.* * *What it cost: *Tour from Alim in the Seman Hotel in Kashgar: 1000 RMB for two people for two days, including driver, yurt, camels and food at the yurts.*Double room at the Seman Hotel, no bathroom: 40 RMB *Entrance ticket to Karakul Lake: 50 RMB per person* Entrance ticket to the Stone City in Tashkurgan: 8 RMB per person* Tajik lunch for three: 27 RMB (2 dishes of noodles, some meat and soup, some dumplings, some bread)* * * Tips for Other Travelers: *The trip to Karakul Lake is definitely worth it. Bring sunscreen, lots of water, toilet paper, and some gifts for the kids. (We gave them candy, which we probably shouldn't have, but they liked it!)*The taxi driver was awesome, his name is Tawakkul, and people wanting to discuss directly with him about trips near Kashgar can call him at 0998-2210454.*Alim can be reached at alimsilkroad@yahoo.com for information and tours. Very friendly, very good English and flexible options for travelers.*Another travel agent, Abdul Wahat and his team helped us get plane tickets and train tickets to and from Kashgar. They were also very friendly, very helpful and had great English, and also do tours. They can be reached at 13899132103 or through www.silkroadinn.com.
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