TravelStream™ news feed for member oulous on TravelPod's free travel blogs service http://www.travelpod.com/syndication/rss/oulous en-us Copyright ©2009 TravelPod.com Mon, 20 Apr 2009 19:34:20 -0400 http://www.travelpod.com http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/oulous/1/1238911140/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/oulous/1/1238911140/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/oulous/1/1238911140/tpod.html Mon, 20 Apr 2009 19:34:20 -0400 A2b2cu

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Matsumoto, Chubu, Japan

More gorgeous train rides through the Japanese Alps got us to the city of Matsumoto. We lucked out with the weather, as it was perfect all day. It was a long train ride so we arrived in the late afternoon. We tried to have lunch at a restaurant where a retired 5 star chef makes only one dish, a soba noodle bowl. Sadly we got there too late and the place was closed. Too bad as B2 was very excited at the idea of eating in a place where the chef is focused and only working on mastering one dish.

We spent most of our time in Matsumoto at the World Heritage Castle. The castle is only one of a few ancient wooden castles left in Japan, since most of the others burned down and have been reconstructed. Wandering through the castle grounds, we were approached by a volunteer guide, who gave us an amazing one hour free tour of the place. We wished we had had more time, as he would have been more than happy to spend the entire day with us. He told us the history, the folklore, about ancient weapons, and interesting anecdotes about the lord and his retainers. In the end, he was the one who was grateful to have spent some time with us - the Japanese are supremely polite! No, please, thank you for the wonderful tour, really!!

We wandered into a temple and past some nice old streets in Matsumoto before getting back on the train to our next destination, which was Yudanaka, near Nagano (where the winter Olympics were held in the late 90's). We stayed in a Ryokan for the first (and only) time during our travels in Japan. A Ryokan is a Japanese style bed and breakfast. There's a bathhouse for men and women to bathe in natural hot springs in the facility. Since we arrived late, we were able to get one section of it for our private use, which was really nice.
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Takayama, Chubu, Japan

Takayama is at the foothills of the Japanese Alps. We had a gorgeous morning view on the train here, with the sun striking the snow peaked mountains in the distance. We took a bunch of photos from the train, so they are not exactly great, but give you a sense of the scenery en route. Unfortunately the morning train ride was the only sun we saw on this day. The rain held off until noon and then was quite strong for the rest of the day while the temperature hovered just above freezing. Brrr!!!

We went to an "open air" museum where old houses have been moved there from their original location to show how people lived a few hundred years ago in the mountains. These houses have very steep, thatch roofs and basic wood interiors. What was shocking was how cold the houses felt inside. There was almost no light, as the few "windows" were made of rice paper and there's no insulation. The small fires inside the living "room" areas did not heat the houses. We were here in spring - we can only imagine how cold it was living here in winter. The place was a bit gloomy on a cold gray day, but, nonetheless it was an interesting stop to see old houses.

We spent the cold, rainy afternoon walking through the city; window shopping, tasting sake, ice cream, miso, Wagyu Beef sushi and various other delicacies of the region. The Wagyu is a specialty here which you can eat sushi style, which B2 had a chance to try. We found a small store window with a box that said "place your money here" followed by another sign which said "sushi will be delivered here". B2 put 500 yen in the box, and out came the raw beef sushi. Awesome!! The place was busy for a bad weather afternoon with even small children sampling the raw deliciousness of the region. We ended up doing some gift shopping since there was little else to do in the rain. Sorry, no photos of the rainy afternoon walk except for B2's raw beef eating. Back on the train we went, in search of better weather!
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Kanazawa, Chubu, Japan

Kanazawa is a relatively
small city on the north-central shore
of Japan. It has one of the most famous Zen gardens in Japan. We spent the day hopping on/off the tourist
bus which dropped you off at the towns' main sights. The garden was indeed picturesque, but the
cherry trees were a few weeks from really flowering with the exception of one
in the center lake. The castle here was
a reconstruction of the original, which burned down in the 1800's. No nails were used in the current and
original construction - an animation showed how intricate the wooden
construction was in order to be earthquake-safe and very strong at the same
time. That's incredible craftsmanship
from hundreds of years ago.

The town also had a number of districts of old preserved
houses, still being used as residential homes.
We had a stroll through one set, which had the nicest public toilet
building we'd ever seen. (We won't go
into the details about Japanese toilets - that needs a book just to go over how
amazing they are - warm seats being a highlight in the cold weather right now).

We finished off our day at the Kanazawa market, which had mostly fish and
crab, as this is a sea-side town. Wow,
we'd never seen crab this big (or costly) at $70 USD - the thing could eat you
for dinner. It would have been nice to
stay and have a seafood dinner near the market, but we had to get going on the
train to our next destination...
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Yudanaka, Chubu, Japan

One of the most amusing sites we've been to in Japan - "snow monkeys" who love to sit in hot-tubs!

More TBD (we're working on taxes and so no time for text right now).
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Kyoto, Kinki, Japan

We had an overnight flight from Phuket to Osaka, Japan. We arrived in the early morning dazed and confused, but managed to navigate ourselves to Kyoto using three different train systems. Three and a half hours later we got off the train in Kyoto and decided to walk to our hotel. The pictograph map of the hotel indicated that it was near the station, but after walking and walking with our luggage, we could not find it. We asked someone for help every few blocks, and we got a lot of hand gestures that we needed to keep going... and going... and going. About an hour later, we finally arrived at our hotel, totally exhausted. We only had three days in Kyoto, so we wanted to make the most of it. We took a quick nap and went out to the park for a walk around the palace gardens. The cherries were just starting full bloom, so we arrived in Kyoto with perfect timing!

We did the temple, shrine, castle and cherry tree viewing circuits, hitting most of the touristy spots across the city. All of it was fascinating and we had a wonderful time exploring the Kyoto area with its many World Heritage sites. The weather was pretty good to us here - with only one day of very cold rain. It was a bit shocking coming from 36 C to 6 C in one night, but we're used to the brisk spring days in Japan now. It's a good change from sweaty Southeast Asia. And, we love the non-smoggy air!!

At night, during this time of year the temples and blossom walks are lit, making it a real treat to walk around these gorgeous places. Every site has a festival atmosphere - large groups of people picnic under the trees well into the late hours of the eve. We got some incredible night temple view which one would not normally get outside the bloom season.

Thumbs up for Kyoto - a must see! We liked the place so much that we ended up staying another day to soak in a few more views. The food in Kyoto is superb: sushi on the conveyer, hot bowl of ramen soup, udon soup, anything you can think of on a stick (including sushi), green-tea soft serve ice cream, Japanese curry, tofu donuts, unknown pickled items and sake, hai arigato!
]]> http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/oulous/1/1238456040/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/oulous/1/1238456040/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/oulous/1/1238456040/tpod.html Mon, 06 Apr 2009 08:50:56 -0400 A2b2cu

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Phuket, Thailand

AHHHHHHHHH... What can we say... Phuket was quite a conundrum, do we go swimming at the beach or the pool or both (and if both, in what order). Once we settled that issue the next major decision was to choose one of the delicious thai food restaurants on the beach. We did this every day.... tough traveling! It was a lot of fun and just what we needed - four days of relaxations at one of Thailand's best beaches (Naithonburi). We splurged for a resort hotel (18,000THB, $50 USD) and we're glad we did. Check out the photos of the pool! It was awesome. And, there was a delicious breakfast buffet included, which was enough for breakfast and lunch. We had planned on staying there just two nights and moving to another beach just for change of scenery, but we were smitten with this beach and too lazy to make the move, so we stayed the additional two days at the same location. We had big plans of renting a scooter or going on a tour or taking a kayak out, but none of those things happened and four days flew by. We had to store up on sleep since we are heading to Japan where we anticipate traveling pretty intensely so 4 days of doing nothing was perfect.

Some things of note - AWESOME sunsets!!! Each one was unique and incredible, even the one from the airport terminal was spectacular. The only real excitement was the green snake that slithered under the beach chairs and made everyone run out of its way as it found a good tree to spend the day in. One woman was so scared that she shut her eyes as the snake passed under her beach chair while muttering prayers. A2 was mauled by mosquitoes while B2 managed to remain unscathed; generally B2 is more tasty, but we think the spicy green curry in his blood kept the mosquitoes at bay. A2's legs now look like she has plague.

We had a fun quick layover in Kuala Lampur and spent the time browsing various airport stalls, luckily we found one with loads of dried fruit free samples. While we were there a man quietly approached us and took B2 to a back room to see the sacred dried cuttlefish storage area. A2 almost collapsed on the floor from the smell and crawled out of there while B2 stayed and sampled some cuttle contra band.

We can't believe there are only two weeks left on the trip... we're off to Japan for a whirlwind quick visit and back in LA on Apr 13th.
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Yangshuo, Guangxi Zhuang, China

Vietnam was full of karsts but we departed earlier than intended so the Guilin area of southern China was our last chance to see karst scenery in asia. We decided to fly from Changdu to Guilin, as it would have taken a day and a half to go by train/bus. After reading about the touts in Guilin, we decided to bypass the city and splurge for a direct taxi (260Y) from the airport to our guesthouse outside the small city of Yangshuo.

We woke up late to the sound of many wasps (or hornets) buzzing around in our room. The owner came armed with two fly swatters - he and A2 went to town killing them while B2 watched from afar, since he's allergic to bee stings. 10 carcasses later, our room was free of stinger beasts and we finally got to enjoy the beautiful view of orange groves and karsts outside our window. It was smoggy and hot, which was disappointing, but we realized at this point due to the coal fire power plants smog was going to be everywhere in China. Since New Zealand we have seen blue sky only twice, Da Li and Lijiang.

On our first day, we ventured out on foot, taking a 7-8 mile route through farmland into the city of Yangshuo. The scenery was pretty gorgeous, but smoggy, so you could only see the nearest karsts. We were also swept back into feeling a bit like we were in Vietnam - the touts were popping up often, and some were quite forceful and unfriendly. We ran into a group of three American's who had just overpaid for lunch 10 fold and while they were eating, someone popped two of their bike tires. B2 tried to help them negotiate a price to fix them at the "fix bike" station, but the mechanic was rude and demanding so prices were not negotiable. We ran into touts with water buffalo who wanted payment to take photos of their animals; one old lady was so forceful that B2 had to push her away for 15 minutes and start pantomiming tossing her in the river.... it had limited effect. Other touts wanted money for photos of their kids sitting in bamboo baskets. Over all it was a pleasant walk after the first major taut gauntlet and we managed to meet many nice people whom waved hello and helped us with directions.

After 3 hours of walking, we finally got to the main road but still had about 4 kilometers to go. We were both tired so B2 flagged down a guy on a motorcycle and we negotiated a ride into town. Three sweaty bodies on a bike and 4 minutes later, we got to our destination. We didn't have much energy to walk around town, so we planted ourselves in an internet café and ate and drank into the eve.

Our second day in the Yangshuo area was a lot better. The weather was cooler, less humid, and not nearly as smoggy as the previous day. We rented bikes from our guesthouse and after a quick riding lesson for A2 (its been 18 years since her last disastrous bike ride) we pedaled west towards a quiet road. We went on a 6 hour bike ride through a karst river valley and it was gorgeous. For lunch we stopped at a guest house run by Dutch people with a beautiful view of orchards and rapeseed fields, luckily a wedding party had come by for photos so there was plenty of entertainment. We spent the afternoon cycling back slowly since A2's butt was very sore from the all day ride. Thankfully we had no accidents or falls, which was a first for A2 - perhaps we can rethink buying A2 a tricycle for Amsterdam.

We spent the evening at our guesthouse, chatting with two older American men who were living in Bejing and two young men from The Netherlands who were studying Chinese in Shanghai. We tried the famous "beer fish" which is a specialty of the region. All the food was excellent and not too spicy, so A2 was able to eat without any worries. The evening got rowdy with many stories from all six of us about travel and living in China. We understand why people have rated the guesthouse highly online - it was a fun place to stay - in the country - good company - good food - away from the noise of the city. At night all you hear is the sound of frogs from the farming fields.
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Emie, Sichuan, China

The Mt. Emie Shan area is two hour bus ride south of Chengdu, we felt ripped off; we got the sweaty heat but no barfing baby, perhaps the company barfbaby had other obligations. The bus ended up being pretty good until the end, no smoking but the driver was banging away on the horn as if the damn thing would show him where a pot of gold was buried. The bus driver must have thought the gold was inside the bus because somehow the horn was inside and pointing towards the passengers.

There were very few English-friendly places to stay, so we went with the guidebook recommendation, staying at the Teddy Bear Hotel. It was being renovated and stank of varnish. It was easy to wake up as the varnish was applied to the hallway at 7AM which caused our bodies to convulse and our breathing to become shallow, and just in case any sleepy heads on our hall slept through that the hammering and power drill made sure you got an early start on the day. We moved next door to a quiet empty hotel and the owners looked mystified at the fleeing western tourists but happily gave us a room for a deep discount compared to the Teddy Bear.

Emie Sham is a mountainous area with something like 100KM of tracks made up of 66,000 steps which take you to temples, caves, waterfalls and monkey forests within the mountains. We read a few blogs about the area and decided to mostly take cable cars up to spots and walk down, instead of ascending most of the way which seemed like a Herculaneum feat. We did two day trips instead of an overnight at a monastery in the mountains. We wanted a warm bed, food we could eat and a (be it cold) shower; none of those things were possible when staying overnight on the track. Yes, we are wimps.

The first day, we took a gondola to a halfway point and did a 5 hour trek to see a number of temples en route. The place is a bit over the top. We wanted nature, but it does not feel very natural when you're walking on concrete steps and there are stalls selling things all along the way. The rich Chinese pilgrims are carried up in chairs hoisted on two men's shoulders. We were offered this form of transportation many times but passed.

We stopped at a monkey forest area which was hilarious. B2 was prepared with a bamboo stick and A2 had the camera ready to use for photos and as a weapon if needed. There are 50 guards stationed throughout this area to help you fend off the monkeys, who come charging at you from all directions, wanting food. As long as you make eye contact and keep the stick between you and them, they leave you alone. B2 saved A2 from being attacked several times. However, we were pretty helpless on the monkey bridge. The bridge monkey hangs out under the bridge and does a quick surprise attack by climbing the rail and leaping onto your head as you walk by him. The guards have sling shots and big sticks to help. After we crossed we watched as several people ran screaming across the bridge with a monkey attached to their head, while expert marksmen plucked them off with sling shot rocks. It felt like the humans were in the zoo and the moneys were having fun with us for a change. The entrance and exit had a "Monkey Injury Emergency Station" for obvious reasons. Take our advice buy the 1Y bamboo stick and save yourself from being scratched, bitten, or possibly disemboweled by a monkey.

The next day we took a bus to the end of the road, and then a gondola to the very top of Mt. Emie, called the Golden Summit. The best part was the 100 people crammed into the gondola, all exclaiming something like "HOLY SHIT BLUE SKY!" in chinese when the ride burst through the cloud/smog bank into the beautiful crisp heavens. The rest of the golden summit was disappointing - the top of the mountain was paved over in concrete with hundreds of thousands of tourists and tons of garbage littered down the cliff side. We didn't stay long and headed back to Chengdu disappointed. If you want nature and real hiking, go to the national parks 6-7 hours north of Chengdu - they are bound to be less smoggy with better scenery. We also heard that there were smaller, less crowded and cheaper versions of something similar to Emie Sham, all within reasonable distance of Changdu. Take our advice, skip this site and save yourself a lot of money, leg strain and various monkey injuries.

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Chengdu, Sichuan, China

We flew from Lijiang to Chengdu on an evening flight. The airport in Lijiang kept filling up with more and more people, but all the incoming/outgoing flights were delayed (the runway lights all went out). Every seat was taken in the waiting areas, and after three hours of waiting, the flights finally started coming in and clearing the people out. Our flight landed at 10:40pm and had one of the fastest turn arounds we have ever witnessed - we were boarding ten minutes later and in the air at 11pm. That's efficiency for you! We won't go into any gory details about the flight, but it was pretty scary, since it was one of the worse cases of turbulence we have ever encountered flying. Let's just say that people were screaming or dead silent; the usual loud chatter we hear when traveling with Chinese people was gone on this flight. Thankfully, one hour later, we landed in Chengdu. B2 was very airsick and we still had a long taxi ride into town. There was one other foreign couple on our flight and we quickly paired up to share the taxi fare into town. We pre-booked a room at the Holiday Inn since we knew we'd be arriving late (well, not this late). The cab driver dropped us off at the Crown Plaza by mistake; it's in the Holiday Inn chain, but not the hotel we were staying in. Luckily, the front desk staff spoke English and were able to tell our second taxi driver where to take us. So, after much delay, a hairy flight and two cab rides, we finally got to bed at 2AM.

Chengdu is the 5th largest city in China with almost as many people as NYC. Our hotel room was on the 16th floor, so we thought we'd get a great view of the city in the morning. Sadly, the pollution is so bad, one can only see about one or two blocks into the thickness of the air. We had descended from almost 9000ft of Lijiang to fairly low elevation in Chengdu, but due to the air quality, we still left like we were walking in high altitude because of the pollution.

Chengdu is in the process of being built and re-built. Due to the earthquake last year many buildings are under construction while entire new neighborhoods are also being built, along with a new metro. There are cranes everywhere! We mostly walked during our first two days in town, which ended up being quite a lot, since the distances are vast in this city. Everywhere we went, we met really nice people - the locals were very kind in helping us with directions. The irony is that no one seems to be able to read maps in this city nor know where anything is, but they try. We ran several errands in the city and ended getting very lost, but it's a very fun city to get lost in. Its' not a beautiful city but it's a incredibly fascinating city to witness the lightning fast changes taking place in China.

One thing we really enjoyed was a visit to an outdoor tea "house" within the largest temple complex in the city. It was hopping! There were hundreds of people chatting, drinking, eating, people watching, etc. We planted ourselves down in the thick of things and did our share of people watching for two hours. A2 broke one of the tea dishes by accident and there was a big uproar from all the men who run around pouring hot water. One came over to us, pointed at the broken dish and motioned with his other hand that we needed to pay up. Hand signals continued, some amounts were shouted and we finally determined we owed 6Y (1USD). The rest of the time was a maelstrom of spitting, chewing sunflower seeds, waiters blowing their nose over their shoulders while blindly pouring hot water into your cup (impressive!) and old hags shouting at us in Chinese that we owe them money. We had a blast!

Begrudgingly A2 dragged B2 to the Panda preserve, just outside the city. The cute pandas won him over, so it was a great trip in the end. We also met a woman from NYC and a man from Hong Kong, and had some great company for the half day tour together. What can we say, the panda's were absolutely adorable! We saw several adults, a group of adolescents, and many babies (6-7 months old). We went there specifically during feeding time, since that's when they are most active; after eating bamboo they fall into a all-day drunken stupor and sleep most of the day. Every bear has a full time handler/servant who feeds them, cleans them, makes their bed and basically does everything for them. It's not a bad life these pandas have.

The baby panda area was the cutest. They were just waking up when we arrived. The handlers had to pry some of them off the playpen - they were holding on with dear might and wanted to keep sleeping. A2 can relate. But, once the bottles of milk were in their mouths, they were very content and rolled on their back like little babies slurping down the gallon bottle in less than a minute. It's hard to pull yourself away from this nature show. We watched them eat, play, sleep, interact, fight, and sleep some more. We left the place with huge smiles on our faces.

We also liked the Chengdu University area. It was hopping with people, shops, crowded eateries, hair salons, and did we mention great eateries? We ended up having TexMex which was pretty decent. It's been a long time since we had good Mexican food...

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Lijiang, Yunnan, China

Well, we were under the impression that this would be an all-day trip, but it ended up being only 3.5 hours, even though we thought we paid for a car and driver all day. So, it was a miss-communication and we just had to deal with it. We went to Lashi Hai with all three proprietors of our guesthouse (private tour, I guess), and we invited a Canadian couple along. The Lashi Hai was about 20 minutes by car out of town.

The area has a large lake (called "swamp lake" by the locals), a village and a Tibetan Monastery. We drove past many tourists on ponies, which seemed to be the thing to do here. The village was small and simple. The houses were painted white with local writing and mythical creatures in bright paint. It was a cheerful stop, but very short, as our guides did not dilly dally, as much as we would have liked. We made it down to swamp lake; the farm fields go all the way to the edge of the lake, with golden rape seed being the primary crop. It was tadpole season and we must have seen millions of them at the shore of the lake. We could have stayed an hour or so enjoying the scenery, but we were shoveled back into the car and driven to the monastery. This was definitely a highlight of the day, in the back all the fruit trees were blooming and the monks were practicing tooting on horns, so we had strange music in the background for our visit. It was a peaceful place and we're very glad we got to see a Tibetan Monastery, since we're not going any closer to the border with Tibet.

We had to make some decisions regarding our next destinations - push on to the Tiger Leaping Gorge for some hiking, and then go to Shangri-La on the border with Tibet, or move on and see a different region of China... We read about a number of recent robberies at knife point at the Gorge and the police have been restricting access to towns close to Tibet. In addition the only airline which flew out of Shangri-La was recently grounded and has a bad safety record, so we decided to fly to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province.
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