YE-blogs

Weekend in Barcelona

2012-01-15T15:48:00.001-05:00

We spent a weekend visiting my sister Marie in Barcelona. The purpose of the stopover was to spend time with Marie, so we didn't plan many tourist activities. Luckily within our first hour in the city we experienced two of Barcelona's tourist activities: (1) Yann got pick-pocketed in the metro, within five minutes of our arrival and (2) we spotted an exhibitionist with a strategic elephant tattoo highlighting an impressively large but totally gross "trunk", apparently a regular Barcelona sighting (yet one that Marie has not yet had the pleasure of viewing). Yann only lost 50 euros and his recently purchased metro pass, so we were able to happily laugh at him. His chain was apparently a thief magnet and built-in fishing rod once cut. I will point out that there are no photos of "elephant man", because Yann was too prudish to let me pose with him.

While Marie was at school, Yann and I tried to stave off the effects of jet lag, a red eye flight from Montreal with seats among five babies and a connection flight from Amsterdam among three highly intoxicated Norwegian tourists. We weren't too successful we spent most of the afternoon sleeping in a park, with Yann now completely paranoid, guarding our bags with our life.

It was Yann's first time in the city, but I had visited in January. The number of tourists in the city compared to my winter visit was overwhelming. It made me grateful for the time I had spent visiting Barcelona's famous sights in the low season. Yann and I spent only one afternoon touristing. We couldn't get Marie to join us, and we could barely muster up enough energy to drag ourselves around. I wanted to visit Sagrada Familia again, Barcelona's iconic basilica and we strolled around Parc Guell (both sites creations of famed Catalan architect Antoni Gaudi). But most importantly we had to pay homage to our favourite writer by visiting at Placa de George Orwell. On Saturday night Marie was deejaying at an art gallery where two of her friends had an art installation entitled "Urban Collage" on display. Yann and I awkwardly mingled in our totally cool travel outfits. The evening culminated with drinking in a public square. Despite the late hour the square was packed with people, of all ages, socializing over beers sold for a euro each and cooled in the sewer drains - we drank until early morning in the perfect summer weather. Marie treated us to cava (Catalan sparkling wine), curado (cheese) and jamon serrano (dry-cured Spanish ham) on her sunny balcony and we wished we had a few more days to enjoy the long, hot and slow summer days that we were getting used to. We were heading to Perugia Italy next to visit Yann's parents and then to Mongolia and we were sure that our travel pace was going to pick up.

Winding Down: Chandigarh, Delhi and Amsterdam

2011-05-15T13:55:00.001-04:00

CHANDIGARH

Chandigarh wasn't a planned stop on our itinerary. It was Antonia who convinced us that we wouldn't regret shortening our time in Delhi in exchange for a day in the Punjabi capital.

The main reason for stopping in Chandigarh was the Nek Chand Garden, which we visited on our first morning in the city. The story is that Nek Chand, a public servant, spent his spare time collecting debris from demolition sites around the city. He used the scrap to build sculptures and figurines and scatter them in a maze of courtyards and walkways, also built from recycled material. His garden, on public land was discovered almost 20 years after Nek Chand had begun his work, and was slated for destruction. A public outcry saved the garden which is now a booming tourist attraction in the state of Punjab. With good reason, as the garden is delightful. Although nothing could quite soothe the effects of the stifling head, the park seemed to provide the best respite we could have hoped for. In the afternoon, we rickshawed between Chandigarh's other tourist attractions, most of them municipal buildings designed by Swiss architect Le Corbusier. Chandigarh is an entirely a planned city, conceptualised by Le Corbusier in the 1950s as a capital for the recently partitioned state of Punjab. The city is divided into rectangular numbered sectors (0.5 mile x 0.75 mile). The result is an organized although somewhat bland city, where even the rickshaws obey traffic signals. It is unlike any of the other cities we'd visited in India, and despite the lack of bustle, was a rather pleasant place to visit even in the 35C heat. After a long day of sight-seeing we treated to the comfort of our double room which the four of us were sharing after a hard-bargaining session with the hotel staff.

DELHI

Delhi is a terrible place to be in the heat. As our bus from Chandigarh approached the Indian capital, the passengers seemed to get meaner, the odors worse and the heat more oppressive. On the advice of other travelers, we had decided to reside in the Tibetan Colony, away from the city centre. This might have been the best decision we made on our entire trip. In addition to having an amazing restaurant and air-conditioned rooms, the Peace Hotel was a sanctuary from the noise and madness of Delhi. As usual, Yann's anti-air-conditioning policy was in effect. He agreed to have an air-conditioned room on the condition that all four of us share a room, which we did, and its 2 single beds (note that this arrangement was still more expensive than two separate non air-conditioned rooms)

The only disadvantage of staying in the Tibetan Colony is its location. Everyday we had to renegotiate with the rickshaw drivers who would originally refuse to take the four of us in one rickshaw and then proceed to give in to our request a few minutes later. The roughly 10km journey was never comfortable with the four of us piling one on top of each other.

We visited the Delhi sights: Red Fort, Jama Masjid (Great Mosque), Gandhi's Memorial. But my fondest memories of our few days in Delhi are the hours spent negotiating with rickshaw drivers and eating Indian fastfood in the comfort of our Tibetan hotel. This might be an indication that after 2 months in India and Bangladesh, we were all totally exhausted. So our morning visit of Amsterdam, on a stopover between Delhi and Montreal, should be considered all the more impressive. We had an eight hour stopover and we arrived in Amsterdam at 6am. By 7am we were downtown waiting for the first coffee shops to open. In just a few hours we took a boat cruise through the city's canals, strolled the red light district, drank our first real coffee in months, downed Heinekens and ate stroopwafles. We landed in Montreal completely drained, but grateful for an amazing, and pretty hassle-free trip.

Our Last Days in the Indian Hills

2011-02-17T21:00:00.000-05:00

The end point of our trip through the Indian Himalayas was Shimla, the capital of Himachal Pradesh province and the most populated city we had visited since leaving the wedding in Kanpur. Shimla is the former summer capital of the British Raj in India and now somewhat of a resort town. A place to escape the impressive heat of the Indian plains. We knew that the few days in Shimla would be the last ones we would enjoy in bearable weather. Even Shimla, sitting at an altitude of over 2000m seemed muggier and hotter than what we would have liked.

We descended into Shimla on what would be out last "scary mountain bus ride". The view is one of a thousands of colourful homes clinging to the mountainside with the cities prominent historic colonial buildings looking down on them. These historic buildings, most noticeable the bright yellow Christ Church sit along what is known as "The Ridge", a wide road running on the very top of city. The Ridge is the heart of Shimla's tourist district. It is lined with restaurants, hotels, gift shops and packed with visitors. Shimla is a disorienting maze of steep, criss-crossing streets and staircases. Our climb from the bus station up to The Ridge was endless, especially since Yann had somehow gotten control of the map. We were so tired by the end of the climb, that we followed a hotel tout to his "great cheap rooms". Surprisingly, they actually ended up being "great cheap rooms" with clean bedding, hot showers and even televisions. After dropping our backpacks, we immediately went into veg mode. Our sight-seeing in Shimla was limited to anything that we could see from the Ridge, as we couldn't bring ourselves to do anything that would involve a climb. My main task in Shimla was going to be doing laundry. But our clothes were absolutely filthy, and even with the hot water in the hotel, I wasn't able to get them very clean. But my efforts went completely to waste when I decided to hang the clothes to dry on the balcony of the hotel. When I went to check on their progress, I noticed that someone had been tampering with my underwear! As I vocalized this, "hey I think someone's been tampering with my underwear" I heard a hiss and turned to see an ugly monkey holding my turquoise pants.

The next ten minutes were a blur of my yelling and chasing the monkey along the balcony. I was joined by James, Yann and Antonia and we all watched as the monkey hopped from roof to roof with his turquoise streamer flying behind him. Other monkeys attempted to get in on the turquoise pant action, but this monkey was highly defensive of his winnings. He came back to the hotel to taunt us, by dangling the pants right above our heads from the roof above. The incident ended with the pants being ripped into pieces, with the tattered turquoise shreds scattered on the neighbouring roof tops. We consequently opted out of a hike to Shimla's "monkey temple".

We left Shimla by "toy train". One of three narrow-gauge mountain railways of India, the Shimla-Kalka railway was built by the British to connect Shimla to the regular India rails system. It is a beautiful train ride, through the lush scenery forests of the Himalayan foothills, crossing almost 850 bridges and passing through over a hundred tunnels. The train moves so slowly that doors are left open, and passengers can jump on and off the train when it slows down. At one point we even stalled on a steep incline. Most of the passengers got off the train and joked about pushing it up the hill, which seemed like alarmingly insightful commentary. Arriving at the Kalka train station in mid-afternoon was a shock. We had no onward ticket, the heat was stifling and the crowds were pushy. I dove into the ticket line and fought my way to the front shamelessly exploiting the "ladies first" rule in effect at Indian railway offices. Within a few minutes we had tickets to Chandigarh and we were running to catch our train. We were back in India.

Temples and Traditions of Kinnaur

2011-01-15T20:04:00.000-05:00

We left behind in Nako, the barren, scenery that characterised the Spiti Valley. As we dropped in altitude, we were greeted by green alpine forests, that probably seemed that much lusher after an absence vegetation. We were even greeted by light showers as we entered the Kinnauri village of Kalpa in the early evening. We decided to stay two nights at a small family guest house a short climb above the village centre. We were in serious need of rest in order to recover from the bus rides and Kalpa seemed to offer a lovely setting for doing nothing.

Other than the mountain scenery, Kalpa's main attraction is its temple. A collection of intricatally carved wooden buildings, built in the traditional Kinnauri style. This style is marked by its “balagad” shaped roofs and carvings depicting the natural environment. Of particular intrigue were the very well-endowed male animals, whose images occupied a large portion of our camera's memory card space. From the building eaves hang hundreds of delicate chimes that eerily resonate when the wind blows. Our second day in Kalpa happened to coincide with an annual celebration of the village deity. This celebration was marked by a procession through the streets of Kalpa by village's men. As we ate on a hotel patio we heard the beating of drums and the sound of trumpets which is actually what led us to catch a glimpse of the large black item, the village deity, as it was carried up towards the temple, the procession's ending point. The stream of green-capped men followed the deity, in a state of alcohol-induced gaiety. I was drawn into the festivities and followed the procession into the temple. I left the others to settled the bill while I entered the temple grounds. A group of men had already begin performing a ceremonial dance with the deity, while the village band accompanied them. Although very welcoming, the men were becoming increasingly rowdy, and were particularly enamoured by the presence of lone foreign woman. Even once Yann had joined me I had the feeling that the presence of foreigners was somewhat of an unwelcome distraction. So we quietly left the temple heading towards the outskirts of the village to wait for the sunset.
Despite our distance, we could hear the loud, monotone chanting emanating from the temple celebrations. The chants seemed to call on the clouds to lift, revealing for the first time since our arrival in Kalpa, the snow-capped peaks of the sacred Kinner Kailash mountain range that were actually surrounding us. We watched until the last sliver of light had disappeared from the sky. We headed for bed expecting that the village men would continue their celebrations throughout the night. From Kalpa, we took a small detour from the main highway to visit Sarahan, location of the Bhimakali Temple. A multi-story construction of alternating layers of timber and stone whose original construction dates back over 800 years. As a temple honouring the local manifestation of the blood-thirsty goddess Kali, it has been a site of sacrifice for hundreds of years. Apparently even human sacrifices as recently as the 1800s. It seems a strange contrast from the beauty of the temple and its surroundings. Unbelievably, we had the temple entirely to ourselves. We stayed in the temple guest house, as possibly its only guests, with a balcony looking over the courtyard entrance to the temple. The architectural wonder was ours to explore and admire without any distraction.

Nako - "Land of Fairy Tales and Fantasies"

2011-01-09T11:45:00.003-05:00

Tabo marked the end of our trip through the Spiti Valley, we would now be passing through the Kinnaur Valley. Our inner-line permits that we had patiently applied for in Kaza were now necessary as we traveled within ten kilometers of the Indian-Tibetan border. At the highway checkpoint, we watched as a poor foreigner was detained for traveling without a permit. They seemed to be discussing whether to send him back from where he came, and he was distraught. Even though the nearest permit office was less than 100km away, on this highway this could represent an entire day of travel, on possibly the world's scariest roads. Had it been Yann being sent back, this might have necessitated a helicopter evacuation. His nerves were getting shakier and shakier as we climbed towards the town of Nako, where we would be stopping. We had discovered that the only thing keeping Yann together on mountain bus rides had been his MP3 player. I had managed to forget mine on the train and drop Yann's out a bus window. All I could do was hold Yann's hand, which didn't work wonders but was all we had. But Nako's precarious location, afforded it simply breathtaking views of the surrounding mountains. Sitting within a few kilometers of the barren Western Tibetan frontier, the village of Nako is centered around the small but sacred Nako lake. The narrow alleys of Nako are lined with prayer wheels, crumbling chortens and piles of Mani stones. Livestock or gardens are enclosed by stone walls and roofs are piled high with kindling and hay. Fancier homes are adorned with intricately carved wooden door frames. Prayer flags criss-cross the village. We had some trouble finding accomodation in Nako. There didn't seem to be many tourists around but many of the small guest houses claimed to be full. The larger, newly constructed hotels in the village's centre were large and obtrusive and uglified the charming village. We weren't keen on using them. The four of us ended up in a basement room of a restaurant, using the bathrooms of the guest house next door (which conveniently locked its doors after dinner, making for interesting nighttime bathroom runs).

The villagers, both men and women, sported the traditional Kinnauri wool cap with its bright green flap and appeared from the surrounding hills carrying crops on their backs. An elderly man who we passed on the road stopped to proclaim his love of Kinnaur. Packs of small children played together as their parents disappeared for the long summer days in the fields. We spent an afternoon walking the hills surrounding Nako, taking in the views and wondering if the foot trails led into Tibet. Chortens, Mani walls and prayer flags dotted the landscape, the blue sky reflected into the crystal clear Nako lake. We did a pretty good job of taking advantage of the village's tranquility without thinking too much about our upcoming bus ride and the contiunation of our trip. With a little bit more time we would have stayed longer, and would have had even more trouble leaving than we already did.

"At last they entered a world within a world - a valley of leagues where the high hills were fashioned of the mere rubble and refuse from off the knees of the mountains...
'Surely the Gods live here', said Kim, beaten down by the silence and the appalling sweep of dispersal of the cloud-shadows after rain. 'This is no place for men!'"
- From Kim, by Rudyard Kipling

Brief Visit to the Tabo Monastery

2010-12-28T23:14:00.044-05:00

From Dhankar, we were picked up within a few hours by a monk traveling to Tabo in the "Monastery Jeep". Antonia and I loaded into the trunk and James and Yann got the back seat, it was a rare comfort in comparison to the other rides we'd lived through on this trip. The village of Tabo is home to a thousand-year old monastery, with vast collections of well-preserved frescoes. The monastery also houses a beautiful guesthouse were we slept, just a few steps away from the mud brick walls that surround the dozens of chortens and buildings that make up the monastery complex. Attached to the monastery guesthouse was a tasty restaurant where we ate every meal and socialized with a sweet teenage migrant worker from south India who had found people with whom to discuss his Christianity.

Our stay in Tabo was brief. We had a private tour of the thankas in the monastery buildings by a surly novice monk. We studied the walls by flashlight and contented ourselves with a booklet of postcards as a souvenir of the hundreds of images wonderfully-preserved in the monastery. The dusty alleys around the monastery are filled with souvenir stands and a few western-style restaurants and cafes. We were treated to real espressos by James and Antonia in honour of our seven year anniversary. This was a real treat, our first and only real coffee on the trip. We sat in a small village square sipping our coffees among the stray dogs and playing children as dusk crept up. As the sun set, so did much of the village activity.

Dhankar Village - Worth the Hike

2010-12-25T14:39:00.000-05:00

After five days in Kaza we were eager to move onwards down the Spiti Valley. James was still recovering from his allergic reaction, but felt strong enough to make the trip to the next village. The trip involved a short bus ride, and a longer hike, to the village of Dhankar. We had received instructions from a Kaza local as to where to debark from the bus in order to take the foot path up to the village. Other than hiring a private driver, walking was the only way to reach our destination. Even considering the local tradition of impressive monastery locations, Dhankar seemed to be particularly impractically situated, especially when lugging backpacks up the side of a mountain. The two hour climb was made more difficult by the high altitude, with the sun beating down on us feeling that much closer, and the trail getting narrower and steeper as we approached the village. The farm houses along the road turned into tiny specks against the backdrop of the Spiti and Pin Rivers winding through the valley. By mid-afternoon the footpath had snaked its way into the village and we climbed even further up the side of the mountain, to where the crumbling 1000 year old monastery sat overlooking the homes below. The tiny village was completely empty, other than a few stray sheep. The first person we met was a solo tourist who had been driven to the monastery, where he sat waiting to get in. I put my bag down and climbed the stairs into the monastery tower. We were planning on spending the night in the monastery, and we were exhausted and eager to secure accommodation. I finally met a young monk who didn't really know how to deal with me. I inquired about sleeping which he seemed to tell me was impossible. This, being contrary to what our guidebook said, had the effect of annoying me. When he entered his small chambers I followed him to the door from where I could see another older monk lying on a bed. When I inquired about him, the younger monk gave me a solemn look and said in his broken English: "he is dead". Shocked, I responded with "when?" to which the young monk replied "this morning". I apologized for my intrusion and went back to relay my discovery to Yann, James and Antonia. They had meanwhile concluded that we would have to descend into the village in order to find a place to sleep. We didn't have any solutions to the dead monk problem so we headed to the village confusedly. From the road we spotted the hand-painted sign of the "Manirang Family Guest Homestay" which we followed. We were greeted by an elderly man who settled us into our own rooms, showed us the pit toilet and offered to make us lunch. We eagerly settled into the comfortable family room where we waited to be fed. After a few minutes the elderly man came out with the pressure cooker which he sat in front of us. He was eager to get back out to the fields and asked for us to finish cooking. He seemed utterly unimpressed when we explained that none of us knew how to operate the pressure cooker. After re-fueling, we set out once again to climb even higher into the surrounding hills where we were told we would find a high altitude lake. There was considerable debate among the four of us as to whether or not we had the energy to undertake another hike that day. Yann was definitely the keenest to head out again, and somehow managed to convince the three of us to follow him.

The more we climbed without spotting a lake, the grumpier James got. At one point he exclaimed "I'm from Manitoba, we've got 100 000 lakes in Manitoba, you want to see lakes, I'll show you lakes". I then fell way behind the three others silently and not so silently cursing Yann as I dragged myself along the trail. All was forgiven though when we reached the lake. We all sat quietly in admiration. In the evening, the family had returned to the house and we ate dinner watching the villagers return from the high altitude pastures. The sight of thousands of goats streaming down the sides of the mountain into the village was spectacular. As the sun set the voice of the town crier announcing an upcoming meeting echoed through Dhankar. We were warm, well-fed and completely mesmerized by our surroundings. The next morning we returned to the monastery in an attempt to buy tickets and visit. We were greeted by the young monk from the previous day as well as his dead companion. We now were wondering if the monk had misused the word dead in order to get rid of a pesky tourist or whether it had been an honest mistake. Yann, James and Antonia were convinced that I had been purposefully duped and couldn't contain their laughter. The young monk atoned for his bad behaviour however, by feeding us tea and cookies. He explained that the old monastery was now closed and that all but two monks (himself and his dead companion) lived in the new modern complex on the other end of the village. We spent the rest of the morning exploring the monastery and the village fort before making our way back to the road where we hoped to catch onward transportation. We didn't wait too long before being picked up by a monk from the Tabo monastery, our next destination.

Ki Chaam Dance

2010-11-01T22:30:00.000-04:00

Ki is a small village a few kilometers away from Kaza. The spectacular Ki Monastery sits perched above it and is the area's most recognized sight. We had heard that every July the monastery holds a Chaam Festival, a Buddhist ritual involving music and dance performed by monks. We had arrived in the Spiti valley in the last week of July and despite asking a handful of locals, were unable to confirm whether or not the festival was taking place. The staff of both hotels had no idea what I was talking about when I mentioned Chaam.

As James was sick, we were taking it easy in Kaza, sleeping in and not planning too many activities. We had found a small restaurant where we ate noodles every morning. The restaurant was in Kaza's central square, this is where most tourists ended up for meals or to access the internet at the town's only internet cafe. One morning we arrived for our morning noodles to find the plaza and its restaurants emptier than usual. Sitting at an outdoor table we were greeted by a local travel agent who inquired "why aren't you guys at the Chaam dance?".

Somehow every tourist in town knew of the festival but us. Despite having inquired the night before at our hotel. We sped through our already late breakfast, got help from the travel agent finding a driver and were off towards Ki by noon. James was in rough shape, it was probably the worst day of his allergic reaction, but he dragged himself out nonetheless.

We arrived at the festival at the end of lunch. A communal meal was just wrapping up and locals were settling into the monastery courtyard for more dancing. Antonia and I squeezed in with women and children on the ground level and James and Yann watched from the balcony above. The crowd jostled for the best position from which to view the monks as they paraded onto the courtyard in their bright robes. Four young novice monks were in charge of crowd control. Dressed in tattered robes and scary masks and armed with sticks, they patrolled vigilantly, even whacking people if they attempted to encroach on the monks' dance floor. The monks danced for almost two hours, spinning and stomping while musicians kept a trance inducing beat on large drums and Tibetan long horns. The older monks wore the larger, elaborate masks but moved little, restricted by their age and the weight of their costumes. The younger monks spun around them, almost never pausing. As the dancers spun, their colourful robes would rise revealing their beautiful but cumbersome boots highlighting the difficulty of their movements. We watched intently, absorbed in the music and the coordinated movements of the dancers. The ritual ended with final prayers from the microphone wielding senior monks and the lighting of a gasoline soaked pyre, startling the crowd (and visibly the monks who lit the fire).

What the crowd was really waiting for however, was the final procession of dancers and monks leaving the courtyard. Pilgrims of all ages rushed to throw themselves on the ground before the procession reached them. They lined the entire walkway leading away from the monastery down to the village. The monks, still in full costume, stepped over the pilgrims, one at a time. It was a chaotic and magnificent scene. Before leaving Kaza we returned to Ki to visit the monastery and get one more look at its spectacular setting. Our visit to Ki will remain a highlight of our lives.

The Spiti Valley- A Rough Start

2010-10-18T19:47:00.004-04:00

The four of us spent only one full day in Manali. We slept in a small guesthouse hidden in an apple orchard on the outskirts of the small but popular tourist getaway town. We all probably needed about a week of rest but we bought our onward bus tickets for the earliest available departure. Actually only one daily bus made the 200km trip to the remote town of Kaza. With a population of just about 4000 people it is the largest settlement in the Spiti Valley, where we planned to spend a day or so arranging special permits for onward travel.

We arrived at the Manali bus station before sunrise to load our bags onto the bus and claim our reserved seats for the 6 a.m. departure. We were not surprised to find that our seats numbered 32 to 36 were in fact in the last two rows of the bus. For the first hour or so of travel, these seats proved to be better than we thought. We were mesmerized by the quick transformation of the lush Manali scenery into arid plateaus and snowy passes. At the halfway mark we stopped at a restaurant whose existence was due to the necessity of feeding passengers on this particular bus ride. The bus ride was already wearing the four of us down and it was difficult to motivate ourselves to eat, despite the fresh meal ready for us on our arrival. We did however take advantage of the first bathroom break that didn't involve the driver angrily honking at any passenger attempting to lengthen the 3 minute stop. We were no longer content with our back seats and we were coming to terms with the hellish discomfort that we would have to endure for another 6 or 7 hours. The barren scenery that was just hours earlier eerily exciting was becoming depressing and repetitive.
In twelve hours we would gain almost 2000m of altitude and cross two 4000m+ passes on a rickety, over-crowded bus. By the time we arrived in Kaza we were exhausted and grumpy. By the time we found hotel beds it was nightfall. Our exhaustion had made the hotel-finding process more difficulty than usual. I will take most of the blame for this as I was certainly the worst behaved that evening. I was in no mood to bargain or shop around and was willing to basically sleep anywhere. So we ended up in a empty guesthouse with characterless rooms for which we paid too much.

The next morning we were awoken by Antonia at an unusually early hour. She seemed slightly concerned and came to request that we come to inspect James. Overnight he had developed a rash on his face and neck. My initial reaction was that he had psychosomatically willed it upon himself to prove to me how terrible my hotel choice was. After closely inspecting a very annoyed James we concluded that he had probably reacted to a cleaning product used on the hotel bedding. We agreed to change hotels and take it easy until his rash subsided.

James and I probably visited every guesthouse in Kaza before finally agreeing on a new accommodation. By mid-afternoon James' rash had not improved, in fact he seemed to be getting sicker. His hands, feet and face had begun to swell. We decided that we wouldn't leave town until his reaction had cleared up. Antonia and I worked on getting our travel permits for 7 days of travel along the Hindustan-Tibet Highway. This involved frustrating back-and-forth trips between shabby government offices and the equally shabby local police station. Luckily I was accompanied by the ever-so patient Antonia, because after an entire afternoon of poor instructions and idiotic procedures she was the only one keeping me from blowing up. In fact, we secured our four permits right before another traveller's melt-down in the permit office.

Another night passed with James showing now signs of improvement. James had become convinced that he was allergic to the town of Kaza and was adamant that we leave. But when it appeared that his neck and torso were swelling Yann and I tried very hard to hide our growing concern for fear of scaring him further. In the mean time we concluded that we wouldn't leave town under any circumstance as it was the only place in the valley with a helicopter landing pad and access to some form of medical care. The three of us also decided that we would have to drag the reluctant James to the hospital.

We had heard a rumour that Canadian doctors were staffing the hospital, but when we arrived on a Sunday afternoon we found the building to be completely empty. We circled the empty building looking for anyone who might be able to help us. We finally crossed paths with a dentist who referred found us two off-duty nurses, neither of whom could speak English. We stood outside outside the hospital explaining James' condition. The nurses inspected him before pulling out a cellular phone and concluding that they would call "doctor"! We patiently watched and waited as one of the two nurses discussed. When she finally hung up she turned to James and exclaimed "Injection! Ready?". James almost screamed out his answer "NO!". We translated to the startled nurses: "Maybe we will come back tomorrow". They agreed that this was a reasonable plan unless James got worse in which case we should return to find them. The next 12 hours consisted of attempting to convince poor James to return to the hospital the next day. We sat in a crowded hospital waiting room the next day, and embarrassingly, enjoyed the privilege of being foreign tourists to jump near the front of the rowdy, disorganized queue of poor villagers waiting to talk to the one doctor on duty. Armed with a prescription of a hefty daily dose of anti-histamines the mysterious rash began to disappear within a day. Two days in Kaza had turned into five, but we could now continue our trip feeling that the four of us were safe to do so.

Himalayan Roadblock

2010-07-02T00:03:00.031-04:00

We left ourselves about 5 days to make the 30 hour trip to Manali. We started with a 6 hour trek down from the Valley of Flowers to the highway where we jumped on a bus to Joshimath. We had worked out a plan to spend the night in Joshimath and leave on the first morning bus. The Joshimath bus station consisted of a wooden shack staffed by a grumpy attendant who issued hand-written tickets. We opted for the second morning bus at 5:45 am bus so that we could make the 14-hour trip in good seats. We would be in Manali in two days and have three days of rest before James and Antonia's arrival. We were quite content with our purchase and we went to bed feeling like we might be the world's best travelers.

Our bus left the next day on time and as we were able to stretch our legs in the roomiest seats on the bus. We were brilliant. After twenty minutes on the road we hadn't crossed any oncoming traffic but we had caught up to the first morning bus. The bus was stopped and our driver pulled up behind it. It took a few minutes for us to get the news of the landslide up ahead. We spoke to fellow passengers who had been assured that the road would be cleared in a few hours. I was optimistic that we would be moving on that day, that is, until Yann returned from his visit to the sight of the landslide. He reported that a boulder the size of a house had dropped onto the road and that the current clean up crew consisted of 20 or so young, skinny men in flip-flops carrying virtually no equipment other than a few mallets and construction hats. As the hours went by, a queue of hundreds of vehicles had built up behind us. One motorcycle after another sped past us, returning a few minutes later having seen the rock pile for themselves. The original time of two hours quoted for the clean-up had been revised multiple times. Sometime in the late morning a small bulldozer arrived on scene as well as a compressor to begin dynamiting. The soldier in charge of the clean up operation yelled frantically trying to control the various workers. The bulldozer was moving one soccerball-sized rock every 10 minutes or so. Meanwhile, dozens of workers were scattered over the landslide moving hammering and heaving things, seemingly at random. At the same time a crew was setting up to begin dynamiting (also seemingly at random). My earlier cautious optimism had turned into utter disbelief. There was no way we would be moving, maybe ever. Yann had made an earlier suggestion to hike over the mountain, around the landslide which I had flat out refused. After having been shoveled into another bus and watching our driver head back to Joshimath I realised this might be our only hope of moving forward in the near future. So we picked up our bags, got a refund on our bus tickets and headed up the steep mountain side as the workers began blowing things up.

We climbed for almost two hours, through thorn bushes, sometimes on our hands and knees, trying to get as high as we possibly could to avoid the dynamiting. After much swearing, sweating and frustration we eventually reached a mountain trail connecting Joshimath to the neighbouring village. We celebrated with photos and hugs having cleared the landslide successfully. The mountain trail seemed to be used by local herders and wasn't particularly wide. We crossed a few villagers who shook our hands and seemed to emphasize the need for care, as they made gestures of falling over the side of the trail. Any hope of Yann staying calm had now been eliminated. His vertigo began to kick in as we followed the winding trail. He hugged the side of the mountain and quickened his pace leaving me out of his sight. Within a few minutes I noticed Yann in the distance now heading back to me. As he approached I could read his lips: "no way ... no way ... we're going back". Although I am usually sympathetic to Yann's cautiousness, I was now in a bad mood. We were less than a kilometre from the next village, we had been walking for hours, and I was simply not going to turn around.

What had turned Yann back on his tracks was the result of another landslide. This one having taken out the footpath. The metre wide trail had now narrowed to about a foot. The drop was most likely a deadly one. But I really didn't want to give up, we were so close. I made the suggestion of crawling across the narrow part, but we couldn't figure out how to deal with our heavy backpacks. I made another suggestion of making several trips, carrying over all of our bags, that way Yann only had to worry about himself. At this suggestion Yann completely lost it. He threw his bag to the ground, sat down, and refused to move until I promised that we would turn back. Turning back was disappointing and frustrating, but clearly the correct thing to do. During our travels there are very few times where I am the one physically supporting Yann, I tend to get sick more often, get tired more easily and generally be more affected by discomfort. So it gave me a little bit of pleasure to spend a few hours with Yann clinging onto my arm, following the trail back towards Joshimath. He was now completely rattled by the height of the trail and wouldn't really move forward without me. We arrived back at the sight of the landslide in the late afternoon and hitched a ride back to town.

We spent the next 2 days in Joshimath. We visited the bus station 3 or 4 times a day for updates on the road. We spent hours sitting on the steps of the station killing time. The road finally opened three days after our initial departure. On the advice of the bus station staff we left on an early bus to be among the first in line when the road actually opened. Other than the hundreds of motorcycles ahead of us we were among the first to finally leave Joshimath. We now had almost 30 consecutive travel hours ahead of us (all in the back seat of the bus). But we arrived in Manali a few hours before James and Antonia.

The Valley of Flowers

2010-06-22T07:26:00.023-04:00

Govindghat is a town about an hour from Badrinath and the departure point for Sikhs pilgrims heading to Hemkund, a high altitude lake (4200m) in the Himalayas. The arduous 19 km climb to Hemkund takes two days with an overnight stop in the small seasonal village established by villagers from Ghangaria who spend the winter at lower altitude but run restaurants and hotels for pilgrims closer to their sacred site.

Thousands of Sikhs were in Govindghat, some arriving exhausted from Hemkund, others happily preparing for the climb. We were among the handful of visitors who were not actually heading to Hemkund. We were actually on our way to the Valley of Flowers, an Indian National Park. The park had a short but inspiring write up in our guidebook and we had been attracted by its secluded location: a 16 hour bus ride from Haridwar and 2 day climb. Most of the Sikh pilgrims we crossed assumed we were heading to Hemkund and admittedly we had been surprised by the thousands of pilgrims who (thankfully) were heading somewhere else. The presence of so many people on the trail created a significant amount of litter, noise and horse excrement but in exchange financed the seasonal hotels and restaurants and the creation of the trail itself. The presence of so many people also attracted Nepalese porters, who spent their summer hiking up and down the mountain. I was grateful for the porter that we hired and found the walk up the steep muddy trail difficult even without my pack. I didn't feel as bad about hiring someone to carry my bag when I saw the first, of many, large men being carried up the hill by a teams of porters. We walked fairly quickly but didn't reach our first night's rest stop until nightfall. Mainly because every time we passed someone on the trail they would stop us to take photos. We had never turned anyone down for a photo before that day, but after 6 or 7 hours, with our legs cramping (maybe just mine) we couldn't bring ourselves to stop anymore. The seasonal camp where we slept is a collection of guesthouses and restaurants, including a large Sikh gurdwara, a temple which acts somewhat like a community centre, serving as a place for prayer and the housing and feeding of pilgrims. Gurdwaras are open to people of all denominations but we found a lovely guesthouse overlooking the village's only trail. The atmosphere was festive as exhausted pilgrims made their way into town either from the starting point at Govindghat or from the descent from Hemkund. All the towns' supplies are carried up to the village on foot or by donkey so prices were expensive. Apparently pilgrims were not expected to have to make too many sacrifices in terms of comfort or food. There was much more than expected: hot showers, comfortable beds and menus with as many options as anywhere else in the country including a large selection of Punjabi dishes. The noise and excitement subsided fairly early, with the generators being shut off and people preparing for their next day's trek. We were happy for the quiet as we had been a little bit overwhelmed by the sheer number of people that had descended onto the otherwise peaceful valley. The temporary town was built right at the fork in the road veering one way to Hemkund and the other to the Valley of Flowers. When we set out from the guesthouse in the morning we were the only two heading down the trail to the valley. According to the park rangers (Ghangaria villagers) who registered us at the entrance, we were the second group to enter the park that day. The valley, although known to locals who used it for grazing livestock in the summer months, is said to have been "discovered" by a British mountaineer who stumbled upon in while lost on the return from a successful summit of a nearby peak. He named it the "Valley of Flowers" after the meadows of alpine flowers that blossom there. For its botanical importance and simply for its natural beauty it has been named is a UNESCO Heritage Site. From the entrance to the national park there is still a 4km climb to actually reach the valley. It took us for ever to actually get there because I was slightly preemptive in my wildflower spotting. I stopped to photograph every single flower on the trail with Yann urging me frustratingly to move on. When we arrived to the actually valley of flowers I regretted every second I had wasted somewhere else. It's hard to express the sense of awe that we felt while wandering alone through the valley. It felt so far from the garbage-strewn tourist mayhem just a few kilometers away. We found it difficult to leave, but had to make it to the gate before sunset (park closing time). We decided to skip the trek to Hemkund the next day and return to the park for another day of peace.

On a Himalayan Pilgrimage

2010-06-16T13:25:00.000-04:00

Leaving Kanpur was not easy. And it wasn't because we had gotten used to the air-conditioning and the cable television in our hotel room. We had simply gotten used to spending every day with Jitendra's family and it seemed painful to be saying goodbye. We were now affectionately known as Emilie Bhabi and Yann Bhaya (older sister and older brother) by Jitendra's cousins. We had been so lovingly welcomed by everyone and we got a small glimpse of the closeness of an Indian family.

We were also parting ways with James and Antonia, albeit only for a few weeks. Being their first time in India there were a few “must-sees” that we all agreed they shouldn't miss. But we would wait for them in the coolness of the Himalayas. We decided to head up to the state of Uttarakhand, the location of the Himalayan Char Dam, an important Hindu pilgrimage circuit covering four temples.

One of the main jump off points for the Char Dam is Haridwar, actually one of Hinduism's most sacred cities. The sacred Ganges river enters the North Indian plains for the first time from its origin in the Himalayan glaciers. According to Hindu scripture, Haridwar is one of four places where a drop of the elixir of immortality was accidentally dropped. We only had a day there, which was marred by the fact that I had been stung by an insect in the overnight train and had one eye completely swollen shut. Yann was his usual unsympathetic self and didn't seem to be as concerned as I was about the possibility that I might go blind. It was actually quite painful, especially trying to pry the the contact lens out of my eye. But the worst part was navigating through the hectic streets of Haridwar half blind. Yann did a good job of pulling me around for the morning until the anti-histamines kicked in. In the afternoon, we took the popular cable car trip to the Mansa Devi Temple which was crowded and confusing (The Goddess Mansa Devi is said to grand the wishes of her devotees, which might be an explanation for the the temple's popularity). We just followed the crowd and did what everyone else was doing. When we were in Haridwar, it was the tail end of the pilgrimage season and thousands of mostly young men, covered wearing head-to-toe orange scoured the city. Many of these pilgrims were walking to and from Haridwar from in order to carry back sacred water from the Ganges back to their home villages. They are known as kanwarias, named for the kanwar, the pole that they balance on their shoulders with water jugs hanging on each end. The orange colour represents the God Shiva and the Ganges water will be used to honour Shiva in their home villages. Apparently, at the busiest time of the pilgrimage season, entire swaths of highway are closed off to accommodate the crowds of kanwarias heading to Haridwar. With the rainy season fast approaching, the mountain roads leading to the four Char Dam temples would soon become too treacherous for the buses, so the number of pilgrims seemed to be manageable for the city. Although most tour bus companies offered a 4-day/4-temple Char Dam package, containing some ungodly amount of time on a bus. We decided to focus on only one of the four sacred temples. We picked Badrinath because it seemed to be the most accessible by road, and because the national park a few hours away was actually our main destination. We were able to book a direct bus to Badrinath for the next morning at 5:30am, we had no problem getting seats for the 14-hour trip.

We have taken hundreds of bus trips, and it seems like every one of them is worse than the one before. This ride was no exception, in fact it this one seemed to surpass any of the trips in our recent memory as the most uncomfortable, the most unpleasant and the most dangerous. Although the road winding up and down the mountain is in relatively good condition, what makes it dangerous is the sheer volume of traffic plying the route. Buses speed and pass each other on perilous switchbacks, the one highway leads to the four Hindu holy sites and a Sikh holy site. In terms of comfort, clearly every single seat in the bus had been ripped out and been replaced with tiny ones so as to cram more people in it. Our knees were completely up against the seats in front of us, which seemed ok for the first few hours, but grew more and more awful as the ride continued. When we finally arrived in Badrinath it was already night. We were happy to be alive, but we were even more happy that it was so cold that we needed to pull out our sweaters. It was the first time we had needed to wear them since arriving in Asia. We were so delighted with the weather that we decided to stay for three days. Badrinath itself is a mainly seasonal town. In the winter the road is too perilous to travel and the weather too cold. Hotels and restaurants are open only for the summer pilgrimmage season, only a few villagers remain nearby for the winter. The atmosphere in town is festive with hundreds of saddhus living in the surrounding hills for the summer months and the colourful Badrinath Temple itself (for which the town is named) is overflowing with visitors. We were a big hit at the temple entrance where everyone wanted us to join into their family photos. We spend almost a full day walking into the mountains surrounding Badrinath. Various trails criss-cross the hills and lead to holy caves or worshipping places. We followed a trail that lead us to a small tea shop where we met two sadhhus (wandering Hindu holy men). One of them had a huge walkman that played tapes, he carried two small bags with him, one was entirely filled with tapes. He insisted on having us listen to one of his tapes to prove to us that he only listened to Hindu music. "No Bollywood... no Salman Khan ...!" Another saddhu at the tea shop seemed to be interested in us as well and hovered around us as we set up to keep trekking up the hill. Sensing a request for money we tried to go on alone but we had picked up a new friend and the three of us left together. We wandered along together and everytime we crossed other pilgrims he would make his plea for money. It seemed that he believed that our presence might be increasing the quantity and quality of alms he was receiving and he became increasingly cheerful as we walked up through the mountains. We crossed dozens of pilgrims who keenly inquired about us and requested photos with us. People were incredibly friendly and excited. At some point we decided to head back to town, and the saddhu accompanying us asked for a gift. He didn't want money, he wanted a gift. Luckily I had a bag full of Canadian flag pins and I handed one over. He was quite convinced that it was an earring and despite my attempts to dissuade him, poked one through his ear then asked for another one. In exchange he gave me his Krishna pin. actually he emptied both of his pockets and tried to give us everything he had in them, including his bag of hash. We left with only the pin. The next day we walked to Mana village, the last Indian settlement on the road heading to Tibet. The village was truly lovely albeit slightly overrun with visitors passing through from Badrinath (such as ourselves). The villagers didn't speak much English, nor did they speak much Hindi, and the older women dressed in brown wrap-like coats, adorned with jewelry carved from bone, reminiscent of their Tibetan neighbours. We were an easy 3km away from Badrinath, but we were in a completely new setting, the pace had slowed to a near standstill. Women sat around together knitting hand-spun wool, the village is known for its knitwear, but the wool was so rough, we couldn't bring ourselves to purchase anything (and actually everything also happened to be hideously ugly). While village men sat in their porter's baskets waiting to carry visitors up steep mountain paths (not looking particularly interested in nabbing any customers though). It took about 20 minutes to get a chai because the tea shop owner didn't want to interrupt his card game. It seemed as though the higher the altitude, the slower things moved, which made us perfectly happy.

Lucie Weds Jitendra

2010-06-11T11:52:00.001-04:00

BHARAT NIKASI

The Bharat Nikasi is the groom's wedding procession towards the wedding hall. As guests of the groom, the four of us were instructed to join in the parade. As foreign guests with little Indian wedding experience we had been clothed by Jitendra and his family members. James and Yann had on their 3-piece embroidered and beaded Indian suits. Antonia and I had were wearing rented lehangas (a long beaded skirt with matching shawl and a mid-drift bearing top). We were also wearing about 5 pounds each of rented jewelry. By the time the procession began, it was already dark. But we were surrounded by portable chandeliers being carried alongside us, plugged in to a generator being wheeled along with them. An ornate portable stage held a brass band and a singer and drove ahead of us. At the very end of the procession was Jitendra, still in the car that had driven him away from the temple hours earlier. We paraded for at least half an hour until we finally arrived in front of the hotel where the other guests awaited. Including Lucie's family members who were charged with pulling Jitendra out of the car. We had plugged up most of the traffic on Kanpur's main road, but we didn't notice because we were focusing on our dancing. Jitendra's uncles and male cousins were the most rowdy and led the way, while most of the women walked at the tail end of the parade. If the amount we had perspired was any indication of our dancing skills, then we had done a good job representing Jitendra.

JAIMALA (Garland Ceremony)

While the guests waited in the large hall for the bride and groom to appear a huge buffet of snack food is served. Among them, the ultimate in culinary perfection: Indian Chinese food. This had become our favourite treat since being introduced to the popular Kanpur restaurant "Talk of the Town", specializing in this amazing Indian take on Chinese food. Some of the dishes we savored were Veg Manchurian and Chili Paneer which, if their were Chinese equivalents (which there aren't) might be known as fried noodles with tofu and General Tao's cheese. While we pigged out, poor Lucie waited upstairs in a hotel room awaiting instructions. Jitendra had been formally invited into the wedding hall by Lucie's oldest brother. He sat waiting on stage as the well-fed crowd of family and friends started jockeying for position to be the first to get a glimpse of Lucie when she entered. Lucie's entrance was brilliant! Many of the younger male family members had continued outdoor procession onto the fluorescent tiled dance floor. They danced in the background to the classic "Tomber la Chemise" by French group Zebda as Lucie made her appearance alongside her bridesmaids. When they appeared at the entrance to the hall way all the guests stood up and rushed towards them cheering and taking photos. If ever there was a photo perfectly capturing a moment, it has to be the one below: Once Lucie arrives on stage, she and Jitendra exchange fresh flower garlands in a ceremony called Jaimala. They then spend the next few hours posing for photos on stage with every single wedding guest. For most of the attendees, once they have been snapped with the bride and groom their duties as guest are complete. They finish the evening with dinner served in a separate hall. The close friends and family members are the last to be photographed and the last to eat (they just stay on the dance floor waiting their turn). We had dinner in the last shift, at about midnight. An elaborate feast served by attentive waiters who never let our plate stay empty. We do not appear to have any photos of the dinner, we were too busy eating.

CHAADI (Traditional Vedic Marriage Ceremony)

After dinner, we returned to the main wedding hall where a four-pillared canopy called a mandap had been set up to under which the religious ceremony would take place. The ceremony would last about 5 hours, and we didn't begin until after midnight. We had been instructed to change into comfortable clothes and matresses had been set up around the mandap. Jitendra had informed us that having a nap during the ceremony was perfectly acceptable. Waiters had also been instructed to keep the espresso machines up and running. We watched the ceremony as intently as possible and I summarize its main aspects below, not because I was clever enough to note them at the time but because Lucie was good enough to do it for us.

Durga Janu:
A white chord is placed around the groom's chest by male family members. The white chord is a symbol that the groom has attained the maturity to marry. Chadhawa:
The bride receives clothing, gold and jewelry that she will wear upon entering the groom's home. Kanyadan:
Kanyadan is the union of the two families. This union is symbolised by a paste made of flour and water. At this point in the ceremony the bride's parents confirm the confidence that they have in their future son-in-law. Vivan Havan:
Small offerings are thrown into the holy fire called the Havan and the bride and groom say prayers to various gods. Saptapadi:
Seven vows are taken in front of the sacred fire, they are thus considered to be unbreakable. At each vow, the bride and groom circumambulate the fire. There seem to be many different versions of the seven vows, in Lucie and Jitendra's case, Jitendra made 6 promises to Lucie and Lucie one promise to Jitendra. Sindur Daan:
The groom applies red vermilion powder along the part of the bride's hair. Red is a colour worn only by married women in India and supposedly brings good health. Bichiya:
The bride receives silver rings on all five of her toes (Bichiya is the word for toe ring). The wife an older brother or cousin of the bride is the one to place the rings on her toys.

WESTERN ADDITIONS

Exchange of Wedding Bands:
Lucie and Jitendra exchanged wedding bands and even had a best man (James) and maid of honour to present them. No kissing on the lips though. Wedding Cake:
A multi-tiered cake with icing flowers flown in from Mumbai was served at the end of the night. The Indian twist is that the bride and groom feed each of their guests individually! First Dance:
Lucie and Jitendra showed off their lessons with a swing dance (minimal closeness between bride and groom). By the time they hit the dance floor it was about 6am, its amazing that they were able to even keep their eyes open. Despite Yann's pleas to continue dancing, the guests finally started to leave a little bit past sunset. We had been celebrating for close to 24 hours. As we left, Jitendra gave us instructions to be ready for the afternoon ceremonies!

CLOSING CEREMONIES

That the wedding wasn't actually over was news to us, but not entirely a surprise. Every day since we had arrived in Kanpur there was something wedding-related to do. The first ceremony was to begin shortly after we left the wedding, but Jitendra kindly "forgot" to call the hotel to wake us up.

On the Banks of the Ganga:
In the afternoon, cars were ready at the hotel to escort us to a small village along the Ganga River, not far outside the city. Here, more prayers and blessings were recited with the help of a priest hired on site, one of many priests stationed along the banks of the river waiting for customers. Among many rituals, Jitendra tossed his tinsel wedding hat into the river. The Center of the World:
Lucie and Jitendra were blessed by the priest guarding the "Centre of the World". Apparently located right there in the village! Shirdi Sai Baba Temple: Sai Baba of Shirdi is a (now deceased) much revered Indian guru. We visited a temple dedicated to his teachings right outside Kanpur in order to have the new couple blessed. Lucie and Jitendra, as well as all the guests were given offerings of a yellow stole and a coconut. Puja and Decoration of the Matrimonial Bed:
A small puja was held at the Bajpai residence in order to welcome Lucie in to the home. The evening's last event was to decorate the matrimonial bedroom. Actually, Jitendra's mother arranged to have it decorated. Thousands of fresh flowers were strung together and draped from the bed frame and pink flower petals were scattered on the bed itself. Other than the fact it was being supervised by her mother-in-law I can't imagine that Lucie could hope for anything more delightful. After a week in Kanpur, the wedding had finally come to an end.

More Pre-Wedding Activities

2010-05-07T08:56:00.062-04:00

THE MEHNDI AND PITHI CEREMONIES
According to Jitendra, his mother had been planning the wedding for over a year. This didn't appear to us to be an exaggerated statement. We had only been in Kanpur for a few days and there was one event after another. In the time between events, we had to shop for clothes for the upcoming event. The bride and groom celebrate many of the activities leading up to the wedding separately with their family and friends. Of course, with Lucie's family not being in a position to plan celebrations, Jitendra's mom had been planning activities for both sides of the family. Lucie's events were scaled down, but they all had to be planned and celebrated nonetheless in order to keep with tradition.

Two days before the wedding we had the mehndi ceremony, basically the bride, her female friends and family members have henna painted on their hands and feet. A henna artist had been hired to come to the hotel and decorate all of us, it was a wonderful activity for Antonia and I, mainly because we were forced to sit for 3 hours for the henna to dry, which meant lying in the air-conditioned hotel room watching TV, this was the most rest we had gotten since arriving in Kanpur. Before any henna was applied on Lucie, we held a small Pithi Ceremony for her, where a paste of chickpea flour and turmeric was applied to her body, to cleanse and purify before the wedding day. As part of the ceremony Lucie adorned a white stole with her turmeric-pasted hand print. The stole would be brought to Jitendra and he would wear it until the wedding day as a reminder of his bride-to-be. PUJA - EVE OF WEDDING DAY
A day before the wedding, Jitendra's parents had a small ceremony at their home. Even Jitendra did not attend, so I have little information as to what was actually happening. It seemed that married couples played an important role in the ceremony, both Jitendra's parents and his brother and sister-in-law went through a ritual involving pounding grain, mixing pastes and receiving gifts. It seemed like a celebration of the other couples in Jitendra's life, those who married before him. The married women present (such as myself and Antonia) had our feet painted pink, a ceremony that would be performed the next day on Lucie. Yann and James received their tailored pyjama kurtas as gifts. DANCE PRACTICE
Jitendra's cousins made it clear to us on multiple occasions that we would be part of the Barat (the groom's wedding procession). It seemed that one of the main responsibilities of being part of such a procession, was to impress the bride's family with dance moves. From almost the first moment we arrived in Kanpur, James and Yann began intensive training in the art of Indian dancing. In the evening before the wedding, practice was especially exhausting, much to the enjoyment of everyone present. Most of Jitendra's relatives had by now mastered a pretty good imitation of Yann's "dance face". DRESSING JITENDRA - MORNING OF THE WEDDING
We were at Jitendra's parents place fairly early on the morning of June 30th. The date of July 1st had been chosen for the wedding, and so the actual wedding wouldn't be starting until midnight. This day belonged to Jitendra, and we began a long series of rituals to prepare him to meet Lucie. Almost all of his close family members took part in a ceremony that involved among other things, dressing and feeding him. His brother-in-law had the task of dressing him, his young female cousins also had various roles throughout the ceremony, including suspending a cloth full of grains over his head. His aunt painted on his eye liner and placed the turban on his head, the priest fed him sweets, his feet were painted pink, and finally his mother marked the tilak on his forehead. GROOM DEMANDS MONEY FROM FEMALE RELATIVES
The post puja (prayer) celebrations began with the female guests lining up to feed Jitendra sweets. Each woman takes a turn feeding Jitendra a sweet morsel and he must then return the favour. But before the exchange of sweets takes place Jitendra demands payment, and depending on the relative, he demanded a different amount. After payment and feeding the donor places a tilak mark on Jitendra's forehead. Both Antonia and I took part in the activity, and this one was relatively easy to understand, so everything went well ... except for Antonia trying to use the dessert to mark Jitendra's forehead. DANCING - OUTSIDE THE FAMILY HOME
Once all the women had taken their turn feeding and paying Jitendra, the band began and we danced. Jitendra's father was an absolutely wild dancer, and his children implored him constantly to calm down in order to protect his weak heart (he would hear nothing of it). Note that the photo below illustrates Yann's "dance face" which Jitendra's relatives could all mimic with perfect precision. TEMPLE VISIT
For a break from dancing we crossed the street to the local temple where offerings were made and prayers recited. In the brief time we were at the temple, 2 other grooms arrived with their wedding parties (wedding dates are set according to auspicious days in the Hindu calendar) DANCING - AT THE TEMPLE
Once the offerings were made inside the temple, the dancing began again outside the temple. We had to compete with the two other brass bands playing for the two other wedding parties. THE WELL RITUAL
Near the temple we assembled around a water pump, (the closest thing to a well nearby). Jitendra's married female relatives circled the well repeatedly, as did Jitendra. Jitendra's mother sat on the edge of the "well" as it was circumambulated. The next part of the ritual involved Jitendra's mother threatening to throw herself into the well since her son is leaving her. Jitendra then had to promise that he would always love and take care of her. Happiness and celebration ensue! JITENDRA'S SEND OFF
With the pre-wedding rituals now over, it was time to escort Jitendra to the wedding vehicle. He would not be allowed out until his arrival at the wedding hall many hours later. In fact, he would not be allowed to leave the vehicle until Lucie's brother formally invited him out. But before getting in the car ... more dancing!

The Tilak Ceremony

2010-05-06T21:30:00.000-04:00

Jitendra was particularly nervous about the Tilak Ceremony. This was a ceremony to take place at his parents home without Lucie's presence. During this ceremony Lucie's male relatives would officially accept Jitendra into the family by way of an invitation letter and a smear of tilak powder placed on Jitendra's forehead by the oldest Lucie's two younger brothers. All of Lucie's guests would be there, about 20 friends and family members arriving from France. For many of them it would be their first time meeting Jitendra and their first time in India. Many would not be English speakers. The priest's instructions would have to be translated from Sanskrit to Hindi to English to French. Jitendra was unbelievably anxious and talked as if Etienne might not hand him over the invitation letter if things didn't go off without a hitch. Lucie laughed and was simply disappointed that she wasn't invited to the party (although Jitendra had lovingly offered to let her watch from the neighbor's window)!

The day of the ceremony the four of us had to arrive at the house early to help with anything that might need to be done. Of course, we weren't needed as Jitendra's entire family was busy with the finishing touches. The house was draped in lights hanging from the roof, a brass band was seated at the entrance waiting to play for guests, hundreds of sweets had been purchased to serve at the beginning of the ceremony, the first floor of the house had been transformed to accomodate the priest, the altar and the guests, a camera and video crew were on sight to film the ceremony and the roof of the house had been transformed into a beautiful dining area with a catered Indian buffet and even hired espresso machines for the European guests! If we were excited before arriving to the house, we were now giddy! Yann and James had on their Western style outfits that they had purchased a few days earlier, the tilak ceremony was not as formal as others to come, so they did not need their Indian suits yet. Antonia and I got to borrow saris from Jitendra's mother who had quite the collection. We had tried them on the day before which gave us time to purchase matching churis (bangles) and matching bindis. I had been dreading wearing a sari due to their middrift bearing nature and Yann had not made the situation any easier by constantly reminding me that he would be "photographing my belly hanging out". But I did a fantastic job of wrapping myself up in such a way that exposed the least amount of skin. I thought I might lose circulation from the lack of blood flow to my arms, but Jitendra assured me that "nobody wanted to see a loose sari top! They are supposed to give you big bulges at the arms". This might have been his way of making me feel better, or maybe making me stop asking for a new bigger top, but I didn't give my arm bulges a moment's thought for the rest of the night. The brass band had changed into their uniforms and played on the street outside the home as the guests arrived, neighbors watched from their windows and crowds began to gather to watch the dancing and music. We spent at least an hour dancing outside in celebration until we were ushered inside for the religious section of the ceremony. James and Yann had practised dance moves with Jitendra's younger male cousins the previous night, so all eyes were on them and they certainly did not disappoint!

There was only one thing out of Jitendra's family's control: the heat. It was still over 40 degrees outside, even in the late afternoon, and the dancing had left us bathed in sweat as we entered the house to watch the exchange between Jitendra and his soon-to-be brother-in-law. Hindu ceremonies share many of the characteristics of Western religious ceremonies. They are long, boring and for the most part incomprehensible. What seemed to differ between them is a certain recognition of this fact from the part of the participants. It was funny to watch as we Western guests tried desperately to appear respectful: keep quiet, keep our back's straight, watch intently, while the local guests talked, took breaks, made calls on their cell phones etc. The only two people who never seemed to take her gaze off Jitendra was his mother, who had spent months planning the wedding and oversaw every single aspect of the ceremony and Lucie's brother who had been told how important his role was in the evening's ceremony (which it was). Even Jitendra cut off the priest multiple times to make sure his guests needed anything or if the camera man had the right angle. After the priest completed the necessary rites, it was again the band's turn to get things going. Everyone danced this time (even Lucie's father and brother which clearly surprised her when she heard the reports of the evening), crammed together, dripping in sweat, we danced until we were too exhausted to continue. By the time we climbed up to the roof to dine, the temperature had dropped just enough to cool us down as we sat together under the Kanpur night sky. An experience we will never forget.

Picking Wedding Suits in Kanpur

2010-04-21T13:45:00.032-04:00

Jitendra and Lucie had already reserved a room for us in Kanpur just a few doors down from their wedding venue. We were the first international guests to arrive (we were keen ok?!) and when we called Jitendra from Lucknow he eagerly explained that he would meet us at the hotel the next day (he also told us the maximum amount it should cost us for a rickshaw ride from the bus station to the hotel... we paid twice that).

Kanpur is Uttar Pradesh state's largest city, it has a population of roughly 6 million people and is nestled on the banks of the holy Ganga river. Kanpur was once a major British military station and was the site of an important siege during the 1857 Rebellion against British rule. Today Kanpur is a large industrial city and consequently quite polluted. Most trains heading west to Delhi pass through Kanpur and there is very little respite from the railway, rickshaw and pedestrian traffic that jams up the city's streets. Unlike its neighbour Lucknow's rich Mughal history there are few major draws for tourists. One of Jitendra's first words to us upon arrival were: "Welcome to Kanpur. India's ugliest city!".

I met Jitendra in February 2005. He was an exchange student from India coming to study under my supervisor in Montreal. Due to visa problems he was arriving a month into the winter semester and my supervisor had given me the task of making sure he got settled in and got all his paperwork filled out etc... I still remember him holding tightly onto my arm as we shuffled down the icy streets of Montreal with him exclaiming "be careful Emlee I don't have my health insurance yet!". When he announced his engagement to the beautiful Lucie 4 years later (a French exchange student) we promised that we would be at the wedding. The four of us were 10 days early for the wedding, but there was lots to do, as the only foreign baraatis (invitees on the groom's side), we would have to make Jitendra proud.

Jitendra's sister Jyoti had already reserved jewelry and clothing for Antonia and I, but the men had a multitude of different outfits that had to be made for them. Within 2 hours of arriving in Kanpur, Jitendra had already had already whisked James and Yann to the tailor's. Our only instructions regarding apparel was that "we do what's traditional". Admittedly, the "Indian suits" that Jitendra had been talking about, were not exactly what we expected, but we made sure that James and Yann had the full 3-piece suits and we even got to customize the embroidery and beading. Yann almost chose the eggplant colour, but I convinced him to get the navy blue so that he could wear it in Canada!? After placing the rush order on the suits, there was another fitting, this time for the "pyjama kurtas", these are long cotton tunics and matching baggy pants. James and Yann picked out matching ones with flowery embroidery (selected by Antonia and I). Now, with a little bit of experience, Yann and James had started becoming selective. The process of picking the shade of off-white and the weave of cotton was painfully slow. Antonia and I had to be brought in to pick the embroidery. Jitendra left us with a shopping list of accessories and outfits that had to be purchased in the next few days for various ceremonies. Dress shoes, pointy shoes, dress pants, dress shirts, sandals, jewelry, bangles... That same evening we would begin our shopping. The fun was just beginning.

Loving Lucknow

2010-04-15T14:42:00.036-04:00

We left Kolkata in an air-conditioned train car. Not because Yann had given in to getting one, but because we couldn't get anything else. We had a date with James and Antonia in less than 48 hours who were arriving from Southern India and we didn't want to be late. I was (as any normal human being would be) relieved to know that I would get sleep on the 22 hour train ride, since I certainly hadn't had any in Kolkata. We had spent two nights in a non-ac room with intermittent electricity (read intermittent fan), next to the festering public washroom and a drunken guest who stayed up all night with the door open and no shirt on. When we arrived in the room we had an argument over who would get the bed next to the filthy wall and who would have the bed covered in crusted instant noodles (I ended up with the noodles because at least I could identify that they were noodles, unlike the stains on the walls).

We arrived in Lucknow in the evening, one day before James and Antonia's plane was landing at the Lucknow airport. This gave us time to 1) Find a hotel room and 2) Eat meat before we turned exclusively to vegetarian fare (actually, we are big meat eaters in India, but Lucknow's famous Mughal-inspired cuisine is heavy in the meat department). Finding a meat-filled meal was an easy task, as henna-dyed bearded men watching over their huge cooking pots called for us to visit their respective restaurants. Finding a hotel room was unusually difficult. For a long while it seemed like our only option was a rooftop room/sauna, the only room left in a hotel known to take foreigners. We visited dozens of hotel front desks before we finally found one that would take us. It was pricier than we wanted to pay, because all of its rooms were air-conditioned (but that made it easy for me to be convinced). We were worried that James and Antonia would think it was too expensive at 800 rupees (about 20$CDN). But by guaranteeing their presence the next day we were able to bargain the rate down.

It was a huge relief when James and Antonia exited the airport (the last two). We had decided that they had missed the plane, but had received a positive ID of two "white people" on the plane from another passenger. We had been locked out of the airport waiting room due to the arrival of a politician on their same plane, and we had been lying on the hot pavement outside for almost an hour when James and Antonia finally exited. The airport billboard displayed a temperature of 47.6 degrees Celsius. Antonia described getting off the plane and thinking that she being blasted by the plane engines before realizing that the heat was simply the ambient air. Welcome to the Northern Plains ... in June.

The four of us decided to stay an extra day in Lucknow before heading to Kanpur for the pre-wedding preparations. Yann and I had already spent the day visiting Bara Imambara, Lucknow's epic Mughal shrine and we felt that James and Antonia couldn't leave without seeing it. We lined up back-to-back activities for the next day but spent the evening relaxing in our air-conditioned rooms sharing stories of our past weeks' adventures (James and Antonia in Southern India and Yann and I in Bangladesh).

Our first morning started with breaking in James with a road side breakfast. Yann and I had decided long before leaving for India that we would deal with James' relative travel inexperience with baptism by fire.

Baptism by fire (from Wikipedia entry) :" Today, it has entered the common vernacular to describe anyone doing something "the hard way" for the first time, particularly if training is necessarily insufficient to fully prepare one for the experience (as is the case with battle)."

We picked a busy street stall and ordered four breakfasts. The food was good and hot and Yann and I settled into our smug "see that wasn't so bad" attitudes until Yann spotted the dishes being washed out of the corner of his eye. He mumbled under his breath for me to look over. The dishes we were just using were being washed in a stream next to a huge pile of medical waste, including dirty needles. It didn't take long for James to recognize in our faces that something was wrong. I had brief moment of fear when James noticed the dishwasher, not because our dishes were washed in medical waste, but because I thought James might strangle me. But the situation was just so absurd that we had to laugh. Thus started out first morning together and our failed attempt at making James see the harmlessness of eating street food. We spent the morning visiting the former Residency of the British Resident General in Lucknow. the former British complex where thousands of soldiers and civilians spent almost 3 months under siege by "mutineers" during the first Indian uprising against British rule (1857). It is an interesting sight as one tends to sympathize with both sides of the battle, the hundreds trapped inside the crammed complex dying of disease and cannon fire and the Indians taking up arms against oppressive foreign rule. The sight itself is known as "The Residency" and has a museum on sight as well as the preserved ruins of the former residency buildings. The grounds are beautifully tended to and we might have lingered longer outside if it hadn't been almost 50 degrees. In the afternoon Yann and I waited outside the huge Mughal shrine, Bara Imambara, while James and Antonia visited. They described a similar experience the one we had experienced the previous day: being the only foreign tourists, posing for dozens of photos with Indian tourists, signing the guestbook on the request of the complex security guards while they looked over your shoulder to make sure only good things were written, taking off your shoes to enter the shrine and then burning them on the hot rooftop stones, resisting an attempt to be assigned a mandatory guide for the "Labyrinth"... All and all a fantastic experience. In the afternoon we made us of our "Lucknow Tourist Pass" and visited the smaller Chota Imambara, the Clocktower, the Jama Masjid (actually non-Muslims weren't allowed in this one, but we peered through the gates). A pair of rickshaws carrying foreigners seemed to garner a huge amoutn of attention and locals waved and yelled out hellos as we passed them. We were sort of surprised by the amount of attention we got, which was quite unusual compared to other Indian cities we had visited. Other than the heat, we had quite a perfect day, ending with a bowl of kulfi-falooda, a local specialty. Kulfi-falooda is ice cream (kulfi) covered in orange vermicelli noodles (falooda). Actually I'm not sure what the final verdict was on this dessert, but the four of us seemed to agree on our love for Lucknow.

To Kolkata on the Maitree Express

2010-04-09T13:39:00.012-04:00

We had a whirlwind trip back to Dhaka. Two things happened to cause this:
1) We missed the train
2) We boarded the bus with no money left
How we got into this situation was a series of bad luck and possibly bad decisions.

We arrived in Chittagong on a Friday evening, expecting to buy train tickets to Dhaka on the night train leaving the same day. There were no tickets left in any class, on any train to Dhaka until Sunday. We didn't want to wait until Sunday, we didn't want to take a night bus, so we spent a night in Chittagong with the intention of leaving early the next morning on an express bus to Dhaka.

That evening we forgot to go to an ATM to withdraw money, by the time we realised it, the banks were closed. Luckily we knew of an ATM in the train station, we would head there the next morning and find it to be out of order.

We had just enough money to buy bus tickets to Dhaka and have a few hundred Takas left. Then we got a little bit risky: we decided to make a stop half way to Dhaka to visit Buddhist ruins. We would need enough money to hire a taxi to and from the ruins and get back on a bus to Dhaka. We quickly did the math and it seemed like we would make it, just. Everything was going according to plan, we got off in Mainimati and hired a taxi to the site of the ruins. When we arrived we were made aware of the item we had left out of our calculations: admission cost. The cost of two tickets to see the ruins was more than what we had left in our pockets. In fact we were now doubting whether we could even afford the taxi back to the main highway.

Now, standing outside the gate to the ruins, we decided to meticulously break down the cost of getting back to Dhaka. Things weren't looking good, getting in to see the ruins was definitely a no-go. We made an attempt to have our secret stash of American money exchanged, but the rate we were offered was so ridiculous that we passed. In retrospect we probably should have just exchanged the money, but the ticket seller was being kind of an ass, so we didn't want to give him any money.

We concluded that we couldn't afford a taxi back to the highway, so we would have to walk. The rickshaw from the highway had taken quite a while, but our driver had gotten lost, so we thought it wouldn't be too bad. And our map showed the highway as being quite close, so we set off. After at least 30 minutes of walking we didn't seem to be anywhere near the highway, it appeared that the scale on our map was way way off. After more walking we flagged down a rickshaw and got him to drive us as far as 10 takas would take us. This left us with only another 20 minutes or so to the highway. From the side of the highway two business men helped us flag down a bus to Dhaka which somewhat stopped for us. We hopped onto it as it was still moving. Being a "local" bus, and not a fancy direct bus to Dhaka, we didn't have to pay much for the ride to Dhaka, we just had to stop every few minutes to pick up and drop people off. We ended up in Dhaka with about 300 takas, enough for 2 admission tickets to the Buddhist ruins.

In Dhaka, we booked tickets on the Maitree Express to Kolkata, the only Bangladesh-India train, reopened in 2008 after being out of service since partition. Even though it was slower than the bus, we wanted to take it. We had actually timed our departure from Bangladesh to make sure it fell on one of the 3 days a week on which the train ran. After a confusing discussion with the ticket salesmen we settled with "snigdha" class tickets:

"What do you mean what is snigdha class?
"Well, sir, would you be able to explain to us the difference between Seat Class, Snigdha Class and Chair Class?"
"Snigdha is Relax Class."
"Oooooh I see, Relax Class, we'll take two of those!"

The name Maitree Express is a bit of a misnomer. A more suitable name might be "the slowest possible way of getting to Kolkata from Dhaka other than walking". The train was almost empty, there were probably less than 50 passengers. But the train had the capacity for over 200, which meant that the break scheduled at the border had to be long enough to accommodate that many passport checks. The entire train was processed in less than 30 minutes, but we then had to wait about 2 hours in a stuffy waiting room in 40 degree weather. Which I suppose is better than waiting in a customs line for 2 hours in 40 degree weather. I don't think the train actually ever went much fast than 30km/h or so, but we had big reclining seats and air-conditioning (snigdha class = relax class), so other than the border crossing we were comfortable. We had reported at the train station in Dhaka at 8am and we didn't arrive in Kolkata until almost 10pm. The train station where we arrived did not even figure on any map of Kolkata, we exited the station to a dark empty parking lot. We had no idea how far we were from the city nor was there anyone in sight to help us. We eventually spotted a taxi that got us to our trusty hotel on Sudder St for a very reasonable price. We settled into our filthy, 200 rupee accommodation ready to tackle India for the second time.

Chitmorong Pilgrimmage

2010-03-23T07:25:00.044-04:00

Chitmorong was the Buddhist hamlet where I had wanted to attempt to find a bed when our bus had stranded us on the side of a river. Before Yann and I had agreed on it, we were picked up by a bus and swept away to Rangamati (as had been the plan before being abandoned by the bus driver). Now we wanted to attempt to visit the village before returning leaving the area and heading back to Dhaka.

We had abandoned the idea of getting there by boat, but we knew we could catch a bus heading to main city of Chittagong and get off along the highway from where we would be able to get to Chitmorong. So this is what we decided to do. We would never have known to get off had we not been in the company of a Bangladeshi Navy officer who spoke some English AND had visited a Canadian ship in Hong Kong. We added his address and cell phone number to our ever growing list, if we ever got into trouble we now had at least half a dozen people to bail us out.

From the side of the highway, we found the stair case leading to a small dock where we paid a few takas to be rowed across the river. Once in the small village we quickly identified the beautiful wooden temple and stood around its outer courtyard with our huge packs, dripping in sweat, not really knowing what to do next. A few teenage monks passed us and giggled, saying hello once they were at a safe distance from us then bursting into further laughter. We still had a long day of travel ahead of us so we felt tempted to just poke around and head back to the bus stop across the river. The village was so quiet, beautiful and tiny, but somehow we were disoriented. Maybe it was the contrast with most of the rest of Bangladesh that threw us off. Before giving up returning to the river a young monk finally approached us and offered to show us around. He turned out to be a visitor himself, as were many of the people we subsequently met at the larger temple. As Chitmorong is home to one of the largest temples in the area, monks and Buddhist pilgrims from surrounding areas and smaller monasteries come to worship and meet the senior monks. Visiting women were beautifully dressed and made-up, and all had their own baskets in which to carry offerings to the temple and monks. We were led to the large new "modern" temple a little bit further into the village. Although not an architectural gem, it benefited from thick concrete walls to keep the heat out, and it seemed that most of the village made us of the main hall in the hot afternoons. Yann and I were terribly embarrassed when we were ushered past all the actual pilgrims to the front of the hall to meet the head monk. As locals offered up relatively large sums of money and other offerings, we were offered cakes, fresh fruit and soda (other people's previous offerings perhaps?). We sat and ate under the nose of the entire village and the old monk looking down on us carefully perched on his seat. We were anxious to leave, but we didn't know how long we should kneel. We watched other pilgrims around us placed money at the monks feet during their bow, and tried to emulate them. We tried to look pious and serious but neither of us knew what we were doing "you do it", "no you do it", "Is this enough?"... Of course, no one around us seemed to be as bothered by our presence there as we were.

After a few minutes we exited the temple with our young guide and joined the small crowd of villagers and pilgrims gathered outside in the shade. We were introduced to his family, a large group of men and women, who we understood later to simply be other inhabitants of his small village, making the size of the group slightly less impressive. After a few family photos, our guide, along with his fellow villagers rushed back down to the river to catch their boats home. We were left in a small riverside tea stall where we sat for a drink and to plan our return back to the big city.

Next to us was a young man who had been next to us at the temple, kneeling silently while we ate offerings. Judging by his facial features, he was Bengali, so his presence at a Buddhist temple was a little bit of a curiosity to us (less than 1% of Bengalis are Buddhist or Christian). I can't recall who initiated conversation, but we ended up sitting together, sharing tea and discussing onward travel. Suman spoke English quite well and when we left insisted on paying for our tea. Suman explained that he was from a village near Chittagong, where there was no Buddhist Temple where he could worship. We didn't push too hard, it appeared as though his family might be the only Buddhists in his village.

Suman stood out from people that we had met on our travels, he spoke with such honesty and frankness. It is difficult to explain why he marked us so much. Among thousands of meetings with locals from dozens of different countries, it often seems difficult to get passed the typical curiosities that we have for each other. Suman seemed to know exactly where we were coming from, and was more interested in our reflections on life than the weather in Canada or whether we approved of sex before marriage.

On Suman's suggestion, the three of us hired a boat all the way to Kaptai, which was only a few kilometers down river. The sun was excruciating out on the river but could only slightly detract from the surrounding scenery. Along the banks of the river we passed groups of bathers, clothes washers and even a few brave fishermen anchored in the few shady spots along the water. Within half an hour we were wandering the streets of Kaptai, heading to the bus stand. Within sight of the buses we were intercepted by an English speaking gentlemen who introduced himself as a government official, a self-proclaimed mayor of sorts. He was adamant that we take a tour of beautiful Kaptai before even considering stepping on a bus to Chittagong! We had a train to catch, and Suman clearly wanted to get home (to make matters worse was now carrying my heavy backpack), but it was impossible to turn down such enthusiasm. After all, Kaptai was the home of Bangladesh's only hydro electric project.

The contrast between Chitmorong and Kaptai was striking. The rows of shacks that led from the docking area to the main street were squalid, and the main street was not much better. The town was a seedy military base and there really was nothing for us to see. We were prevented from taking photos of the only somewhat decent view due to the presence of the Kaptai Dam in the photo. We did at least attract the attention of a sweet journalist who popped out of his office to be photographed with us and to exchange e-mail addresses as we passed by (the photos were in our inbox by the time we next had access to internet). Our guide was however becoming increasingly annoying, asking us for gifts, and parading us around town like trophies while Suman exhaustedly lugged my bag around (his pride was no match for the heat though, and he eventually let me take my bag back).

We had now drawn enough attention to ourselves to be summoned into the nearby military office, where luckily, the bored soldiers simply wanted to get in on the excitement. Our small tour of Kaptai had now been dragged out much longer than we had wanted, and we finally managed to say escape from with "the mayor", the journalist and the soldiers. Suman got us onto a direct bus to Chittagong and waved goodbye, once again we were parting ways with a stranger who had gone out of his way to help us, this time it felt like we were leaving an old friend.

Note: After a little bit of research back home, we discovered that Suman is a member of the Barua Buddhist community. For a short article on the Barua you can click here .

Friendly Rangamati

2010-03-11T11:10:00.060-05:00

After a harrowing bus ride to get to Rangamati, we were exhausted and checked in to the first hotel that we visited. For dinner, we spotted an outdoor restaurant directly across the street where, after sampling the deep fried paratha bread stuffed with egg, we ate every night. After a few meals, the kitchen staff knew us (I admit we were somewhat recognizable) and would send over the "English speaking" waiter to serve us. Our hotel was slightly more upscale than what we are used to, we met many Bangladeshi families vacationing ... we posed in a few family photos. I enjoyed the hotel even more once I convinced Yann to move into an air-conditioned room. We spent quite a few hours hiding from the mid-day heat watching Al-Jazeera coverage of the Iranian elections.

Rangamati is actually a series of islands on Kaptai Lake, an artificial lake cause by the Construction of Bangladesh's only hydro-electric project. Some of the main islands are connected by causeways, and others are only reached by boat. We were a causeway away from the centre of town. Getting around was actually fun, once we understood the system. Since the town is actually quite sprawling, it was difficult to walk anywhere, but there were motorized rickshaws abound. The rickshaws operate almost like public buses. They ply the two main roads and pick up and drop off customers. You simply pay a few takas and climb on to the rickshaw with other passengers. It was amazingly efficient, and great for keeping the fare low, as the other passengers intervened if they thought the driver was charging us too much. We ended up going back and forth between the two main docks for almost an entire morning, trying to get someone to let us on a boat. We wanted to take a boat back towards Kaptai, returning to visit some of the villages that we had passed on our bus ride from Bandarban. We first went to the main docking area at the very northern tip of Rangamati's main island. Various boats were docked on the sandy shoreline, with passengers loading onto the boats via thin wooden planks leaning up against the boats. The area was bustling and the boats were completely packed, but apparently none were going in our direction. We worried that no one could understand our Bengali. Many people had told us that this was the place to catch a boat to Kaptai, so we were weary of anyone trying to tell us otherwise. That our guidebook's list of scheduled departures from this boat terminal would be accurate now seemed to be more than a little bit optimistic. There was no ticket booth, no signs, certainly no staff member, simply a few shacks along the beach and a few unmarked boats. It seemed that the local system was to hope that your boat would eventually arrive. Of course there was probably more order than was apparent to us, but without a local guide to help us, getting on the correct boat was close to impossible. At one point we gave up trying to find a boat to Kaptai and decided to get onto any boat that would take us anywhere. No one would let us on. We had been warned that this might happen, as theoretically our permits were not valid for any travel that strayed too much from the main towns. The boat drivers may have been weary of carrying foreigners to "restricted" areas. Whatever the reason, we spent most of our afternoon inquiring about boat rides for the next day. Everyone tried their best to help us, but not a single person gave us the same instructions. The only person who seemed to maybe have an idea was a young man who spoke a bit of English, he instructed us to go to the other docks across town the next morning, a boat would be leaving for Kaptai the next morning.

Searching for a boat took up most of our morning and early afternoon, so for the rest of the day we explored the dried fish market, near the main docks. We were followed by a steady stream of curious locals who wanted to have their photo taken and see themselves in the camera viewfinder. Adults and children were equally giddy at our presence and would usually burst into laughter when we smiled at them. On our second morning in Rangamati, we headed to the docks where the boat to Kaptai was apparently leaving from. Everyone we asked told us that we were in the wrong place and that we had to go to the main boat area (where we had been the day before). As we went from boat to boat being turned down, the young man who had given us the departure information appeared and we quickly questioned him: "where is the boat to Kaptai?". "Oh.... friends, no boat to Kaptai. I give you private boat tour around Rangamati?". What? We had been duped? It had been too long since we had seen other tourists and it seemed we had let our guard down. Luckily, we had pretty much given up hope on getting onto a boat, so we were only mildly pissed off, even though our friend had arranged so that we would miss the actual boat that we wanted to catch.

It turned out to be market day in Rangamati and boat loads of people and products were arriving as we stood around explaining to the sneaky boat driver that we would not be taking a private boat tour. Instead we followed the stream of women in their colourful sarongs into the packed market streets where hundreds of people had already set down their blankets and neatly displayed their fresh produce. The beautiful Chakma women who manned the stalls seemed to smile more than most people we had encountered (maybe this is the reason we remember them as being particularly beautiful). We spent a lovely morning photographing them as they smoked, laughed and sold their fruits and vegetables. In the afternoon we headed to the largest Buddhist temple complex in the city, Bana Vihara. We ended up there two hours before visiting time was to begin, and we felt that if we returned to our air-conditioned hotel room we might never returned, so we decided to wait it out. We spent at least an hour at a small local tea shop outside the temple gates. The minute we sat down, other shop owners came to see their neighbor's bizarre guests. We ordered tea and we were promptly served along with a plate of soggy cookies. We sat most of the time with a sweet old man, who seemed to be a family member of the tea shop worker. He spoke to us most of the time, in a local language. He didn't seem too worried that we spoke a different one. Other family members entered the shop, one smoked a huge bamboo pipe, the others just hung around and had tea. Before returning to the temple we handed out postcards of Montreal which proved to be a huge hit. Little did we know that the Olympic Stadium postcard would be the most coveted. It seemed that locals knew the word "stadium" from cricket, so they cared much more about our stadium then say, the postcards depicting 4 feet of snow.We made note to only hand out the same postcard the next time around so as to not cause the jealousy that was brought on by the stadium postcard. To finish off the day, we watched the sun set over the temple, accompanied by a sweet local student who had seen us entering the temple rather confusedly. He gave us a tour of the complex, explaining each building and even bringing us to the "question period" where locals come to ask the elder monks for answers to their queries. The temple grounds were quiet and peaceful and were just beginning to fill up as we left. After a full day, we finally headed back to our hotel where we crossed the street for our last meal of fried paratha, just one of many pleasures of Rangamati that we would be sad to leave behind.

Yann Gets Us to Rangamati

2010-03-08T16:13:00.001-05:00

Yann and I argued about how to get to Rangamati. I am usually the one who carries and actually reads the guidebooks when we travel, so I was surprised when Yann expressed confidently that there was a direct bus to Rangamati from Banderban. There was definitely no such bus listed in the guidebook (although Yann was absolutely convinced). The officer in Chittagong who had issued our permits had told us that there was a bus, but I didn't think he knew what he was talking about either. My suggestion was to back track along the main highway to Chittagong, then take another main highway to Rangamati, rather than take the more direct route through the back roads of the Hill Tracts, this, I guessed, would take us 6 to 7 hours. But locals quoted us much faster times along the more direct route, and Yann was already convinced that it was the best choice for us, based on the mysterious advice that "he had read somewhere".

The local buses leave from a different bus station than the one we had arrived at. Judging by its appearance, we should have been able to predict what kind of ride we would be having. Many of the "buses" were beat up vans whose seats had been ripped out and replaced with wooden benches so as to squeeze in more passengers. And the actual buses looked like they had been salvaged from scrap-yards. We had a two hour wait for departure, so we hauled up in a local restaurant with our bags trying to keep cool (as in temperature). The restaurant we picked was the one with a fan and an empty bench to sit on. There wasn't actually any food available, and there was quite a number of flies hovering around, but we could get semi-cold drinks. A teenage boy had followed us into the restaurant and was quick to strike up a conversation. His dream was to become a tour guide and he would practice on us. Upon hearing that we were taking a later bus, he changed his bus ticket so that he could leave with us. We insisted that it was not necessary but he felt that it was his responsibility to take care of us. At the time we were a little bit annoyed, and we took turns chatting with him, but we would later be very grateful for his presence. When the bus finally took off, it was quite packed, people on for shorter rides got the standing room only, and those like Yann and I traveling the whole length of the trip got seats. We were near the front, just behind the woman traveling with her young son and a baby goat. Our new friend Anik, could not be seated with us, and as is customary in Bangladesh, we the foreigners had been given a prime seat while poor Anik had been relegated to the back of the bus. The bus was in rough shape, but not in any worse shape than any of the other ones we had taken in the country. Anyways, we were so eager to start moving and get some a bit of air blowing in our faces that we couldn't be bothered worrying about the holes in the floor of the bus. Being a local bus or train in Asia means being painfully slow. A local bus will pick up anybody who hails it down, from anywhere along its route. Even if it is to drop the person off 500m ahead. Passengers are simply charged according to how far they travel and how well they can negotiate with the conductor. We could be wrong, but we figure that all the money that the driver and his conductor make from picking up passengers goes directly to their pockets. Only the money from ticket sales goes to the bus company, particularly ambitious driver-conductor pairs will stop for everything. Our bus was in high demand, as the second of only two buses to travel the route in the day, so we stopped a lot. The road however, didn't seem to be terribly bad, and I was beginning to doubt my objections at traveling by this route. And by the halfway mark of the trip we'd only had to empty the bus once to make sure we'd make it over a bridge. After four hours on the road, we ended up at a river crossing. The waters were still quite low and the river was calm, so we weren't too worried about making it across. It seemed like the bus had its own raft and the passengers would cross in smaller boats, in groups of 7 or 8 passengers. As we waited for the process to get organized we found Anik to figure out where we were and what was going on. It turned out we weren't exactly making great time and the raft that was supposed to be bringing the bus across the river was still parked on the other bank. At some point we noticed that the passengers that had remained in the bus were now exiting and crowded around the driver. Anik investigated and returned with the news that the bus driver no longer wanted to continue the trip. He was giving the customers half of their money back and was turning around. As soon as he gave us back our money, Anik had already led us to the river where the three of us got in a small boat that sped across to the other side. From there, we caught a taxi to drive us a few kilometers up the road to a bus station. When we arrived at the "bus station" (this is how Anik had sold it to us anyways, it was actually the fork in the road, one direction leading to the main highway, the other leading to Rangamati) we were told that there were no more buses for the day heading to Rangamati.

Under normal circumstances we would not have worried, we would probably have found a place to sleep, but we were traveling with a permit that only allowed us certain stops in the region. At this point we were between two of them. We eventually figured out that we were quite close to the town of Kaptai a military outpost where we really didn't want to end up. Anik, as well as many fellow passengers (most of whom had now caught up to us and were also at the bus stand) were going in the direction of Kaptai. Anik now was trying to convince us to travel with him and find a place to stay there, but we were very weary of spending the night in a military town. We worried that our permits would be scrutinized more closely and we absolutely wanted to make it to Rangamati.

We knew there was a tiny Buddhist hamlet nearby, with no accommodation, but we thought we might get a floor to sleep on there. I tried to convince Yann and Anik that this was our best option, but I was fighting a losing battle. Anik was determined to have us go his way (he was now probably regretting having changed his ticket, and he was eager to get home) and Yann was too worried that we would be lost with no place to sleep with nightfall approaching. I saw it as the perfect opportunity to ditch our "permit route" because we had been dumped by our bus driver and thus had a perfectly valid excuse for being stranded in the Hill Tracts. At some point a bus arrived heading to Kaptai, and Anik reluctantly got on after asking us permission to do so. We were now alone.

Now I was beginning to panic, and I was getting pretty angry at Yann. I wanted to go to the nearby village and beg for a place to sleep and I had decided that Yann was being too cautious. After all, he had put us on this route in the first place. We were beginning to argue a little bit more aggressively when barreling up the road appeared a bus. As it slowed down the conductor leaned out the door yelling "Rangamati Rangamati" and we picked up our bags and jumped on. I have never seen a bus as packed as this one. There seemed to be two bus loads of people crammed into one (which was most likely the case). There was luggage piled on the roof and people hanging out of the doors and windows. Again, we were given seats, Yann refused his, as an old man had been kicked out to make room for him.

Yann spent the next 2 hours or so, standing in the bus as we raced through the hills towards Rangamati, picking up more and more passengers, including a group of about 20 school girls walking home. We arrived in Rangamati 8 hours after having left Banderban. The friendly conductor dropped us off right in front of a hotel where we checked in immediately. We were immensely relieved. A foreign engineer that we had met in Banderban was sitting in the hotel lobby, I wondered what route he had taken to get here?!

Epilogue
I scoured the guidebook for a mention of the road, and there really wasn't anything talking about direct travel between the two cities. Finally I tracked down the source of Yann's information: he had read about it on wikitravel, (actually a great source of travel information). The website had the following description of the road "it is possible to get to Bandarban directly from Rangamati by way of Chandraghona, but the perilous route is not advisable at all. " Somehow, between the time Yann read this and the time we had to set out to Rangamati, the sentence had become transformed in Yann's mind as something along the lines of "the fastest way to Rangamati is through the backroads of the Chittagong Hill tracts via Chandraghona". Yann is yet to admit that my route may have been faster, but I will concede that it would not have been as much fun.

Market Day in Banderban

2010-03-04T16:30:00.001-05:00

We decided to spend our third day in Banderban without a guide. Since we were going to the town itself and not into any of the villages we felt comfortable getting around. The manager of the Hillside Resort tried to encourage us to take a tour and wasn't too generous with information sharing, but Banderban isn't very big so we weren't worried.

We planned to hitch a ride downhill on the back of a truck but it was still quite early in the morning and one never crossed our path. About half way into town we spotted an older woman dressed in traditional village clothing accompanied by two young girls in jeans and t-shirts. We decided to follow them to town as we knew it was market day. Unfortunately, we scared the old woman who quickly accelerated to the point that we had trouble keeping up. The two girls hung back to try a few words of English on us, but then raced ahead to catch up with their elder. By the time we entered Banderban they were out of sight. So we followed the pedestrian traffic into the main part of town.

Banderban was bustling with market day activity. The first group of people we encountered were the banana and jackfruit sellers. Truck and boat loads of fruit had been brought in for the day, and vendors watched sat by their goods along the road. We watched as buyers attempted to set the world record for most fruit in a vehicle. As we wandered among the fruit vendors we were greeted in English by a fat little Bengali boy on a bicycle. We were taken aback by his English, although not perfect, he was the most understandable local we had heard in a while. We asked him where he had learned, I can't remember his exact response, but I do recall that we had concluded that he was the son of some rich businessman or politician who had just moved to the area. He led us through the busy streets of Banderban to the permanent market near the river and we thanked him heartily, he seemed pretty proud of himself as he biked off. We were actually looking for the "tribal market" (as referred to by locals) that sets up every Saturday, regrouping villagers from around the area. We never found it, but we spent the whole morning at the town's main market which itself was packed, probably more than other days of the week. The market is set up near the river to allow for large shipment of goods from nearby villages. Porters carry the goods on their backs up the steep flight of stairs that connects the back of the shops to the river banks. We headed down to the river passing a constant stream of sweaty, barefoot porters, who usually stopped to be photographed despite their back-breaking loads. Wandering through the market stalls we were greeted with the same curiosity and enthusiasm that we had encountered throughout Bangladesh. People greeting us, posing for photos, trying out their few English words on us. One vendor insisted that we pick a complimentary item from his stand. I'm not sure what we eventually picked, but with a choice of onion, potato or hot pepper I think we walked away with a hot pepper. There was quite a variety of produce on display, of course the in-season bananas, pineapples and jackfruit, but also bright green herbs, betel leaves, dried fish and seafood, hot peppers, eggplants, pumpkin... We couldn't figure out why the only thing we could ever get to eat was bread and lentils. After a while in the market we decided to catch a rickshaw ride to the Buddhist Temple at the other end of town. We had somewhat unconvincingly argued to ourselves that we had in fact seen the Tribal Market. And since it was not even noon and we were already hot, sweaty and exhausted, we didn't know if we could handle another crowded market. A barefoot rickshaw driver agreed to take us to the temple for a small fee. It tooks us many tries to explain where we wanted to go, we had forgotten the name of the village where the temple stood (that had been taught to us earlier in the morning). Eventually it seemed we struck the right combination of syllables and we were off. Leaving behind the crowd that had gathered around to try to help with communication.

Banderban would probably rank first in the list of least pleasant places to be a rickshaw driver. Only a small area in the center of town is actually flat, and this is where of most of the drivers operate. Balaghata, home of Bangladesh's largest Buddhist temple is actually 4km outside of Banderban on a hilly, pothole-filled road. On multiple occasions I insisted that Yann jump out of the rickshaw to help our struggling driver haul his rusty, one-geared bike up a steep hill (I of course, had to stay in the rickshaw in order to preserve the driver's pride). The minute we cleared a hill though, the driver was quick to signal Yann to get back in. We arrived at the "Suprem Bliss Full Filled Buddha" temple around lunch time and hiked up the long flight of stairs leading to the temple. complex. A young, chubby monk led us into a dark cool room and directed us to sit down. We joined a family of pilgrims. The monk could speak some English (I am somewhat abusing the use of the word 'some' here), and he explained that we couldn't visit the golden stupa until the visiting hours, which weren't for another few hours. Yann and I, feeling particularly awkward with the dialogue (or lack-there-of) were eager to escape for lunch and return later but our host insisted that we stay. He brought out a bottle of Pepsi and some snacks which we were grateful for but did not really want to accept (in the end we did, thus feeling obliged to put some money in the offering box). The family of pilgrims presented money and gifts to the monk and we sat and watched while drinking soda. Eventually we freed ourselves and spent an hour or so at a small canteen at the base of the temple, where we drank more soda and ate stale pastries for lunch.

When we returned to the temple, we found a group of American university students waiting for us to join their tour. They were on a summer exchange, working in Dhaka and had come to the Hill Tracts for a short weekend holiday. One of the girls with the group was of Bengali origin, so she was able to help translate some of our guide's painfully detailed descriptions of the temple. The monk loved taking photos and would make us pose in various positions, including hands together in prayer. The Muslim girls seemed particularly uncomfortable doing this, but Yann and I thought the whole thing was hilarious (although we have made sure to destroy any evidence of these photos ever being taken). Eventually, the American group's driver stormed into the temple yelling that he had been waiting too long and that they had to leave. The group left without saying goodbye and without leaving an offering to the temple, despite having a personal tour outside visiting hours. The monk seemed disappointed, so Yann and I had to remain perky and interested for the rest of the tour, despite the absence of our translator. Our guide was extremely sweet and took more photos of us on the scorching roof of the temple. The tour eventually ended with our monk handing us a business card including his bank account number where we could send money. He showed us design plans for the the intended finished product. For 50,000 Takas (about 800 CDN) we could pay for a whole stupa . We kept the business card just in case we ever had the urge to have our names engraved on a golden stupa next to those of generals of the Burmese military junta.

Exploring the Chittagong Hill Tracts

2010-02-19T14:00:00.001-05:00

The hillside resort offers a series of tours of the area. We chose the least expensive tour, the one that involved no transportation costs. The tour was consisted of a walk to Haatibandha, a local village inhabited by the Tripura tribe. The walk was described as “a 2 hour walk that should not be undertaken by anyone who is not physically fit”. I wouldn't exactly qualify myself as “physically fit” but I figured the brochure wasn't pitched at backpackers. It took us 20 minutes to get to the village. Our guide was not particularly friendly, but he was local and he spoke many of the local languages. He seemed to be known by villagers. Actually we didn't mind that he didn't want to talk, as a day of small talk in broken English is usually what keeps us from signing up for tours in the first place. The village was dusty and seemed empty. Most of the adults were working in the fields as it was harvest time for many local fruits, pineapples in particular. The eyes of young mothers and their children peaked out from the windows of their bamboo-walled homes. It was too hot for them to be outside playing. A few children came out to get a better look at us, many of them wore crosses or photos of Jesus around their necks. Tripurans were converted to Christianity by missionaries some generations ago. We caught a glimpse of a local elder, wearing the full traditional costume consisting of hundreds of beaded necklace, bangles up to the elbows and heavy earrings stetching our the earlobes. Our guide asked her permission to be photographed which she refused, but another elder was happy to be photographed. She explained that she used to wear traditional costume, but that it was just too heavy in the heat, so she had given it up. To get back to the main road we took a different route, following the banks of the river. In a few weeks the river would probably swell closing off this route, but the rainy season was delayed. The banks of the river were inhabited by poor Bengali settlers, their homes looking significantly more dilapidated than those of Haatibaandha. Their homes seemed to be too close to the river and we wondered how they would manage when the rains came. At least the village was shaded, allowing for a little bit more noon-time activity. The children were out playing and fishing in the river and women washed their clothes. Not unlike in Dhaka and Chittagong, everybody here wanted to be photographed. We ended up back at the road, almost in town, so with the help of our guide we stopped a truck and climbed on to the back. It was loaded with sand which of course ended up in our clothes. Forget the expensive rickshaw, this was definitely the local form of transportation up the road. This ride was free, because our guide new the drivers. (I feel the need to explain this photo due to the extreme dorky expression on my face. Yes, I was very excited. Yes, the young boy behind me thought I was a weirdo. Also, I was holding the camera up so that it didn't get any sand in it, not in preparation for a shot.)

We agreed to continue for the afternoon with our guide so that we could see some villages further away. Being a member of the Bawm tribe, he wanted to show us a Bawm village which is where we headed first. The Bawm village of Faruk Para was right on the side of the road, next to the tourist hot spot Shilo Propat waterfall. A bus load of Bengali tourists were swimming and admiring the tiny waterfall while a few Bawm villagers had set up stands selling “local” blankets. A small store sold cold drinks and village women and children sold their mangoes and pineapples on the side of the road while chewing betel leaves. We ordered a few cold drinks from the store and sat outside next to an extremely old Baum man. We were completely taken aback when he spoke English to us, with a British accent. He expressed his happiness at having tourists visit that were not British: “before....all we had were British, now we even have Japanese!”. For some reason he was very excited about the Japanese, and he proceeded to mention them a few more times over the course of our brief conversation. Yann walked down to the water while I sat with the women fruit-sellers. They were extremely friendly and curious and we made great attempts to communicate with each other. They managed to ask me the key questions of whether or not I was married and whether or not I had children. An older woman gave me a demonstration of betel leaf rolling. Areca nuts are rolled in betel leaf and chewed, (causing teeth and gums to turn red) having the effect of a mild stimulant. When we left the village, the women gave us a mango for the road. By now our guide was beginning to warm up to us. Just a little. We spoke briefly about politics and he expressed his dismay at the current situation for many of the villagers. According to him, villagers could not sell their own produce in the markets across Bangladesh. By law, they could only sell wholesale to Bengalis who would then transport them across the country and sell them at huge profit. The villages were undeniably poor, almost none had access to electricity, running water, health care, transportation, schooling. Multiple NGOs were operating in the area, but a clear development plan involving locals was not evident. The only businesses operating in the area were Bengali, and land-grabbing seemed to be an ongoing problem (despite relocation of Bengalis officially stopping in 1984). Our guide was a young man who seemed to be sad and frustrated. We tried to express sympathy for his cause, but we understood his animosity towards foreigners.

He decided to bring us further up the road to a Mru village. We hitched another ride on the back of a truck, but he could only drop us part way. Soon after being dropped off we passed a father and daughter along the side of the road, hunched over harvesting pineapples with large machetes. The man yelled over at our guide to tell us to come over. He sat us down and sliced open two pineapples for us. They were warm and juicy, and the three of us hadn't eaten any lunch so they were gone rather quickly. They offered to cut us open another one, but we declined. We were covered in sticky pineapple juice and the man offered us the last half of his water bottle to rinse off our hands. Yann and our guide quickly blocked me as I reached for the water. I was extremely embarrassed, especially as I saw the pile of pineapples that hey had already cut, and I thought of how long they had been working in the sun. The village of Noou Para was barely visible from the road and without our guide we surely would have missed the small path leading to it. On our way down, we crossed the village chief who spoke briefly to our guide before heading back to the fields. By now I was completely exhausted, and even on the downhill walk to the village I fell behind. All I could think about was that I was going to have to walk up the same path. The village seemed deserted, but the children and elderly were just hidden in their homes to keep out of the suffocating heat. Our guide managed to get us invited into a village home, where an older couple was resting. Inside it was cool and dark and the bamboo floors were soft to sit on. We were offered some local liquor and the woman decorated me with locally-grown roses. The village women wear the roses as earrings, by shoving the stem through their stretched holes. It took her a while to get one in my ear, and it was pretty painful. (I didn't have to decline getting one through the other ear as it was never offered). Before leaving the woman gave me her beaded necklace, which I accepted. Then she asked for money for it, which we didn't mind. The walk back up to the road wasn't quite as painful as I had imagined. By now we had come to terms with the fact that we would be wet with sweat for the entirety of our time in Bangladesh. There was a small shaded structure along the road and we sat down to have a rest before finishing off the day's tour. Nothing had to be said between for us to agree that we would not be walking back to the resort, even though it would be downhill. The three of us sat in silence and waited for someone who could give us a ride back.

The Resorts of Banderban

2009-09-15T18:18:00.057-04:00

We debated for a while whether or not we would visit the Chittagong Hill Tracts, with the Canadian Government listing it as a "Avoid All Travel" area with the instructions "there is an extreme risk to personal safety and Canadians should not travel at this time". Somehow the Chittagong Hill Tracts were firmly fixed on the itinerary the minute we knew we were heading to Bangladesh. The area is a narrow strip of land sandwiched between India and Burma, home to the only "highlands" of Bangladesh (and its main source of timber). At partition, 99% of the population of the area was made up of ethnic minority groups. Today, almost 50% of the population is Bengali. Many of the Hindu tribes people fled to neighbouring India at partition, but after Bangladesh's war of independence, the government began resettling Bengali people to the area (an often cited reason for this resettlement is the tribes people siding with Pakistan during the war of Independence). A political party representing the various ethnic minorities of the Chittagong Hill Tracts was formed in the early seventies and began a 25 year armed struggle with the government. In 1998 a peace-treaty was signed promising the return of all stolen land and guaranteeing rights of return to those who fled the country. Not surprisingly, there is continued dissatisfaction with the implementation of the peace accord. The native inhabitants of the Chittagong Hill Tracts continue to be marginalized while land is still taken from them. The area was finally granted the "right" to use cell phones 2 months prior to our arrival. Despite the safety warnings, the area is a popular domestic tourist destination, as it boasts the country's only "mountainous scenery". And in a country with one of the highest population densities in the world, its such a lovely contrast to enter the sparsely inhabited hill tracts, only a three hour bus ride from Chittagong, Bangladesh's second largest city.

We arrived in Banderban, one of the region's largest population centres, on a Friday morning. Our guidebook recommended tourist facility slightly outside the town as the best place to stay in the region. Had we had a map and an idea of where we were going we would have resisted paying the rickshaw-cartel the "fixed price" to get there, but we didn't have much bargaining power. Cycle-rickshaws ply a small strip of Banderban, but everything else is too hilly and for anything over a kilometre or so you are stuck in a CNG (motorised rickshaw). Our motorised rickshaw chugged us up to the Hillside Resort. It was just close enough that Yann would definitely have suggested we walk had he known the distance, but just far enough and uphill enough that it would have been painful, so I was not-so-secretly grateful for our lack of map.

By the time we arrived at the Hillside Resort, we were already pouring sweat from our short walk up to the front desk. It was still fairly early in the morning but we could feel the intensity of the heat and humidity of the surrounding jungle. We had not seen any backpackers in Bangladesh except for a couple in Dhaka, so we were pretty surprised when we were told that there was not a single bed left in the complex (including one of their 36 dorm beds). We offered to sleep outside, or on the roof, but apparently even their tents and roof spots were taken by employees. The two managers were extremely apologetic, offered us a place for the next day and served us a huge plate of freshly cut pineapples. We ate them the huge airy dining hall overlooking the hills and jungle below, wondering what we would do.

We had seen a guest house on the road on our way up to the hillside resort and we asked about it. We were told that it was probably outside our price range, but we decided it was worth a try since it was on the way to town. It took us only a few minutes to get there, we were already sweaty and tired and we were walking downhill. (On the way, we crossed the huge tour group from Chittagong arriving to the hillside resort to take up all their beds). The place didn't look to be particularly booming but the gates were open so we walked in. We were greeted by a skinny Bengali teenager who directed us to a nice shaded gazebo. He couldn't speak much English, but he understood that we wanted a place to sleep. He quoted us the same as the other resort, but we would have our own private cabin with balcony overlooking the river below. We were feeling incredibly smart.

The skinny boy led us to the main building on the property where we met the owner, one of the first fat people we had seen in Bangladesh. He spoke English and he had children living in Canada. He was in the process of being interviewed by what seemed to be local media. He insisted we sit down and watch the interview in what turned out to be his "cottage". He was loud and confident and he called on a few more servants to serve us drinks and snacks. We felt pretty uncomfortable, and were really just trying to figure out if it was possible for us to stay the night and how much it would cost us. The owner just kept telling us to "take the cabin of our choice". Some of the cabins were still being built, and they were quite luxurious from the outside. Only two of them had working fans though, so we picked the one of the two in the shade.

Our large host insisted that we drop our bags at the cabin and come back to socialize with him at the main lodge. Yann and I always have trouble saying no in these types of situations and we ended up back at the lodge listening to our hosts monologues. Among the various things he talked about, the highlights were probably his $15 000 membership to the Chittagong Golf Club, his love of local alcohol that he could purchase from the tribes people who he "allowed on his land", the fact that the daughter of the tribal family living on his land was a prostitute, that he thought he should feed his baby deer alcohol to get it addicted and subsequently dependent on him, his decision that the resort would not be for "uncivilized locals" but for respectable guests like us. We were introduced to his collection of exotic pets that he had manage to capture from the jungle: the baby deer, a tiny monkey chained to a post in the sun and a civet cat. To top off the awful exposé we got to meet his mistress, who was hiding in the bedroom and didn't want to be seen. He forced us to enter the room and look at her as she screamed and covered her face. According to him she was actually a well-known t.v. personality. Over the course of our discussions we would often be left alone for long periods of time when our host would disappear to his bedroom or elsewhere. When we would try to leave the servants would insist that we stay seated in the dark living room. At the first opportunity we escaped the lodge and walked back up the hill to make sure that they had reserved us a bed at the other place. We felt sorry leaving all the servants to their empty resort. We figured they were being treated only slightly better than the tribes people living on "their owners land". In the afternoon we walked along the hillside and sat admiring the jungle and river below. We saw how far the Chittagong business man's property stretched out. Land that was undoubtedly procured via corrupt government officials and locals. He talked about installing an in ground pool at his resort, while the surrounding villages did not have electricity or running water. We couldn't wait to get away from this place. Eating dinner was as uncomfortable as our earlier socializing. We wanted to eat in our cabin, but we were ushered to the dining room to eat with the owner. The owner's girlfriend didn't want to eat with us. We were served a dinner consisting of rice and lentils, while the owner had his own meal prepared. The dinner came 4 hours after we had requested it. Before dinner we were served local alcohol, which had been diluted with warm milk. Neither of us were interested, but our dinner wouldn't be served unless we finished our drinks. In the brief moments we were alone, I managed to toss most of it down the sink (by now my dislike for our host had turned into paranoia and I was pretty convinced that this was a poisoning attempt). We made plans to get up early and did not want anyone to wake up to prepare us breakfast. After much insistence we settled on an order or toast.

In terms of comfort, our night was one of the worst ones spent yet in Bangladesh. By dusk the huge jungle bugs had come out and invaded our cabin. The cabin hadn't been used in a long time, judging from the vast amount of spider webs and bug carcasses. We found a mosquito net covered in pieces of dead bug and quickly got it up to protect our bed from any intruders. The net was so thick that the minute amount of air being produced by the ceiling fan could not reach us. The power was off for many hours any ways which made us appreciate whatever amount of coolness that the fan could provide us. We were soaked in sweat but too terrified to face the prospect of the army of bugs accumulated outside our mosquito net being free to land on us. In fact we both slept holding the net underneath our bodies to make sure that nothing could get in. Any time one of us moved the other would make sure that the net hadn't been disturbed. I few times in the night I braved leaving the safety of the mosquito nets to have a shower. It was the only way to cool myself down, although the effects only lasted a few minutes. Yann has a better tolerance for heat, and is also a lot more afraid of bugs, so he just sweated it out.

Our bags were packed and ready by 7am. None of the staff were awake to make us breakfast, which was a relief. But the owner's car was gone and we couldn't find anyone to pay. After enough shouting, one of the teenage staff appeared to figure out what was going on. Once our departure was figured out, all of the young staff members appeared, including some that we hadn't even met yet. It took the whole group of them to figure out how they were going to charge us 3 times the price they had originally quoted for our stay. While we waited they managed to scribble down an itemized bill, with various incidental fees and a higher room rate because we had a "choice cottage". We figured that since their boss was gone, they were trying to get something for themselves, which didn't bother us. We laughed at them, questioned a few of their charges, then paid the original room rate and about 3 times the going tourist rate for the lentil dinner. They seemed slightly disappointed.

We were so happy to not have to see or talk to the owner again, we left as fast as we could, and raced up the hill to the other resort. We were there long before our room would be ready, so we sat in the dining hall and admired the jungle scenery that lay before us. Free of in ground pools, for now.

To Chittagong

2009-08-23T19:30:00.001-04:00

When we got to the Dhaka train station, we were ushered behind the counter of the ticket office, where the attendant booked us our seats. For our night train to Chittagong (Bangladesh's second largest city) we opted for the slightly less luxurious non-AC cabin. We were spoiled however by the ticket salesmen, who had reserved a private two-bed cabin for us (what a lovely surprise). We gushed about the lovely train to locals, who didn't believe that they could possibly be as nice as in India!? Hmmmmmm..... Arriving early in the morning in Chittagong, we headed to the strip of hotels around the train station, many mentioned in the guidebook. Of course, we had to first check out the cheapest of the bunch. We agreed to take the room before the gigantic rat scuttled passed the door in front of the largest cockroach carcass we'd ever seen. Thankfully the rats and cockroaches were discreet and this was the last we saw or heard of them. Other than the staff barging into our room unannounced every hour or so to offer us something, we were very satisfied.

The main purpose of our Chittagong visit was to pick up a permit for travel to the Chittagong Hill Tracts. An area of Bangladesh bordering Burma, whose non-Bangla residents have been fighting with the government for a few decades (more on that later). We rickshawed our way to the District Commissioners office, who issued us a permit within 30 minutes for all the areas we wanted to visit. We had expected a more difficult time getting permits, so we now had the entire day to visit Chittagong. Chittagong's main tourist attraction has long been the ship breaking yards, where ships from all over the world come to be taken apart piece by piece hundreds of Bangladeshi workers. The yards have now been closed to foreigners for a few years, due to tourists raising world-wide publicity for the awful working conditions of the yards' employees. We decided, that being the country's busiest port, we should spend some time at the water. We took a rickshaw to the main boat terminal following these instructions from the Lonely Planet: "You can hire a boat from the boat terminal to go across the river (Tk 20, 10 minutes)to the fish harbour and market. The Marine Fisheries Academy is housed in a new building with a small museum."

We boarded a boat taxi on a small dock, we were quite certain that we were not at the main boat terminal, but according to the map we were in the right place. On the other side of the river there was no sign of a bustling fish market. We followed a long pathway next to a tall, barbed-wire fence. We ended up at a dusty, empty square with a few small shops. We were greeted with looks of surprise as we inquired "which way to the fish market?". Someone eventually managed to explain that there was no longer a fish market OR that there was no fish market that day OR that the fish market was only in the morning OR that there was never a fish market here in the first place. On to plan B, to the Museum! Even more confusion about this one. Finally someone understood Fisheries Academy/Navy/Army and we were led through fields, onto the other side of the barbed-wire fence. Our local guide dropped us off at the main administrative building and said goodbye. We entered the quiet building looking for someone to show us to the museum. Someone eventually appeared directed us to a room where staff seemed to be eating lunch. An older man got up to talk to us: "You want to visit our museum?" (incredulously). "Ummmm yeah". "How do you know about our museum?" (now suspiciously). "Ummmm, actually its right here in our guide book" (extra cheerily). The fact that their Fisheries Museum was mentioned in an international guidebook was all it took to really perk people up.

We ended up in a waiting room awaiting instructions. The older man popped his head out of the neighbouring office: "Can I have the book please?" (we gave him the guidebook). A few minutes later he exited the office, quite pleased: "Ok, He will see you" (excitedly). "Ummm who will see us?". "The principal will see you!" (obviously!).

Now we were in the spotless, air-conditioned office having been granted an audience with the principal of the Bangladesh Fisheries Academy. We had a long friendly talk, the principal spoke perfect English and gave us a description of the school. We felt completely out of place in our grubby clothes but we kept it cool, even though we were thinking what the hell are we doing here? Once we had passed the examination, we were finally allowed to see the museum. We were escorted there by two academy teachers and one lab technician. The sign on the door said "Museum", which we suppose is how the writer of the guidebook might have heard of its existence. Clearly, the writer had never visited however. It wasn't a museum at all. It was the school's biology lab! A collection of fish from the Bay of Bengal sitting in jars, suspended in formaldehyde. We tried to seem as interested as possible, but there only so many brown flaky fish bodies one can be impressed by.

The two teachers who showed us around were extremely friendly and talkative. They were shocked and appalled to hear that we were teachers visiting as part of our 3 months of vacation. After taking a few photos with us, they called down to the dock to make sure that the military taxi didn't leave without us. We were given a ride back to the other bank, along with other employees of the Bangladesh Navy.

Rickshaws Through Dhaka

2009-07-20T04:49:00.000-04:00

Our first afternoon in Old Dhaka was spent with our guide Jewel. He had a limited repertoire, so we followed him to the three destinations that he knew. Despite our usual reticence to follow guides, I had convinced Yann to follow him. The main reason for me wanting to follow him was the belief that it might cut down our time in the heat. We stopped first at Ahsan Manzil (or the Pink Palace), one of Dhaka's lovelier buildings, a short walk away from the main boat terminal. I was too exhausted to walk up the stairs of the palace, so I hid in the shade while Jewel and Yann visited the museum inside the palace. My rest was interrupted by requests for photos with me, and I spent most of the time in the sun posing, until a guard shooed everyone away. The three of us then hopped on to a rickshaw to the Sitara Mosque, a lovely little mosque a short ride away. The mosque gates weren't open but with a little shouting by Jewel we were let in for a private visit. The mosque is completely covered in mosaic, some parts restored by a rich donor (using Japanese and English china) and other parts original. Each of the four mosque towers are tiled in white and scattered with blue mosaic stars. We were warmly received by the caretaker who showed us Mount Fuji on the Japanese tiles. We weren't as lucky finding the caretaker of the imposing Armenian Church. We had to content ourselves with views from outside the gates.

Our last stop with Jewel was Shankharia Bazar, more commonly known as Hindu street. One of the last enclaves of Hindu craftsmen (shankharias) in Bangladesh. This narrow, rickshaw-packed street is home to dozens of tiny workshops. In our short visit we saw artisans making harmoniums from scratch and an old man carving bangles from conch shells. Shortly after we parted ways with Jewel. Partly because we were exhausted and partly because he had a head-on collision with another pedestrian. This left him very much confused with a huge gash above his eye. Despite Jewel's earlier promises, he demanded twice the price that we had agreed to pay for his guide services. This wasn't particularly surprising, but was disappointing nonetheless.

By the time we arrived back at the hotel, the heat rash that had appeared after our train ride from Delhi to Kolkata had pretty much covered most of my body. We had spent our first night in a room without air-conditioning, but after seeing my heat rash, Yann agreed that it might be beneficial to have it. This doubled our hotel bill, but was enough to get my skin back to a somewhat tolerable state. We had failed in our attempt to withstand the Bangladesh summer without using air-conditioning. It felt extravagant in a country with a dire lack of power. Millions would be attempting to get a good night's sleep without even an operational fan.

On our second day in Dhaka, we decided to tackle the city without the use of a guide. This required special planning due to adorable but extremely annoying "English speaking" rickshaw guides that hovered around our hotel entrance trying to sell us their full day tours. We left with an old gray-bearded rickshaw driver, who we knew would end up costing us more than it should because he was cute and skinny. He got us to the ruins of Lalbagh Fort, one of Dhaka's main attractions, elsewhere it probably wouldn't be given much visiting time, but in Bangladesh, the sights are few and far between, and we wanted to make sure to give them our full attention. We spent a few hours roaming around the unshaded grounds, there isn't much left of the fort, but the grounds are well kept, and we felt sheltered from the noisy and crowded city that surrounded us. After the quiet of Lalbagh, we headed back into the heart of Old Dhaka for a visit to Bicycle Street. We had no problem explaining this site to our rickshaw driver, its the city's headquarters for everything Rickshaw. Each shop specializes in some aspect of rickshaw making and repair. But what we were really there for was the rickshaw artwork. Nearly all of Dhaka's 400 000 + rickshaws are adorned with colourful artwork, on the seat, or as a back bumper-like flap. Basically every possible surface of the rickshaw has some painted metallic cut-out, plastic streamers of fake flowers attached to it. Popular themes include: the Taj Mahal, bloody Bangla movies involving big women and big guns and the serene cabin-in-woods scene (this one is actually quite sad, because it is exactly the opposite of everything that is Dhaka). We caused quite a commotion on Bicycle Street when we pulled out our cameras. Every single shop-owner, pedestrian, child wanted a photo taken of themselves. Men carrying heavy loads on baskets balanced on their heads would stop and insist that we photograph them. We could have spent the entire day there and the requests would have never stopped. In the late afternoon we headed to the sombre "Museum of Liberation" celebrating Bangladesh's bloody civil war with Pakistan (then West Pakistan). The country is extremely proud of its stand to protect its language rights, which were at the core of the conflict with the Urdu-speaking West Pakistan. We met a young man later who summed up his thoughts about his country: "We are very poor, we don't have very much, but we have two things, we have our beautiful language, and we have our religion".

We had successfully navigated ourselves through the incredible chaos of Dhaka for a complete day of sight-seeing, despite our inability to utter a single word in Bangla. In fact, our initial plan of bargaining for prices with a calculator was quashed on our first negotiation, when we realized that Bangladesh does not use the same number system as we do (this is actually the first country where we experienced this). So despite most of the rickshaw drivers unable to speak English (and many illiterate) we relied entirely on the help of strangers to help us get around. Actually we never even had to ask anyone for help. Within seconds of flagging down a rickshaw driver we would be surrounded by a crowd of onlookers, the best English speaker of the bunch (usually not too great) would somehow figure out where we wanted to go, explain it to the driver AND negotiate the price for us. Often the crowd would be arguing with the driver in our favor. Without fail, every time we needed to get somewhere, someone would appear to help us. We had a wonderfully pleasant day, despite the hot humid weather.

A River Cruise in Dhaka

2009-06-22T02:07:00.013-04:00

We were up and ready to explore Dhaka by 7 am. We thought that this would be the best way to tolerate the heat and humidity of the city. Apparently we were the only ones with this idea, at least in the area around our hotel. All the shops were still closed and there was almost no action on the streets, in sharp contrast to our arrival at rush hour the night before. We delayed our departure an hour or so, but it didn't really matter, because it was already hot and sticky.

By 9 am, we were standing in front of the Sadarghat boat terminal, being swept away by a boatman, promising us a tour of the Buriganga river. I think he saw the hesitation in our eyes, because he didn't even let us say a word as he ushered us through the crowds of people and onto a tiny wooden craft sandwiched between too huge passenger ferries. Yann looked utterly terrified (although swears he was only slightly worried) as we slipped through the narrow gap separating the two boats and into the open water. The man who had intercepted us at the entrance tot he boat terminal, was in fact not a boat driver, but an "English speaking guide" named Jewel, who had subcontracted our oarsman. According to Jewel, his mission was not to make money, but to make sure that Bangladesh was known to the world as a wonderful place for tourists, "yo pwoblem is my pwoblem". Almost immediately into our river ride he began pitching us his tour of Old Dhaka. We didn't pay too much attention to him, we were too busy watching everything going on around us. There aren't as many boats on the river as there are rickshaws on the streets of Dhaka, but the traffic is equally disorganized and chaotic. We felt slightly vulnerable as we were rowed down the river next to boats that probably couldn't even tell we were there. We docked on the opposite river bank and visited a small fish and produce market. Right next to the market was a grade school, where Jewel's two boys attended. He was happy to introduce us to his children, who spoke the best English among their schoolmates. Within a few minutes of our arrival, it seemed like the entire school had come out to greet us. Women at the local market lined up to have their photos taken and shake our hand. A produce vendor threw potato peels at me until I finally understood that she wanted me to bring her to Canada with us. The village lined up on the edge of the river to wave goodbye as we pulled off. One of the most enthusiastic sendoffs we've ever had. Jewel then brought us further down the river to his neighborhood, where he wanted to show us his home. He lives in the ship-building district, where huge ship hulls seem to be formed anew by hammering scraps of metal together. Its unbelievable that these ships eventually become sea-worthy. Thousands of men, young and old, work all day hanging off the ships bashing pieces of metal together. You can hear the sounds of hammers clanging against the ships frames from every direction. Most of the local shops sell old ship parts. Jewel brought us to his friend's shop where men were actually building soldering machines from scraps. We navigated through the maze of ships and ship parts until we arrived to Jewel's house. One small room where he sleeps with his wife and two boys. A kitchen is shared between a few other families housed in similar one-room homes. His room was perfectly tended to, with all the pots and pans carefully hanging on the wall and all the family's possessions neatly tucked away out of sight. We spent a few minutes resting while the neighbors gathered at the window. Everywhere we visited, crowds gathered around to have their photo taken or to inquire about us. We were always greeted with smiles and laughter. Jewel proudly informed us that these were "his people" so we need not worry about anything happening to us. Although, he couldn't guarantee "full protection" on the other side of the river, back in Old Dhaka. This is where we were heading next. We had given in to Jewel's tour offers and decided he would show us around for a few more hours, even though it wasn't his turf and he was slightly annoying.

Montreal to Dhaka

2009-06-20T17:00:00.000-04:00

We briefly considered a direct flight to Dhaka, until we saw the price difference between a flight to Delhi. We landed at midnight in the suffocating heat of the Delhi summer, spent a few hours in the usual cockroach infested room in Pahar Ganj, Delhi's budget travel ghetto, before boarding a train to Kolkata the next afternoon. Yann and I had been debating whether or not to travel in air-conditioned cabins (I was for it), but in the end it didn't matter, because there were no berths left in any of the air-conditioned classes. After a day waiting in the sweltering heat of Delhi, we were already exhausted by the time we boarded the train. In non-ac train travel, sections are divided into open compartments containing 8 berths. Six people, including us had already arrived in our compartment when a family of 5 showed up. Forcing our sweaty bodies to be that much closer together, I demanded to see their tickets, which of course they claimed to have, but never produced. After a brief argument, the other foreigner in our compartment began to cry. I blame the heat and exhaustion for my frustration, I watched the family all night trying to get sleep huddled together on tiny bunks, with the father curled up on the floor beneath them. By the next morning I was trying to make amends for my rudeness and was thankfully forgiven. The family shared their homemade lunch with us and invited us to have dinner at their home upon our return to Kolkata.

Even with a bunk to ourselves, sleep was pretty much impossible. Up on the top bunk where I was hidden away, there was no air from a window nor a fan. I lay rolling in my own sweat, soaking up all the dirt from the sheetless bunk, until I was a filthy, soaking mess. Yann, on the middle bunk did a little bit better. But we still had a long 8 hour day sitting 9 people on the two bottom bunks. By the time we arrived in Kolkata, I had convinced Yann that we absolutely needed air-conditioning. But lugging our bags around checking our hotels proved to be too exhausting and I booked us into an ultra-cheapie room with only a crappy fan and filthy sheets. Yann was perplexed by my change of room choice, but all I wanted was to lie down.

The next morning we had a bus to catch to Dhaka. No one at the hotel could confirm the departure time, but we had read that buses left at 5:30. So we set our watches for 4:45 and arrived in plenty of time to board the first bus of the morning (we opted for the AC bus). It took about 3 hours to travel the 84km to the India/Bangladesh border, we were surprised that the road linking these two main roads was barely the width of two cars.

Border crossing was particularly jovial, especially on the Bangladesh side, where the customs officers invited us to have tea with them. The Indian officers were a bit more of a pain, forcing Yann to go back through customs to change his Indian rupees into Bangladeshi takas (we haven't confirmed if this was an actual rule, if he wanted a bribe or if he was just being difficult) We were too worried that our bus would leave us behind, so we didn't argue too much (although I put in a valiant effort). As I filled out our immigration forms the sweat was pouring into my eyes and all over the forms, I don't know that I have ever sweat so profusely in my life. Yann was having a good laugh, claiming that he "loved the heat".

After getting our immigration stamps, we exited into Bangladesh, where we now had to track down our bus. We were faced with dozens of bus company stalls, all identical in appearance, all with Bengali signs. English seemed to have completely disappeared within the span of 100m. Being the only two foreigners on the buses passenger list, we were tracked down pretty quickly by the bus company employees who ushered us to the waiting room. We were soon joined by dozens of Bangladeshi men, who we believed to be bus passengers, but who turned out to be people coming to talk to us, or just get a glimpse of us. Every conversation began with "your country please?" and would end with "your relation please?" to which we would answer "we are husband and wife", great approval and nods followed by a "thank you thank you". The young boy at the bus stand taught us the Bengali sentence "Ami Bangladeshke volobasi","I love my Bangladesh".

The rest of our bus ride to Dhaka passed through similar scenery to that on the Indian side, on an equally narrow road. But when we arrived at the ferry crossing, we got our first view of the Bangladesh we had pictured in our minds: a vast muddy river, stretching out for miles, occupied by dozens of passenger ferries, fishing boats and cargo ships. The banks of the river dotted with thatched roof mud houses and children swimming. Not a hill to be seen anywhere. The children playing on the river banks were amazingly quick to spot us on the upper deck of the ferry and waved continuously at us while our ferry slowly passed them view. Other ferry passengers were eager to ask us where we were from and what we were doing in their country. As we approached Dhaka, our bus slowed down to a crawling speed. We had now been joined on the road by hundreds of auto-rickshaws, cycle-rickshaws, pedestrians, trucks, all honking. When we pulled into the bus company terminal, we had no idea where we were nor how we would possibly be able to navigate the traffic. We stood on the sidewalk for minutes watching the gridlock made up mostly of cycle-rickshaws. We weren't even able to cross the street. Meanwhile, on the sidewalk, a steady stream of pedestrian commuters were blowing by us (and the traffic), we were in the way no matter where we stood. Yann couldn't even utter a word, we felt (and must have looked) completely lost.

It didn't take long before a few people had stopped to help us. They flagged us down an empty cycle-rickshaw (there were not many of these available), a teenage boy who couldn't speak a word of English. Somehow our crowd of helpers managed to understand where we were going, and explain it to our tiny sarong wearing driver. Without a word, he dove into the traffic. We sped through the city, our tiny sarong-clad driver changing lanes and forcing his way in front of oncoming buses and cars. Under over-passes and through garbage-filled back lanes, our driver's shirt was now completely soaked with sweat as he rode his one-speed bike for almost half an hour. It was the most spectacular ride through a city we've ever had. When we finally arrived at the hotel, we paid him the demanded fare, 25 takas, that's correct, 40 cents. Five days after leaving Montreal, we were finally in Dhaka.

A Walk in Lima

2009-05-24T09:28:00.003-04:00

We took a 26 hour bus ride from La Paz to Lima. Along with a pair of French tourists, we managed to be the only tourists lured into a "customs checkpoint" at the border by some unscrupulous guards. We were asked to show them all our money and they sifted through our bags. The four of us made sure that at least two people were present at each of the checks and the guards seemed to back down when it was clear that we suspected them of bad behavior. The actual checkpoint, we found out soon after, was about 100m up the road. The "luxury" bus we boarded at the border came with an extremely serious (and nutty) travel attendant who ushered us quickly onto the bus. She decided that it was her job to keep anyone from exiting the bus at any time. This was a huge pain, because we hadn't purchased a lot of water, knowing that we would be able to buy some en route. We decided that this was not a customary procedure, as most of the passengers were getting angry and began hurling out insults directed at our hostess. This caused the utterly crazy woman to become increasingly militant until she was waging a full out war on her unruly passengers. One of the few Western tourists on the bus had to leave us quite early on, the attendant had told her that the bus bathroom was only for peeing, but was not letting her exit the bus to use other facilities!? The poor girl looked utterly distressed as we left her in some town. When we exited the bus in Lima it was the first breath of non-recycled bus air we had taken in over a day, we were excruciatingly thirsty and completely exhausted.

Lima is a sprawling, confusing city. We were relegated to the rich tourist district of Miraflores by lack of creativity and adventurousness. With only two days in Lima, without even a map or guidebook, we didn't plan to do much (we were only in Lima because it saved us money on the plane tickets). We visited the amazing sights of Miraflores: (1) Two blocks of giant tourist souvenir warehouses (highly recommended by the adorable American couple we met) (2) The modern ocean-side shopping mall (where Yann bought a small Dunkin' Donuts coffee). Despite the riveting excitement of Miraflores, we had our fill of llama trinkets and pashmina shawls and wanted to see other neighborhoods of Lima.

On the advice of our hostel staff we took a taxi to the historic downtown centre of Lima, rather than take public transportation "which would require transferring buses in a bad neighborhood". We were skeptical about all the warnings, but we had no guidebook, and the only map we had was a small tourist pamphlet. Since most of Lima's sights are concentrated within a few blocks, we knew once we were downtown, we didn't have much searching to do. Our taxi driver dropped us off at the Plaza Mayor in time for us to watch the bizarre changing of the guards ceremony. Bizarre, because spectators have to watch it from outside the gates of the Presidential Palace, actually from across the street. Crowds of school children, families and tourists jostle for position on the sidewalk, across the streets from the gates of the palace. To make sure no one gets to close, a row of riot cop stands between the crowd and the palace. I watched the routine while Yann was entertained by a grumpy old Peruvian man, who spent 20 minutes pointing out all the similarities between the French, Italian and Spanish language. After the excitement of the changing of the guards was over, we wandered around the Plaza searching for something to visit. We walked along a pedestrianized street until we were behind the Presidential Palace facing the Rimac river and a large hill in the distance dotted with brightly-painted homes. We decided to cross the river to get a closer view. As we crossed the bridge, we noticed the lovely colonial architecture and a large church in the street directly in front of us. We strolled down the street heading towards the church, carrying our large day bags, and our even larger cameras hanging around our necks. We left the majority of the palace riot police standing on the bridge behind us. We could still spot the fluorescent yellow reflectors of the single police officers stationed at every street corner in the distance, so it didn't feel like we were leaving the tourist district. I remember making two brilliant observations as we walked along; "Boy! people sure like to whistle around here!" and "Boy! That's the third person who passed us making the sign of the cross!". Yann made the third astounding observation "Look, those people across the street seem to be waving at us!". Once we concluded that the shopkeepers had in fact leaped out of their stores to wave us down, we stopped to analyze the complex flow of information coming to us in the form of subtle clues. At the same time, we bumped into the last visible policeman stationed on the street. The kind shopkeepers were looking out for us, and were in fact desperately waving their arms and pointing towards the Presidential Palace. The policeman, after instructing us to hide our cameras, stood in the middle of the sidewalk blocking us from moving forward. The policeman kept repeating "peligroso", which neither Yann nor I knew the meaning of (so much for our "Speak in a Week" Spanish CDs). It took us a surprisingly long time to decide that we should in fact head back towards the plaza. We were actually pretty frazzled and we sped back from where we came from, to the sound of the same whistling, now taking on a new and slightly more alarming meaning. Oh, and we looked up "peligroso" in our pocket dictionary once we were back in tourist territory: "dangerous".

Thus ended our Lima exploring, we were both mad at ourselves for our bad judgment and we concluded that such naive travelers could only be set loose on Miraflores, which is where we stayed for the rest of our time in Lima.

Note: Back in Canada, we came across a blog describing a traveler's day in this same neighborhood (Cerro San Cristobal), where he explored the homes on the mountainside, met locals and had no problems whatsoever...

Fruit in Sucre

2009-04-25T12:32:00.027-04:00

When we arrived to Sucre, it was the first time we had been under 3000m since we had landed in La Paz two weeks earlier. Sucre is markedly different from other cities we had visited in the Bolivian Altiplano, and not only owing to the change in climate. It is a city made up of elegant Spanish Colonial era, white washed buildings and churches. As Bolivia's legislative capital, the seat of Bolivia's Catholic Church and home to one of the oldest universities in the "New World" it is not as poor as its next door neighbour Potosi. In June 2008 a group of indigenous farmers was through Sucre's central plaza, forced to take off their shirts and burn the Wiphala and MAS flags (the Wiphala flag is that of Bolivia's indigenous people, MAS is Morales' Party). All this to the cheers of "on your knees shitty Indians", "long live the capital Sucre"... This was the current political climate when we visited Sucre. Tourists like to stick around the hostels of Sucre to learn Spanish and enjoy the lovely weather. Yann and I enjoyed the hot climate and agreed that the city was quite lovely, but concluded that it was also fairly dull. As in Potosi, we visited all the churches and museums including the one that houses Bolivia's declaration of Independence. The views of the city from the top of the Felipe Neri Convent were particularly nice. The highlight of Sucre for us was the central market where we ate all of our meals with crowds of locals. We went there every night for greasy potatoes and chicken, and every afternoon for gigantic bowls of fruit covered in yogurt. The town of Tarabuco is about 65km from Sucre, and its Sunday market is a popular excursion. Tarabuco and its neighbouring villages are renowned for their intricate textiles. We decided to visit, mainly for lack of other day trip options. Most of the vendors in Tarabuco target the visiting tourists. All sell "authentic embroideries" of various quality (after a visit to the textile museum in Sucre, it is difficult to impress). Most of the local vendors wear traditional clothing, but this seems mostly to be a show for the visiting tourists. Away from the central plaza, vendors sell everyday goods and tourists are slightly more scarce. We wandered the back streets for a few hours, but we were still disappointed by the "market". Back in Sucre, Yann and I joined a group of tourists racing to the fruit stalls. Despite arriving past closing time, we managed to get a vendor to sell us all fruit cups through the locked gates. Yann and I enjoyed our last treat before our long trip to Lima.

Mining in Bolivia

2009-04-22T15:48:00.002-04:00

There was no time to rest, even after our three day tour of the Bolivian desert. First thing the next morning, we were on the bus to Potosi. Yann had recovered well and we had received the good news that 67% of voters had supported Evo Morales in the vote of confidence referendum (that had taken place while we were on the tour). In the western highlands of Bolivia (where we were traveling), where the population is poor and mainly indigenous, support for Morales was even higher. We arrived in Potosi in the late afternoon. We made our way through Potosi's cobblestone alleys, past its crumbling colonial mansions and dozens of churches, admiring the massive Cerro Rico mountain that seems to loom over the city from wherever we were standing. Potosi has a grand and terrible history, and tourists come here for glimpses of the vestiges both of grandeur and of terror. Four hundred years of history has shaped Potosi into a city where the divide between the rich and the poor is even more present than in other parts of the country. (Perhaps why Morales and his Movement for Socialism Party enjoy over 80% support, the most of all prefects in Bolivia). It was established as a mining town in the 16th century and quickly the Spanish discovered that the nearby mountain was full of silver ore. The Spanish removed 45 000 tones of pure silver from the from what seemed to be an inexhaustible source of silver. Thousands of native Quechua and Aymara people were enslaved, and sometimes forced to live underground for 3 months (until they died). When the native population had been decimated (hundreds of thousands are said to have died in the mines), African slaves were shipped to Potosi to continue the work. An estimated 30 000 African slaves died, and rather quickly, due to the 4000m altitude. At the height of silver excavation, the population of the city swelled to over 200 000, making it one of the world's biggest cities. It is even mentioned in Cervantes' Don Quixote "I were to requite thee as the importance and nature of the cure deserves, the treasures of Venice, the mines of Potosi, would be insufficient to pay thee."

By the beginning of the 19th century most of the silver had been depleted and the city began to decline. Today, there is almost no silver left in Potosi, neither in Cerro Rico or in the museums and churches. Most is in Europe. We did the mandatory visit to the Potosi Mint, a testimony to Potosi's previous position of power, the coins for most of Europe were produced here for over a century. We visited a handful of churches, mostly for the great views of the city from their rooftops. And we visited museums and developed a particularly liking for some of the Bolivian artwork. We noted the common theme of Spanish conquistadors crucifying Jesus, which, given Potosi's history is quite an apt representation. On our second day in Potosi, we decided to witness what remains of Cerro Rico mining. We took a popular "Mine Tour" with a local company. For 10$ you get a trip to the mining quarter of Potosi (including the miner's market), then a refinery then a visit inside one of the dozens of cooperative mines that operate in the old tunnels of Cerro Rico. Before heading to the market we were first fitted with ridiculous suits, hardhats and lamps. The lamps and hardhats proved to be useful, but the rubber coveralls just served to highlight our invasive presence in the tunnels. We paraded through the small miners' market purchasing "gifts" for the miners on the insistence of our guide. Gifts included soft drinks, coca leaves and sticks of dynamite, all three available at most market stalls. Miners purchase all of their supplies themselves, hence the absence of any sophisticated equipment (including masks). Mines have been stripped of most of their wealth and ore is extracted with the hope of having a high enough mineral content to make decent money. Each cooperative works in teams sharing their meager profits. Miners are mostly uneducated and indigenous and are forced into mining by circumstance. Small children, boys and girls, enter the mines young, as they are able to crawl to small hard to reach corners. Miners usually die within 15 years of entering the mines, from silicosis (caused by the inhalation of large quantities of silica dust). We arrived at the Candeleria mine around lunch time, and workers were preparing to enter the mines for the beginning of their 12 hr+ shift. They prepared their painfully rickety equipment and put on their cloth masks and we watched them enter the mine. Shortly after, our group of about 8 people entered the mine behind them. We were accompanied by two guides, one to lead and the other to help people out if they began to feel uncomfortable. The first few hundred meters of tunnel is wide with high ceilings, it is dark and extremely noisy, due to the hydraulic pipes used to power the carts. The air is stale and stinky, the tunnel is hot and your lungs begin burning almost immediately after entering. It took us about 10 minutes to get to the end of the main tunnel with the ceiling at which point we sat and rested. We were given a description of the following part of the mine. We would descend a few meters at which point we would enter a tunnel in which we would have to crawl until we reached the second level of the mine. Yann had to be convinced to take this tour, and when we turned the corner and watched as people began entering the tunnel on their hands and knees he turned around to leave. Another tourist had already dropped out ahead of him and our guide left with both of them. I was the last person in our convoy. With just the slight descent further into the mine the temperature had already risen and us inexperienced tourists were kicking up dust everywhere around us, (much to the dismay of the miners that had grumpily joined the queue behind me).
It is hard for me to describe the smells and the discomfort of my few minutes crawling through the tunnel. About halfway through the tunnel, I turned around and crawled back, despite the encouragements of my fellow tourist next to me. I knew that if I got to the end of the tunnel I would eventually have to turn back and do it again. I raced out of the mine (as fast as I could), out of breath and afraid.
Outside the mine Yann and I sat in silence covered in dust and feeling pretty lame dejected as we watched a group of even young miners getting ready to enter the mine. For a wonderful portrayal of the lives of Potosi miners we strongly encourage you to watch "The Devil's Miner" a heartbreaking documentary about mining in Cerro Rico filmed in 2005.

Information at www.thedevilsminer.com

Back to Civilization

2009-04-07T09:03:00.001-04:00

After a great day two, we were ready for the final and longest day (12 hours of driving) of our tour of Southwestern Bolivia. We spent the previous evening eating spaghetti, playing cards and drinking cheap Chilean wine. None of us had particularly considered the fact that we were at an altitude of almost 4000m. We slept poorly, Yann and I huddled together in a single bed under a pile of damp blankets, wearing all of our clothes. There were around 7 or 8 groups spending a night at the tourist lodge and we had planned to be the first group gone in the morning. We wanted to watch the sun rise over the Sol de Manana, a geyser basin.

We were the first group awake (4:30am), we had all the bags ready, we passed on breakfast (much to the dismay of Hilarion who seemed to want to keep sleeping) and we began loading up the jeep. It was extremely cold outside so we took shifts going outside to help load the jeep (with Jonathan and Jonas doing the bulk of the work). Yann seemed to be struggling and was obviously not doing very well, a combination of food, alcohol (only 2 glasses of wine) and altitude had flattened him. We sent him back to bed while we tried to get things ready. We were getting frustrated with the speed at which Hilarion and Maria were packing up, they had nothing packed almost half an hour after the six of us were ready and waiting. The other groups were beginning to wake up and prepare their things (with their guides working much more efficiently).

By 5:30am we should have been on the road, but our poor jeep had had a rough night in the sub-zero weather. When we heard the repeated sound of a jeep starter (not starting), we didn't have to see whose jeep it was, we already knew... We tried everything to start it, we pushed, we boosted the battery, we changed parts. After multiple attempts at getting the jeep started by rolling it uphill, I threw in the towel. My lungs were burning, my heart was pounding and my hands were numb, I thought I was going to pass out. Jonas and Jonathan must have spent a brave 2 hours with Hilarion in the -20 C weather, trying to get our awful jeep started. They enlisted the help of other drivers who tried their best, but had their own clients and jeeps to deal with. One by one they drove off, until we were the last jeep at the lodge. We finally pulled away at about 8am, we were 2 hours behind most of the other groups.

Yann's extra hours of sleep had not improved his situation. He was pale and exhausted, and we piled him under blankets in the back of the jeep. When we got to the Sol de Manana to see the geysers, Yann couldn't leave the jeep. The stench of sulfur in the air wasn't helping him get over his nausea and headache, his face had gone from white to green. We were now climbed to an altitude of almost 5000m. I visited the impressive geysers and hot bubbling sludge by myself, trying to rush through so that we could get to a lower altitude and escape the smell. Nearby are the natural Termas de Polques hot springs, which we were really looking forward to, until we realised that we would have to strip down to our bathing suits, get wet, and then exit into the cold air. Yann had still not left the back of the jeep and was still freezing under his pile of blankets, so there was no question as to whether or not he would enter the water. The three other guys stripped down to the speedos the minute we got there and beckoned Mathilde and I to join them. I spent at least an hour in the water, which was so wonderful after our cold night and awful morning. Getting out wasn't pleasant, but was manageable.

I began to wonder why we were hanging around at the hot springs for so long, as we still had another 50km to the Chilean border where we would visit the Laguna Verde and the 6000m Licancabur Volcano. From Laguna Verde, Yann, Michael and I would leave the three Frenchmen to climb the volcano, and we would switch into a jeep who had dumped passengers at the Chilean border and was heading back to Uyuni half empty. The problem was, we were so behind, that all the jeeps were already on their way back from the border, and we wouldn't be able to catch up. Hilarion mumbled to us in Spanish, that we wouldn't visit the Laguna Verde, and we could get some money back in Uyuni. He flagged down a passing jeep handed the driver some money and we quickly transferred our things. We said goodbye to Mathilde, Jonathan and Jonas who had been wonderful company. They were nervous to be continuing three more days in the same jeep.

The next 5 hours were spent racing back to Uyuni, with a brief stop at the Valles de Rocas (where I puked from motion sickness, and Yann still did not have the energy to exit the jeep). Despite Hilarion's terrible jeep, I was grateful to not have taken the trip with our new driver. He was driving way too fast for the terrain. I asked him to slow down a few times and he obliged. Apparently, he had drank so heavily on the second night, that he was still drunk in the morning. His driving was so erratic that one of the tourists had driven for most of day two while the other passengers navigated. Our jeep troubles seemed minor when I listed to the description of their awful experience. We felt some frustration for having been promised a "great jeep" and missing one third of the sights on the circuit due to its utter crappiness. But since Yann was so sick, we were happy to have saved him from the extra 3 hours of driving. By the time we arrived in San Cristobal Yann was able to get up and walk. We had descended 1500m in one day, which seemed to relieve his headache somewhat. Back in Uyuni, Yann went to bed at 6pm and didn't wake up until the next morning. Meanwhile, Michael (who spoke some Spanish) was busy blasting the travel agent at Ripley Tours. She eventually reimbursed us each some money (reluctantly). So basically our trip was a great success!

Note: About a week later we ran into Jonathan who described their trip continuation with Hilarion. They had paid for 3 more days, but Hilarion only wanted to do 2, they argued with him for the rest of the trip over the terms of their agreement, the jeep broke down two more times, stranding them both mornings AND the absolutely unforgivable: they completely ran out of food!

Guide to a Problem Free Day on the Southwest Circuit

2009-04-04T15:10:00.000-04:00

We learned that whether or not your package tour of the Bolivian southwest has nothing to do with careful preparation, and everything to do with luck. Luckily, we had good travel companions, and we made it through at least one of three days without a jeep breakdown. Our second day was great, we weren't even bothered by the fact that when Hilarion came to pick us up in the morning he was driving the exact same jeep as the day before, unrepaired. So we are actually able to summarize what the second day of the Bolivian Southwest Circuit should be like:

Wake up is at 5 a.m., if you are sleeping in Puerto Chubica (as we were) you can watch the sunrise over the salt flats. After sunrise you will have a breakfast of pancakes, jam, and dulce de leche, complete with moccacinos (hot chocolate, instant coffee and powdered milk). Leaving Puerto Chubica and the salar, you will head to San Juan to pick up supplies: Chilean wine, orange drink, chips... (Note: Depending on your jeep situation the previous day, the small town of San Juan could actually be your day 2 starting point). If your group is organized, you can start the day ahead of all the other groups and at least feel like you are not visiting the desert in a convoy of 30 jeeps. We were actually very organized group, but given our situation, we followed the "last is first" method, in order to have the sights to ourselves.
The first stop of the day is a vast plain of volcanic rock formations, with views of the smoking active Volcano Ollague in the distance. The rest of the morning is spent driving through barren, rocky terrain. On some of the steeper trails, all the passengers have to walk (especially if you don't have a spare tire). You can request stops to admire the packs of Vicunas (llamas with long silky hair) grazing in the distance. For many, the most impressive sight of the day will be the thousands of South American flamingos. These flamingos only inhabit the high altitude (over 3000m) salt lakes and lagoons of the Andes. They are pink due to the beta-carotene contained in their algae diet (the source of beta-carotene the African flamingo's diet is shrimp). You will have your lunch at Laguna Hedionda where you can watch this endangered bird eat, fly or just stand around on a leg. The only thing that detracts ever so slightly from the experience is the raging stench of flamingo poop. The first stop after lunch is the rock forest. You might question the enthusiasm with which it will be presented to you by every single tour operator in Uyuni. The wide-spread belief seems to be that the most interesting thing on the tour is the Arbol de Pietra, a rock shaped like a tree. In the afternoon, the colours and shapes of the desert terrain seem to change every few minutes. The last sight of the day is the Laguna Colorada, sitting at 4300m, red from algae and plankton with shiny white deposits of minerals colouring its banks. By the time you arrive at the lodge just past the Laguna Colarada, you will have traveled for more than 12 hours, covering almost 200km. You will appreciate the wine purchased in San Juan and the spaghetti dinner, especially when the sun sets and the temperature drops to -20C.

First Day on the Southwest Circuit

2009-03-29T11:23:00.000-04:00

Our tour of southwestern Bolivia with Ripley's Tours began 2 hours late. We sat outside the tour office watching other groups meet their sharply-dressed guides,load up their 4x4's and depart. This gave us the time to meet our travelmates, an adventurous French trio: Jonas, Jonathan and Mathilde and a solo Israeli Michael. Michael had enough supplies to last a month in the desert, including a 2kg bag of animal crackers and an enormous backpack. It was pretty obvious that the promise of a 10a.m. departure, a guarantee of fuel (despite the region-wide shortage), an English speaking guide and a new jeep was not going to be fulfilled. When the jeep finally pulled up there was now a significant doubt as to whether it would be able to actually complete the trip. It was in pretty rough shape and we consoled each other by attempting to remember ones we'd seen that might have been worse looking. Our driver Hilarion, a huge local clad in oil stained sweat pants (having probably spent the morning getting the jeep to start) was not particularly amused by the situation. We strapped our bags and boxes of food along with the fuel on the roof and pulled away towards the salt flats.

Our first stop was the train cemetery, which luckily Yann and I had already visited. Due to our late departure, we spent about 10 minutes there. To our surprise, we then drove back to Uyuni, where our driver proceeded to drive through the back streets stopping at make-shift garages inquiring about spare tires (apparently we didn't have one yet). We eventually found one, that actually looked in worse shape than our jeep. We also picked up Hilarion's cousin Maria (our cook) and, another surprise, her 1-year old son Jesus. The nine of us headed off back towards the desert.

The Salar de Uyuni is the largest salt flat in the world (10500 square km) and a highlight of the southwestern circuit, it begins about 10km from Uyuni. The first part of our salt flats visit was the 'Salt Museum' in Colchani, also known as the row of vendors selling knick-knacks made out of salt. The villagers living on the outskirts of the salt flats make their living from salt harvesting and processing and supplement their meager wages by selling their salt figurines to tourists. We felt torn between buying an item from a poor villager and the fact that the items were useless and overpriced. In the end, we left empty handed, hoping that other tourists might have a need for a salt ashtray. (Note: A few hours later I bought a pill box made from salt, which Yann proceeded to misplace on the salt flats 5 minutes later, we never found it).
We drove a few kilometers from Colchani where we saw the villagers mining the salt. After being scraped from the surface of the desert with a pick axe, the salt is then placed into large piles to eventually be loaded into rusty trucks and carried off to refineries. After a brief stop photographing the salt mounds, we moved on to another great addition to the salar brought by tourism: the Salt Hotel. Structures like this one are now illegal to build on the salt flats, but this one was permitted to stay. The ugly building made entirely of salt is now where most of the tour groups stop for lunch. We reached the hotel as most of the other groups were eating, our late departure from Uyuni had at least kept us from traveling in the jeep convoy. While lunch was being prepared we had the chance to walk around and admire the blinding white salt flats that stretching out for kilometers in every direction. After the rainy season, the salt dries up and crystallizes into hexagonal formations, covering the entire surface of the desert. It was after lunch that our car troubles began. As we drove along to our next destination along the hard, flat salt, we popped a rear tire and began swerving out of control. The advantage of having a jeep in such a sorry state, was that we hadn't be traveling very quickly and our visibly shaken Hilarion was able to come to a stop without flipping. After only a few hours on our trip, we had already lost a tire, and we hadn't even began any of the rockier terrain. Plus, we had the world's worst spare tire to drive on for the next 3 days.

The island that we were to visit was visible in the distance so we decided that we would leave Hilarion to unload the jeep and put on the spare tire while we made our way to our next stop. Distances can be quite deceiving in the desert, but we made it to the island in 30 minutes or so, with our pathetic jeep becoming a smaller and smaller sight in the distance. We were again one of the last groups to arrive at Isla Incahuasi, a small oasis home to a colony of gigantic cacti. We had lots of time to explore it and as all the other groups departed we watched the sun get lower and lower in the sky. After our lengthy visit and at least an hour of waiting around the jeep (that had finally arrived to meet us), there was still no sign of our driver. I tracked him down to the small tourist office on the island, where he was desperately trying to radio back to his office in Uyuni. It turned out there there might be more problems with the jeep than the spare tire. He explained that he would drop us off at our lodge and drive back to Uyuni to replace the jeep. We still had a significant distance to complete and by now the sun was setting. We were now half-jokingly discussing the possibility of spending the night on the salt flats at -20 C. We were greatly relieved to spot the tourist lodges lined up on the outskirts of the desert. But when we pulled up, we were told there was no room for us. (What? No reservation?) We ended up in a small village further on, that had a lovely room for us in their salt hotel (complete with the hottest shower I had in Bolivia?!). We said goodbye to poor Hilarion who drove away in the darkness, back to Uyuni to get us a replacement jeep.

A Day in Uyuni

2009-03-01T17:29:00.001-05:00

We spent the morning catching up on our night's lost sleep in our freezing Uyuni hotel room. Due to 5 showerless days we attempted to use the "hot water" in our rooms. There didn't seem to be any way to turn the shower knob in order to get even slightly warm water. I went to the front desk to ask for assistance, since our room fee was higher owing to the hot water. A few minutes later a young girl showed up to our door with a screwdriver. After pulling apart the shower head, switching the breaker on and off multiple times, playing with loose wires, while standing in a pool of water, the conclusion was made that our shower was broken. Bolivian shower heads are exceptionally ingenious. Instead of heating a whole tank of water, a small heater is installed in the shower head, so that the water warms up upon exit. Most of the time the wires are exposed and protruding from the shower head. Some hotels have signs reminding people not to touch the shower without turning off the breaker, but most backpackers we met had been zapped at least once (we were fine because we usually opted not to shower). Adding to the sheer brilliance of the design, the water doesn't actually ever heat up. So our shower didn't work, but that didn't actually make much of a difference. Our hygiene situation was rather desperate however, so we showered and spent at least another hour under the blankets trying to regain some body heat before heading out to visit Uyuni.

Uyuni is a strange, eerie place, owing its current existence to tourists, who use it as a jump off point to visit the surrounding deserts and salt flats. Despite its tourism potential, it remains poor and gloomy (and is one of Bolivia's coldest places). The only cars on the road are the travel agency jeeps, apparently owned by the same few people. Locals rent the vehicles and attempt to eke out a living stuffing as many backpackers into them as possible. Every other storefront in Uyuni is a travel agency. All promise roughly the same trip, prices vary wildly as does service, but not necessarily in a correlated fashion. We were weary about the trips, some of the summer's headlines about Uyuni included "13 tourists burn to death in Bolivia car accident" and "3 tourists die in crash on Bolivian salt flats, raising death toll to 16 since May". We spent the afternoon visiting agency after agency, hearing the same story of "best food, English guide, new jeep...". The reality of the situation was that no matter how carefully we chose our agency, the morning of departure we could be clumped together with another agency if our jeep wasn't full to capacity (6 tourists). To make matters worse, there was a shortage of fuel in the region, and only the agencies that were first in the queue at the gas station the next morning would be able to depart. Only a few of the high end agencies had reserves of fuel. With the national referendum in two days, we had to depart the next day, because all travel was prohibited on the day of the referendum (once we were in the uninhabited desert we wouldn't have any problems). We sought out the agency with tourists already booked to leave the next morning and a guarantee of fuel (a bold face lie), even though it was not the cheapest. After we made our selection (which we immediately doubted), we bought supplies (extra water and food) before walking out to see Uyuni's only tourist attraction. About 2km from Uyuni is the train cemetery. A dump of old train cars and parts abandoned to rust and decay. Upon friends' recommendation we visited in the late afternoon when the sun was setting and the tour groups had long finished their ten minute visit. The sight was well worth the two hours or so that we gave it. We walked up and down the kilometers of train which lay in the unforgiving desert. As the sun set we headed back to Uyuni to get ready for our morning departure.

On the Road to Uyuni

2009-02-08T19:57:00.018-05:00

We left Isla del Sol on an overcrowded boat in choppy waters. I was pretty much convinced that we were going to capsize and our captain's behavior didn't help to calm me down. He angrily discussed with his co-captain, repeatedly taking head counts while shaking his head. He must have counted the passengers 5 times, if I spoke Spanish I would have said "maybe you should have counted the number of passengers BEFORE taking off". The boat was about half the size of the one we got to the island on, and it had about twice the amount of people on it. I was pretty pissed off (what's new?) and I had decided that if we started going down I was going to push the people at the front of the boat out of my way. They had insisted on getting on the boat even when the captain had told them the boat was full. Yann and I removed our heavy boots and stripped off layers of clothing in case we had to swim and I had already planned my escape route. Eventually the boat came out from behind the island where the water was calm, and we realised we might actually make it to Copacabana alive. We left on the early morning boat because we were planning to get back to La Paz and get onto a night bus heading to Uyuni, a small town in the southwest and a jump off point for tours of the surrounding desert. The connection was going to be tight so we had bought tickets before leaving for the island on the earliest bus leaving Copacabana. Our connection was perfectly timed and we got seated on the "tourist bus" heading for La Paz. Right before the bus was scheduled to depart, we heard our names called and we were told that our tickets were "for another bus" (completely made up). We were being kicked off the bus to make room for a group of package tourists whose guide hadn't bought their tickets.

I pretty much lost my shit (my only time on the entire trip) at both the bus company employee who kicked us off and the tourists who didn't seem to have any problem taking seats from people when they didn't have tickets themselves. We got transferred on to another bus and we departed right behind the bus we actually should have been on. I was a little bit embarrassed when the two buses got to the lake crossing at the same time. But I was comforted by other passengers from our first bus who were shocked at the seat thieves' behavior. We ended up in La Paz with 30 minutes to get to the bus station and board a bus for Uyuni. We bought a pair of tourist-priced tickets for a non-tourist bus from a tourist agency and raced to the bus station in a taxi (we probably could have walked faster). We arrived to the station on time but our bus didn't. So we lay on the cold bus station floor for 2 hours before finally taking off. Over the course of the day Yann had been getting sicker and sicker and by the time we were waiting for the bus we were questioning his ability to make the overnight bus trip. We had worked so hard to make our connection that neither of us felt like sticking around La Paz. Yann told me that if he died "he loved me" (that's about as much romance that I can expect from Yann, so I was pleased). We were warned that bus rides to the southwest were extremely cold (even the LP guide recommended paying the extra money for the tourist bus due to the unbearable cold of regular buses). So Yann and I put on every piece of clothing we had with us. I had two pairs of pants over a pair of fleece leggings and was wearing 5 layers on my upper half. I was also wearing a toque, mittens and leg warmers. Yann was possibly wearing even more than I was. There was nothing left in our backpacks.

I would say that by the fourth hour of the 10 hour bus ride, I was down to my t-shirt, with no shoes or socks on. The bus was full of tourists and we were all stripped down in a similar fashion. Despite my best efforts (knocking on the driver's cabin 3 times repeating "mucho caliente") the heat kept blasting. Yann and I had the heater at our feet, but it seemed like everyone suffered similarly. We stopped once the entire time (where we got to go to the bathroom on the side of the road, in the desert, read: no trees or bushes). At one point I thought I might be suffocating from the heat. It's hard to imagine that a cold bus ride could have been worse.

After 26 hours of travel we arrived to find it was raining and freezing in Uyuni, which I remind you is in the middle of the desert. We found a hotel room, piled on the blankets and went to bed.

Two Days of Peace on Isla Del Sol

2009-02-01T15:27:00.025-05:00

On the eve of the Bolivian national holiday, we left Copacabana with Nelly and Xavier and headed to Isla Del Sol, a peaceful island on lake Titicaca. While Bolivians and Peruvians got ready to party in the city, it seemed that every Western tourist in Copacabana was on a boat leaving the place. It took us about an hour to get to the southern tip of the island by boat, then another half hour of sweaty walking on dusty trails lining a steep ridge to get to the village of Yumani. Nelly had already booked us a lovely hostal, and Yann and I grabbed the room with the balcony overlooking the lake. We got a great price on our two night stay, although we discovered it wasn't as great a price when we were told that we would all be sharing the same toilet ... and that it didn't flush... and we were not the only four guests. But after just a few minutes of unwinding we were sold on the spectacular views and peacefulness of our new accommodation. The entire island has about 2500 permanent residents, spread between three "major towns" of which Yumani is one. With the absence of roads, there is no motorized traffic, the running water is sparse and the electricity unreliable. Yumani consists of about 100 or so homes (at least half of which advertise as tourist accommodation) and dozens of crisscrossing dirt lanes (used mainly by the local livestock). Even though the island terrain is rocky and inhospitable, most of the island is covered by fields (potatoes mainly), which would be tended to in the rainy season but now were quiet dried yellow plots. After admiring the views and rejoicing in the fact that we had chosen to stay two nights on the island rather than one, the four of us set out to find a Inca ruins a short distance from Yumani. We crossed only a donkey, a pig and three Belgian tourists on our way to the site, and found the two-storey Palacio del Inca was all to ourselves as well. We wandered around the quiet site and admired the Inca construction set against the intensely blue Lake Titicaca. In the evening we searched for dinner, realising that the signs advertising pizza, pasta, steaks ... were somewhat of a stretch. It appeared that there was exactly one thing to eat on Isla Del Sol: Trucha (lake trout) which we had already grown sick of in Copacabana. But we settled in a small restaurant and ate a home-cooked plate of trucha by candle light. We wandered back to our hotel through the pitch black village where we settled in the restaurant and played cards with Nelly and Xavier until the employees sent us to bed so that they could lock up. Our second day we decided to walk to the northern tip of the island and back. From the advice of a French tourist who had walked the trail on the previous day, we decided to follow trails through villages on the way there and on the way back follow a path built along the top ridge of the island (it took him 5 hours to do the trip, it took us 8). We passed mainly farm land and crossed very few villagers, other than toll collectors stationed outside villages to sell us our mandatory "permits". We passed one exasperated group of tourists who had turned back, refusing to pay for yet another tourist tax. I wasn't too bothered by it (for a change), although on the way back, Nelly finally put her foot down when we were stopped for a 4th time. The first "major" village we crossed was Cha'lla, which had a lovely turquoise church and a small beach, but not too much activity. After a few more hours of following trails up and down the side of the island we arrived at Challapampa, the northern most village on the island, set on a beautiful sandy beach in a quiet bay. A row of small outdoor grills were set up by villagers, selling french fries and sandwiches to the tourists disembarking from their tour boats. The main Inca ruins of Isla Del Sol are north of Challapampa. We were happy to have food and rest before setting out for our final climb to find them. The name Isla Del Sol was now seemed extremely fitting, with the sun feeling that much closer to us at 4000m in altitude. Any piece of skin that had escaped sunscreen got burnt (mainly our hands).
We arrived at the Chincana ruins in the early afternoon and spent some time admiring the Mesa Ceremonica, the ceremonial table and chairs thought to have been a spot for animal and human sacrifice. We then walked to the main feature of the ruins, a maze of doorways and stone walls known as 'El Laberinto'. We made a half-hearted attempt to find its well containing sacred water and failed. We returned to Yumani along the uninhabited top ridge of the island, allowing for beautiful views of the lake below and mountains around us. We pulled into Yumani in late afternoon and managed to find a restaurant selling "spaghetti" which was maybe a sell-out but was irresistible to the four of us who were pretty drained from our day. We all agreed that with a less tightly-packed schedule we would have spent quite a few more days on the island.

Our Copacabana Pilgrimage

2009-01-10T17:11:00.016-05:00

Our first ten minutes in La Paz, we met Nelly and Xavier who were looking for the same hostel as us (and pointed us in the wrong direction). We ran into them later at Plaza San Francisco and made plans to head north for a trek in a few days. After waiting around La Paz for a few days, Nelly and Xavier became convinced (thanks to fellow travelers) that staying in Bolivia for the week of the referendum wasn't safe, and decided that they would head to the border with Peru. With no trekking companions, we changed our plans and joined them for their trip to Lake Titicaca.

We ended up in the lakeside town of Copacabana at its busiest time of the year. The Bolivian national holiday and the annual pilgrimage to the virgin of Copacabana occur in the first week of August. Travel to Copacabana during this week is not recommended, due to high risk of theft and violence against tourists. Local authorities had posted warnings in all hotels and restaurants telling us not to go out after dark and not to carry any valuables with us at any time. By the time we found our hotel room (thanks to Nelly's Spanish negotiation skills) it was dark, and we were hungry, so we ignored safety tips and headed out for dinner. We ate lake trout (not for the last time) and ran into two Bolivian filmmakers that had been on the same bus as us from La Paz. Xavier and I were both interviewed outside the restaurant, drawing some excitement from the local crowds.

Small stands set up all along the main plazas of the small town, most of the activity was centered around the white-washed church of Copacabana, where little old ladies sold candles and plastic religious paraphernalia by day, and hard liquor by night. Home-made firework setups were put together for evening shows, during the day the local school children paraded around in ornate costumes accompanied by brass bands.
In the afternoon we followed the crowds of Peruvian pilgrims as they hiked up to the top of a local hill to pay homage to the Virgin Mary that looks out over Lake Titicaca and Copacabana. On the stairs leading up to the virgin, dozens of vendors set up their displays of miniatures. Wishful pilgrims pick out various objects that they hope for in their lives; houses, cars, trucks, livestock, money, university degrees (the poorer the pilgrim, the fewer miniatures they can afford).
Past the vendors, we got to a large plateau, where dozens of stone altars had been set up, each one of them manned by a Peruvian shaman presiding over pious families and their collection of miniatures. Since I had bought myself a pack of fake money, I thought that I should get it blessed by a shaman. Once I approached a vacant altar, there was nothing we could do to stop our enthusiastic priest. After I negotiated a small fee for the ceremony he first shuffled me over to his official "supplies seller" who had to equip me with the necessities: five rolls of streamers, two bottles of coloured water, one bag of confetti and a pack of firecrackers. Now I had been sucked in to spending way more than I wanted to for my blessing (and Yann was refusing to help me get out of it). But my spending spree wasn't over, I had not bought my two bottles of cerveza to shower over the altar. When they quoted me the price for the two bottles of beer, I realised this whole operation was going way over budget, but the shaman was adamant that the ceremony could not go on without the beer. Thankfully Nelly intervened and explained that I would only do the ceremony without the beer. Our shaman was extremely disappointed, as it seemed that for most of the wobbling shamans around us (including our own), that the bottles of beer were their main form of payment. After much debate about the validity of the ceremony, our shaman agreed to go on. (In retrospect I probably should have bought the beer, because I do believe that it is actually an integral part of the ceremony)

Nelly agreed to take part in the ceremony, and our shaman proceeded with a lengthy ritual of chanting and gesturing. He was disappointed by our lousy pile of miniatures (two packs of money) but encircled them nonetheless with the streamers and doused them with holy water. Our shaman stumbled slightly on the grand finale, when he opened up his arms to the sky, expecting the firecrackers to go off at the same time. After three or four increasingly frustrated attempts at simultaneous arm raising and firecrackers he eventually got them to go off and concluded the ceremony by covering us in confetti. Dozens of these ceremonies were going on all around us (including the ritual of shaking up the bottles of beer and covering the altar and each other with beer, then letting the shaman drink up the rest). We continued further up the hill, past the queue of hundreds that were waiting to have a glimpse of the Virgin Mary statue. All along the stairs, people waited with offerings, and shamans performed ceremonies. People ate and drank, and played music with the amazing Lake Titicaca in the background. And we were quite pleased to have seen it all.

Things to do in La Paz

2009-01-09T21:09:00.000-05:00

Like many big cities, the most interesting thing to do in La Paz was simply roaming around and watching people's daily activities. We spent a lot of time walking up and down the steep streets of La Paz dodging the souvenir sellers and attempting to navigate through the downtown traffic (directed not by streetlights, but rather by policemen). Our opinion of La Paz as a hectic, run-down, crowded city was probably skewed as we never ventured into the richer suburbs of La Paz, where apparently we could have found fancy restaurants and boutiques. The first stop on the tourist circuit is the "Witches Market". Maybe at some point this might have been more of an actual market and less of a bizarre tourist trap, but it now seems to owe its existence to a lucrative trade in tourist kitsch. A few stalls remain that seem to cater to a more local market, selling mainly ingredients for traditional medicine. The big tourist draw are the dried llama fetuses displayed on their store fronts. The storekeepers also put together small altars of candies, coca leaves and various other items which can be purchased ready-for-offering. The air surrounding the market is filled with the smell of burning incense, most storekeepers have an urn burning the branches of a local (strong smelling) plant. But even the burning incense can't ward off the overabundance of cheaply-made "Bolivian" souvenirs: "alpaca", "silver" and other "hand-made goods" (not that I didn't drag Yann around for half a day looking for something "original"). The tourist district is centred around the Plaza San Francisco, where we sat and watched street puppeteers, shoe-shine boys, orange juice vendors, and protesters all vying for attention. Most things that we visited were within a few minutes walking distance from the plaza. We spent a morning wandering around the Presidential Palace Plaza, where we bumped into a street procession complete with brass band and costumes, that blocked up traffic for a while (we still haven't figured out what it was all about). Downtown La Paz seemed to be constantly busy, with the streets packed with people well into the night. At sunset, street vendors set up their small shops and locals browsed through the various boxes of Chinese made goods. But the number one evening activity seemed to be eating at one of the dozens of "hamburgesa and papas fritas" stands, that opened up after dinner. For 50 cents, you could get yourself a hamburger, buried under a pile of onions, french fries and lots of oil, topped with a squirt of warm mayonnaise and hot sauce. At first we thought it couldn't get any better, but within a few days, I could barely stand the sight of the hamburger stalls, even when they were closed up (later we met a girl who refused to eat any more potatoes, and even picked out pieces of potato from her soup). We never quite got the hang of eating well in La Paz, often by 6pm restaurants were already closing their doors for the evening so we often ended up roaming around looking for something other than a hamburgesa to eat. We were saved for breakfasts and lunches when we found a little restaurant that sold only saltenas, empanadas and coffees! Saltenas are apparently a Bolivian breakfast specialty, they are like an empanada except much juicier. The local saltena eating technique is to bite of the end and then drink out all the juice. Neither Yann nor I could bring ourselves to drink the meaty fillings, we just let them pour all over ourselves. The highlight of our time in La Paz came on Sunday, when we took a taxi up to the neighbouring city of El Alto to visit the weekly market. Sprawling over 24 city blocks, it took us 2 hours to cover just a small fraction of it. Each sector of the market is divided by the items sold there, we managed to see the miscellaneous car parts sector and then wandered through aisles of clothing, electronics, donkeys... before stopping for a break at a soda stall. For the first time since being in Bolivia, it seemed that there wasn't another tourist in sight and nobody could have cared less that we were there.

Destination Bolivia

2009-01-05T16:48:00.008-05:00

Having returned from 14 months on the road in last December, and securing our first full-time jobs, after about 4 months of work, we were dreaming about being away. To fill our precious month of vacation, I first attempted to surprise Yann with a trip to Russia, although he was grateful, he was also more realistic than I was, and quickly pointed out how much such a trip would actually cost. We ruled out expensive Russia and started searching for cheap flights. We quickly settled on South America, where return flights started at about 800$.

Although the flights to Bolivia were more expensive, but it seemed to us at the time to be particularly interesting culturally and politically. We departed from Montreal at the end of August, two days after we finished teaching our two summer courses.

We landed at the La Paz airport in the early morning along with one of our backpacks (Yann’s). The “lost baggage counter” consisted of one guy standing in the middle of the arrival lounge with a clipboard surrounded by an increasing number of people. With one flight arriving from Miami per day, I would only get my bag the next day, which didn’t put much of a dent in our travel plans.

Within a few minutes of filling out the baggage form, we were outside, hopping into a shared taxi that would drop us off at the door of our hostel in central La Paz for $0.50.
The descent from the airport (in El Alto) into La Paz provided us a few glimpses of the bustling morning life of residents of La Paz’s less-privileged neighbouring city. They queued up at steaming breakfast stalls or jumped onto one of the dozens of shared taxis heading into La Paz. The women clad in multiple layers of ankle-leg skirts, their hair in two long dark braids and a small hat perching miraculously atop of their heads. As we drove into La Paz, we admired the thousands of brownish, crumbling, square homes, lining the canyon walls and the white-capped peaks of the Andes towering over the city in almost every direction. It's hard to imagine how Bolivia's largest urban centre ended up here.

We settled into our hostel and slept for a few hours, in order to attempt to ward off altitude sickness. Any beneficial affects this might have had were countered by our evening’s first meal, “rack of sheep”.

Canada 2008

2008-01-02T17:09:00.000-05:00

We have been back home now for exactly three weeks. We left Hong Kong on December 10th, flying with the budget airline Oasis Hong Kong (HK to Vancouver 384$ tax incl). We ended up with a 19 hour stop over in Vancouver Airport, which is a good airport to sleep in, although they charge for wi-fi, not the case in Hong Kong (see www.sleepinginairports.com). The stop over appears to have been a cure for jet lag, which neither Yann or I experienced. Amid Christmas and New Year's madness, we are slowly getting back into our lives here. Stay tuned for updates to our website, coming in the new year...

Best (and Worst) of China, Part II

2007-12-19T12:30:00.000-05:00

These are our choices for the best and worst moments of our 18 days in China. We spent some time in the following provinces: Xinjiang, Gansu, Qinghai, Sichuan, Henan, Shanxi, Shaanxi, Shandong, Hebei, Fujian, Guizhou, Guangxi, Guangdong, Beijing, Macau and Hong Kong (in China Part I, and in Pakistan and the Karakorum Highway, the follwoing provinces were featured: Shanghai, Zhejiang, Hubei, Chongqing, Sichuan, Yunnan and Xinjiang). We've also put together a gallery of our favourite photos which you can visit here here.

Our FAVOURITE Cities/Villages
According to Yann:
1- Zhaoxing, Guizhou Province
2- Manigango, Sichuan Province
3- Hongkeng, Fujian Province
According to Emilie:
1- Xiahe, Gansu Province
2- Xi'an, Shaanxi Province
3- Zhaoxing, Guizhou Province
4- Beijing

Our FAVOURITE Tourist Attractions
According to Yann:
1- Labrang Monastery, Xiahe, Gansu Province
2- Tang An Village, Guizhou Province
3- Hakka Earth Houses, Fujian Province
According to Emilie:
1- Labrang Monastery, Xiahe, Gansu Province
2- The Printing Monastery, Dege, Sichuan Province
3- Peking Duck Restaurants, Beijing
4- The Outlying Temples, Chengde, Hebei Province
5- Hakka Earth Houses, Fujian Province

Most DISAPPOINTING Tourist Attractions
According to Emilie and Yann:
1- Dunhuang, sand dunes and Mogao Caves, both totally overpriced
1- Yangshuo, over-hyped
2- Night markets of Henan Province (Luoyang closed, Kaifeng not as big as imagined)
3- Hong Kong skyline in the haze
4- Macau old town, surrounded by high end boutiques

The Most IMPRESSIVE Local Architecture
According to Yann and Emilie:
1- Hakka tulous, Yongding County, Fujian Province
2- Tibetan monasteries, Gansu, Qinghai, Sichuan Provinces
3- Qiang watchtowers, Danba, Sichuan Province
According to Emilie:
1- Tibetan monasteries, Gansu, Qinghai, Sichuan Provinces
2- Qiang watchtowers, Danba, Sichuan Province
3- Hakka tulous, Yongding County, Fujian Province
4- Temple of Heaven, Beijing

Most DELICIOUS Foods
According to Yann:
1- Peking Duck, from Dadong Roast Duck Restaurant, Beijing
2- Chicken dumplings in peanut butter sauce, Guangzhou, Guangdong Province
3- Roasted leg of lamb with cumin, Xi'an Muslim Quarter, Shaanxi Province
4- Indian food, Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong (better than Indian food in India?!?!?)
According to Emilie:
1- Peking Duck, from Dadong Roast Duck Restaurant, Beijing
2- Squid Kebabs and other delicacies at the night market, Xining, Qinghai Province
3- Roasted leg of lamb with cumin, Xi'an Muslim Quarter, Shaanxi Province
4- Chicken dumplings in peanut butter sauce, Guangzhou, Guangdong Province
5- Pork dumplings, Dazhalan Jie Street, Beijing
6- Food from our cooking class, Yangshuo, Guangxi Province
7- Indian food, Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong

WORST Food
According to Yann:
1- Dumplings stuffed with chives and noodles
According to Emilie:
1- Dumplings stuffed with chives and noodles
2- Nescafe instant coffee (I still drank it every day though)
3- "Beijing style" cuisine in Macau

Most SPECTACULAR Scenery
According to Emilie and Yann:
1- Road from Manigango to Dege (over the 5050m Tro La Pass), Sichuan Province
2- Giant sand dunes, Dunhuang, Gansu Province
3- Mountains dotted with Qiang watchtowers, Danba, Sichuan Province
4- Road from Yushu to Manigango (Qinghai to Sichuan Province)

Places we wish we had MORE TIME for
According to Emilie and Yann:
1- Tibetan Monasteries of Northwest Sichuan Province
2- Dong and Miao Villages of Eastern Guizhou Province
3- Kaifeng, Henan Province. Seemed atmospheric and interesting.
4- Xiamen, Fujian Province, (for the amazing seafood restaurants)
5- Changji, Xinjiang Province (to lounge with our friend Jochen)

Best ACCOMODATION
According to Emilie and Yann:
1- Labrang Red Rock Youth Hostel, Xiahe. Run by enthousiastic monks.
2- Kaiyue Youth Hostel, Qingdao. God were we happy to get there.
3- Qianmen Youth Hostel, Beijing. Brand new, cheap(ish), friendly and central.
4- Double Seven Guesthouse, 7th floor, Chunking Mansions, Hong Kong. So damn good.
5- Mountain Villa at off-season prices, Chengde, Hebei Province.

Worst ACCOMODATION
According to Emilie and Yann:
1- Monastery Guesthouse, Yushu, Qinghai. Who new monks could be so grumpy and filthy?
2- San Va Hospedaria, Macau. This one almost made it to the best accomodation list. Atmospheric, clean, cheap, but too full of weirdos.

For those interested in our expenses, we have updated our homepage with our financial information for this phase of China, it is available here

A Ferry Ride (and a World) Away

2007-12-13T18:40:00.000-05:00

From Macau, we rode on a high speed catamaran to Kowloon. It took less than an hour, but the captain apologized over the intercom for the delay, due to choppy waters. Every time we hit a wave we flew through the air, the groups of excited/freightened tourists yelled/gasped. Yann was excited, I was scared. From the ferry terminal, our hotel was only a few minutes walk away. We were headed to Chungking Mansions the seediest and cheapest location in all of Hong Kong. For the first time in months were at a multi-ethnic destination, restricted to a kilometer radius around the Chungking Mansions. Alot of badmouthing goes on about the infamous appartment block, but Yann and I loved it. Each floor of the building has a handful of different budget guesthouses. We arrived, jumped in the elevator, randomly chose floor number seven, and ended up with a cozy, quiet double room for really a spectacular price, considering the cost of everything else in Hong Kong (a 2007 study ranked the cost of living in Hong Kong as 5th highest among 143 countries, the cost of rental accomodation is highest in the world, so you have to be happy with a 16$/night room). Hong Kong Island and Kowloon make up one of the most densily populated areas in the world. Just walking down the sidewalk was challenging. After first afternoon in the city, we felt completely overwhelmed. We also felt shabby and underdressed. Our torn pants and stained t-shirts just weren't going to cut it here. Here's a list of just a few of the many differences between Hong Kong and the Mainland which traumatised us:
-People queue up
-Cars stop at crosswalks and red lights
-People generally refrain from jay walking
-Fines for spitting and smoking in public places
-Driving on the left side of the road
-Where's the street food?
-Why the hell is this public washroom so clean?
-We can flush our toilet paper?
-The souvenirs are still hideously tacky, but are 10 times more expensive
-McDonald's is the cheapest dining option
-No internet firewall
-Drinkable tap water
-Expensive internet cafes
-Non-expats in the Starbucks
-People speak English
Sadly, in five days in Hong Kong we didn't eat a single Cantonese meal. We had decided we would splurge on a Sunday dim sum, but then decided it just wasn't worth the money. We ate delicious (and cheap) Indian food from a small take-out counter on the ground floor of the Chunking Mansions every night. The building is full of Indian and African restaurants, serving the migrant workers hungry for a taste of home who make up most of the staff. Kowloon, is actually attached to mainland China but is a ten minute ferry ride away from Hong Kong Island, home to the main business district and famous skyline. We spent a day there, taking a ride on tram to Victoria Peak, and got disappointing views hazy city below (although we agreed that on a clear day, if they exist, the view would be incredible). On our last day in the city we visited the flower market and the bird market, which were both interesting, but seemed a little bit to clean and ordered compared with other Asian markets. Hong Kong is a demanding city. It's fast paced, crowded and just too business oriented. The main activity seems to be shopping, and you get the impressions that the city is made up of one shopping mall after another. While we were there, we frequently sought out the quiet of our tiny hotel room. Strangely, the place which in alot of ways most resembled home, was the hardest place for us to adjust to.

Rua de la Felicidade

2007-12-10T18:48:00.000-05:00

We ended up spending two nights in Guangzhou (formerly Canton), shopping (and pollution) capital of the world, where we spent the most on a hotel room than anywhere else on our trip. After an unsuccessful trip across the huge city to get to a youth hostel, we ended up following a tout to a seedy hotel around the train station, where we had a lovely balcony crawling with rats (we love rats in our stew). But the private room here, was the same price as two beds in a dormitory in a posher area of the city. We spent Saturday and Sunday in Guangzhou, to avoid the weekend casino rush in Macau, when room prices skyrocket. Lazily, we mainly hung around the train station, where we killed time between our eagerly awaited peanut butter dumpling meals. On Monday morning, we left China, passing through customs in Zhuhai from where we entered Macau on foot. The first obvious change from the mainland was the Portuguese signage, often replacing what might have been an English translation. We never figured out if anyone in Macau, other than maybe Portuguese tourists, could actually speak Portuguese. It still shares official language status with Cantonese. Our highly advanced Mandarin skills were rendered officially useless, our first meal in the city was an excessively expensive wonton meal, which we had understood to be just an expensive wonton meal. Over the past decade or so, Macau's casino scene has exploded (seeing as it is the only place in the PRC where casinos exist legally). Mainlanders and the Hong-Kong-ese descend onto the city for the usual excess, with full turbo-jet ferries leaving Hong Kong every fifteen minutes. We found the place to be bursting at the seams, even on the supposedly quiet Monday and Tuesday. The city's old quarter houses most of the UNESCO protected heritage buildings, vestiges of centuries of Portuguese rule. Something is lost though, by the expensive boutique stores that now surround them. Every other building is a jewelry store or a bank (the most infamous being the Banco Delta Asia, keeping North Korea's assets safe). The symbol of Macau is what remains of St Paul's church, crawling with tourists but beautiful nonetheless. Our atmospheric little hotel, the San Va Hospedaria, was right in the heart of the old quarter, on the rua de la Felicidade (former? red light district aptly named the Street of Happiness). So atmospheric was the hostel, that a movie was filmed there with the interesting synopsis: "Is she a one-nighter, or his daughter?". We passed on the by-the-hour rooms and checked in to the last available 'double room' the size of a small office cubicle, with similar flimsy walls separating us from our neighbours (and stopping well short of the ceiling). One neighbour's fluorescent light kept us up for most of the night, he turned it off at 6a.m. The other neighbour compulsively ran water and splashed it noisily around in his sink, taking breaks to moan for his mama. Down the narrow Street of Happiness, shops make and sell almond cookies (on which we overdosed within half an hour of our arrival), or delicious bacon-like meat. The air around our hotel smelled strongly of almond extract and meat under the heat lamps. Yann discovered Portuguese egg tarts (pastries filled with an egg custard), which we devoured for breakfasts, or afternoon snacks. With more energy and patience, there was much more to Macau for us to discover, but we had neither of those left after two quasi-sleepless nights at the hostel. We got our first look at modern Macau on our walk to the ferry terminal. The jewel in the crown of hideousness, had to be the Fisherman's Wharf, home to replicas of the Roman Coliseum, The Forbidden City, a volcano and best of all the Potala Palace, Tibetan Buddhism's most holy site, immortalized on the Macau casino strip.

Dong Country

2007-12-06T11:20:00.000-05:00

After picking our visas, we had five days before our train left from Guilin. Instead of more rest we opted for a slightly more grueling option of heading west into Guizhou Province, one of the poorer provinces of China, but one of its most ethnically diverse. Five days would five us just enough time to visit one or two villages in the eastern part of the province, with alot of time spent on bad roads and even worse buses.

We ended up in the village of Zhaoxing, home to a community of Dong people. Although the village is not exactly off the beaten track, we only met a handful of tourists in our three days there. The Dong people are known as skilled carpenters, their homes are built entirely out of wood, without the use of nails. They are also known for their drum towers and wind and rain bridges, all made entirely of wood. Zhaoxing had numerous small bridges and five drumtowers, which serve as social and religious centres in the community. Homes are built closely together, making the village almost entirely pedestrianised, with multiple bridges crossing the small river that runs through it. No one in the village is decked out in colourful minority clothing, something here that seems to mainly exist for the benefit of tourists, although most still wear their hair in the traditional top knot, and the older villagers wear clothing made from their hand made fabric. The men smoke from long bamboo pipes. The most amazing thing about Zhaoxing was how much it was brimming with activity. All over the village, women mixed indigo dye, made from fermented indigo leaves transported from their fields. Swaths of fabric were hung to dry from balconies, or laid out in the fields. Once finished drying women flattened the fabric with large wooden mallets. As we walked into the surrounding hills we could still here the sound of dozens of hammers resounding through the village. Women sorted through freshly harvest cotton, carried baskets full of vegetables from their fields, washed clothes in the river, sewed and embroidered. Most of them work all day with their babies strapped to their backs. Men worked at wood carving and house building, several of which were going up in the booming village. And the older men weaved baskets, for carrying their knives, or catching rodents. At night we could here the local singing group practising next door. Two hours worthwhile walk away, uphill, is Tang'An, another beautiful Dong village. Off the main highway, it is smaller and quieter than neighbouring Zhaoxing, but no less lively. In the evening were treated to a performance, at the outdoor village theatre. Amazing that in such a small village that could assemble eighteen people with such great voices. The performance was only slightly marred by the smoking, horking, loudly talking Chinese tour group, which, having financed the performance, we felt we couldn't do much about. Although we spent more time riding the bus getting to Zhaoxing than visiting it, we felt that we were more than rewarded with a glimpse into the lives of its hardworking villagers.

Taking a Break in Yangshuo

2007-12-03T04:46:00.000-05:00

Yann and I debated for a long time whether or not we would spend our last month in China relaxing, or keep up to our usual fast pace. I had a list of over a dozen places scattered over the country that I still wanted to visit, Yann was pulling for the relax option, wanting to stay in one place for a few weeks to rest. This despite the fact that for over a whole year on the road, Yann has found it quasi-impossible to "do nothing" as he calls it. We compromised with our short trip to Fujian Province, then onto Yangshuo, a backpacker getaway in the southwest. Whether we liked the place or not, we knew we could get cheap accommodations and the weather would be good.

After one day in Yangshuo, Yann was ready to leave, and so was I. We had spent out first day in town wandering around taking in the hundreds of souvenir shops (many with visa card stickers in their windows, a very bad sign) or sifting through menus trying to see who sold the cheapest pizza or hamburger. In the evening we had the privilege of watching three rowdy foreigners sexually harassing/assaulting local Chinese girls. All of this on or around West Street, the pedestrianised centre of nightlife and tourist activity in Yangshuo. Our hotel was on a side street directly behind the Moulin Rouge Nightclub, and the bass shook our room until about two in the morning. The karst scenery that makes the region famous was marred by haze.

Despite all this, we forged on with our relaxing. Actually our Chinese visa was two days from expiration and we had to renew it at the local police station, a process which takes a week. On the plus side, the staff at our hotel were extremely friendly, we found a restaurant selling great tuna burgers (for cheap), we rented a DVD player for 0.75$/night and we met the the town's two bootleg DVD salesmen. We got used to the loud music at night and gave in pretty quickly to the seduction of foreign comforts.

Despite rock-climbing, kayaking, musicals, cormorant fishing, cruises down the Li River, hot-air balloon rides, cave exploration, hot spring tours... we spent most of our eight days in Yangshuo doing nothing. We managed to move for a half day cooking course which ended up being worth the effort. The course included a tour of the local market, Southern Chinese are reknowned throughout the country for their 'diversified' menu. As a Chinese saying describes their cuisine: "Anything that walks, swims, crawls or flies with its back to heaven is edible". We fell victim to the wrath of the dog meat seller, who threatened to pelt us with a piece of raw dog meat if we didn't stop taking pictures (maybe she's had a few too many hypocritical foreigners being "outraged by the cruelty"). The course itself was held in a lovely renovated farm house in a small village outside Yangshuo. We now know how to cook (sort of): beer fish (a local dish of fish cooked in beer, chicken with cashew nuts, stuffed mushrooms, Hongshao eggplant and vegetables with garlic. Cooking Chinese dishes was way more difficult than cooking Cambodian dishes, mainly because everything is done so fast. We had the woks blasting at high heat for most of the course with the instructor yelling out instructions and assistants helping us as we lagged behind. Yann proved much more skilled than I was. Later in the week we did the mandatory cruise down the Li River. Actually we hired a (motorised) bamboo raft for a half hour ride. Only a few years ago, villagers still paddled people around. Now most rafts are no longer made out of bamboo, but out of PVC tubes and all of them have motors, progress. One afternoon, Debbie, the receptionist at our hotel invited us to her village, a short bike ride away. Despite working full time at the hotel, in between shifts, she rides her bike to her father's farm where she helps him in the fields. We joined her and her father, picking miniature oranges. At the end of three hours we had picked, along with her father, two large baskets, which her father will then bring to the market to sell on his motorbike in the early morning. Yann and I could barely lift the baskets off the ground (actually Yann got it up on try number three, and I never got it off the ground), Debbie picked them up without a sign of difficulty her father seemed highly entertained by our display of inferiority. It made us appreciate the little old ladies lugging around the same size baskets full of pomelos through the streets of Yangshuo. Despite the rave reviews, we could have passed on West Street and Yangshuo tourism in general. The flower crown sellers, the cormorant fishermen who have abandoned fishing for the more lucrative practice of posing for photos dressed in full fishing gear (with cormorants), the constant harassment by postcard sellers (you can't sit down for two minutes at a restaurant before they find you), the pashmina vendors, the 'Tibetan silver' stalls and the always popular Han Chinese dressed up as local minorities. It's not that this stuff doesn't exist all over China, it's actually quite manageable, in small doses.

The Hakka Tulous

2007-12-01T05:16:00.000-05:00

The earth buildings, known locally as tulous, are the reason that we made the trip all the way to Fujian. It only took one picture of these giant circular communal homes to convince us that the trip would be worth while (to convince me anyways, Yann had to actually see them in person before being convinced). The little information in our guidebook turned out to mostly be wrong, including train schedules, distances between tulous and village names. From Xiamen, we caught a train to Longyan, a city about two hours away from the main clusters of tulous. We didn't know where to go next, we had the name of a town scribbled down, but we had no map of the city nor any idea where the bus station was. We sat down in a little restaurant and were immediately joined by a crowd of people. We assumed they were taxi drivers, but most were just curious locals. The adorable owner of the restaurant impressed them with his English skills "sit down please, sit down please, thank you, monkey, tiger, orange, banana". We tried to explain where we were going, most already knew and were repeating "tulou tulou". After a few minutes someone arrived with three teenage girls, they had gone to fetch them because they could speak some English. They offered the taxi services of a driver, but they also were happy to give us the cheaper alternative, a city bus to the bus station, and then an onward bus to the tulous, they gave us all the instructions we needed. Everyone in the restaurant seemed happy to have helped when we set off.

We got a bus ticket to Hukeng, which was listed as the best base for exploring the nearby tulous. The tulous are actually scattered all over the southwest of Fujian and on the two hour drive to Hukeng we passed dozens of them, although many had been updated Chinese style with white-tiled additions. Before the turnoff for Hukeng, our minibus pulled over to the side of the road and the driver announced that anyone going to the tulous would be transferred into a van that seemed to be waiting to meet us. Under ordinary circumstances, we would have insisted that the bus continue its scheduled trip to Hukeng, but having little idea of where we were or where we wanted to go, we got into the van along with two Chinese tourists and a local farmer. The possibility that this was a legitimate transfer disappeared the minute we were handed the hotel business cards. We ended up at a very small village a few kilometers past Hukeng, our intended destination. Our sneaky drivers ended up being quite friendly and non-pushy, they seemed to have focused their attention on the Chinese couple, so we ended up in their hotel. From the huge illustrated map in the hotel lobby we realised that we were right in the middle of tulou country, the ones we were hoping to visit were actually here in Hongkeng and not in Hukeng as was mentioned in our guidebook. As the sun was setting we wandered through the quiet village watching the locals return from their fields for dinner. The next day we embarked on a full day of tulou sightseeing. Along with the Chinese couple who had been roped into the same hotel as us, we hired a driver to bring us to five nearby villages, each with notable tulous. The first place we visited was Tianluokeng, an impressive cluster of four annular tulous encircling a rectangular one. We arrived before sunrise and were the only visitors. Villagers didn't seem to be bothered by us wandering through their homes, I suppose they're used to lack of privacy. The huge communal homes were originally built by the local Hakka people to keep out bandits and wild animals. Most are still inhabited. On the ground floor are the kitchens, each one with a chimney exiting the mud walls of the building. The courtyard in the centre is used for cleaning, food preparation and socializing over a cup of the famous Fujianese tea. On the second and third floors are the bedrooms storage rooms (sometimes there is a fourth floor). The buildings are made almost entirely out of wood, other than the outer mud walls (from which the buildings take their name: Earth Buildings). We waited for the sun to illuminate each of the Tianluokeng tulous one by one. From Tianluokeng we drove to the nearby village of Xiaban whose main tulou is famous due to the fact that it seems to be on the verge of collapse. It is called Yuchang Tulou (translation, the dilapidated earth building). Shortly after it was built, its beams warped, some as much as 15 degrees, but it has been standing ever since (almost a hundred years) and is still inhabited. From there we visited Taxia, a charming village with a few tulous, which were just probably added to our tulou tour, so that they could claim we were visiting four different sites. We didn't mind that the tulous weren't particularly spectacular, because the village itself was. It was harvest time for persimmons and purple flower, with baskets of them set along the river to dry. According to one local man, the purple flower petals are used to make makeup, although we never once spotted a Hakka woman wearing purple eyeshadow. From there we got our driver to drop us off at the last group of tulous in the village of Gaobei. The Chinese tourists with us didn't want to visit them, because they didn't want to pay the full admission price. We found the huge Chengqi Tulou in Gaobei to be the most impressive. It is made up of a central square altar used for prayers, surrounded by three concentric rings separated by narrow hallways. As in Taxia, the village of Gaobei was filled with baskets of drying persimmons. We had lunch our lunch of a pomelo and peanuts to the distress of the old ladies of the village who didn't think it was adequate nutrition and tried to get us to eat with them. One ended up filling our bag with persimmons despite our objections. By the time we got to Hongkeng we had seen over a dozen tulous and were getting slightly tuloued out. But we forged on and bought out ticket for the 'Tourist Tulou AAAA Village'. This group of tulous around Hongkeng has basically been closed off to anything but local traffic, and golf carts whiz tourists past the numerous tulous. It is obvious why the area was chosen as the tourist village, there are many tulous grouped closely together, of various shapes and sizes in a picturesque setting along a small river. Tourism hasn't really transformed the tulou villages the way it has other 'minority destinations' in China. The villagers seem not to have given up their day jobs quite yet(read working the fields). We watched them as they picked, peeled, flattened roasted, and finally spread out to dry hundreds of persimmons. The amount of work that went into our 5 yuan bag of 20 dried persimmons is incredible. You can't really blame anyone for switching to postcard selling or golf cart driving. Even in Zhencheng Tulou, the biggest of the tulous in the 'tourist village' residents cooked together in the courtyard while tourists wandered around the balconies. We were happy to have gotten a glimpse of tulou life, before it changes forever (something that seems iminent).

Getting to Like Xiamen

2007-11-29T14:26:00.000-05:00

After nearly a month together, it was time for my dad to return home after his successful (we think) introduction to Asia. We were getting a little bit too comfortable in Beijing and the next day Yann and I took off on a 31-hour train ride to Xiamen, a city in the southern coastal province of Fujian. Admittedly, we didn't really know very much about our destination, not having had that much time to plan this next leg of our trip. We had seen a single photo of a tulou, the name given to the round communal houses of the province's Hakka minority and was determined to get a glimpse of them. Xiamen, right on the coast, seemed to be a good place to relax for a few days. It wasn't until we were on the train and we started studying the map and the rail network that we realised that we were traveling ourselves into a corner, and that there would be hours of travel involved to get out of Fujian and on to our next destination. I remained optimistic but Yann wasn't quite as keen. We met an English-speaking political science student from Xiamen on the train, and he assured us that we would love the city, that the air was fresh, the weather warm and the seafood delicious. When our train pulled into Xiamen after dark, he accompanied us by taxi to the harbour (refusing to let us pay), where he showed us where to board the ferry to Gulang Yu, a small nearby island where we wanted to spend the night. He was exceedingly nervous that we didn't have a reservation for the hostel, and tried to get us to consider sleeping in the Xiamen University dorms, or in his appartment.

Xiamen is rich in colonial heritage and forcibly opened as a trading port by the British in the mid 19th-Century. The island of Gulang Yu was a diplomatic enclave, and most of the crumbling colonial mansions are still standing. We arrived on a Saturday night and every single bed in the youth hostel was taken. We were offered a tent on the cement patio outside which we accepted. Yann was now very grumpy, and I was getting nervous about my claims of the city being a worthwhile destination. Upon exit from the train station we had been greeted by a gigantic Wal-Mart, a McDonald's and rows of skyscrapers. Even the tiny island had a McDonald's outlet right at the ferry terminal. We retreated to our tent hoping that we might discover Xiamen's colonial charm the next day. In the morning, we took the ferry back to the mainland to visit Xiamen University's campus. It wasn't until we located the beach that we cheered up a bit watching the Chinese hilariously dip their feet into the water. We came across three hilarious monks, from the nearby Nanputuo Temple burrying each other in the sand in their full monks' robes. When they caught us taking pictures of them they called us over to pose with them. The one who was buried up to his neck was talking away in his broken English despite the sand filling up his mouth, making us promise to e-mail the photos to him and exclaiming that it was a wonderful day when we agreed. We spent a full day exploring Gulang Yu Island with the Chinese tour groups. By night fall the island was pretty much deserted but by day the groups of elderly Chinese sporting matching baseball caps followed their loud-speaker wielding tour guides around, past the old consulates and ornate residences. The funnest activity was watching them hit the seafood shops, where you can buy all sorts of dried sea creatures. Sitting around tables, drinking the famous local tea, they haggled with salespeople selecting the best pieces of shark fin. Buying ridiculous amounts of "local items" at "great prices" seems to be an integral part of any Chinese tour. We had to pass on the delicious dried scallops (asking price: 300yuan/0.5kg), but bought ourselves a giant bag of dried squid so that we wouldn't feel left out (yet to be opened). In the evenings we discovered the hectic streets of the harbour district. Behind layers of clothes lines, electric wires and alot of grime are enchanting century old colonial buildings. Streets are filled with vendors selling everything from fresh seafood to Chinese pornography, we even spotted a Burmese restaurant. We spent hours wandering back and forth down the busy streets, loving the simultaneously chaotic and laid back atmosphere. Against our better judgment we entered a clean, trendy restaurant and had a terrible meal accompanied by a pitiful karaoke singer. The next night we repented, hitting the backstreets and picking fresh seafood from styrofoam containers at an outdoor restaurant. We had an outstanding meal for less money than we had spent the previous night, enjoying the lively streets and the perfect weather. After three days in Xiamen, we were no longer unhappy about our southeastern detour and we were now mad at ourselves for having booked our train tickets out for the next day.

Beijing for Dummies (That's Us)

2007-11-24T10:55:00.000-05:00

THE SIGHTS

The Forbidden City
The quintessential symbol of Imperial China, whether you really want to or not it's a must see. When we visited, two of the main buildings were under construction, so no postcard pictures for us. On the plus side, the ticket price has been drastically reduced to take construction into account. Take a pass on the audio guides, they are supposed to turn on and off automatically as you arrive at the various sights. I got to hear about the Supreme Harmony Gate three times before officially giving up on it. My dad lasted a few hours more than Yann and I, what a trooper. But we had already been there once before. Tianan'men Square
When we first arrived in Beijing, the 17th CCP Congress was in session, prompting topiary statues, neon lights, fountains and even patches of grass to be installed on Tianan'men Square. Thankfully when we arrived back in Beijing, three weeks later, the hideousness was gone, returning the famous square to its concrete, barren massiveness. You still can't get too close to the phallic Monument to the People's Heroes, as in the past it has been the symbolic staging point for many un-harmonious protests. You can't approach the large portrait of Mao hanging at the entrance to the Forbidden City either, as someone actually managed to set it on fire this year, with a gagillion military and police forces and even more tourists around. Chairman Mao Memorial Hall
My dad and I stood with the hundreds of Chinese waiting in line to pay their respects to the great Mao. This is probably the first and last time you will ever see Chinese people queue up in an orderly fashion (somewhat). Once you enter the solemn building, you are quickly ushered past Mao's eerily preserved body to the exit at the back of the mausoleum, where you can get all the Mao Zedong paraphernalia you could possibly ask for. The Chairman would be so proud. The Great Hall of the People
A gargantuan concrete beast. It's where the CCP's congresses take place every once in a while. Otherwise it is used to host foreign dignitaries in its huge lavish rooms. You can tour around a selection of rooms (each named after a Chinese province) and join in the absolute chaos of photo-taking in the main auditorium (where the congresses are held). The Summer Palace
This is where the emperor and his entourage retreated in the hot season. Now on the outskirts of the Beijing City Centre, it's accesible by public bus. My dad and I spent an entire day walking around the grounds. Even the terrible haze obscuring views across Kunming Lake didn't detract too much from our enjoyment of the place. Yonghe Gong (Lama Temple)
Maybe we had overdosed on temples, but the Tibetan Lama Temple, didn't seem to inspire much. Less Tibetan Buddhism on hand than Chinese tourists purchasing copious amounts of incense so that Buddha might grant them good luck. We opted for a speedy tour so that we could catch the sunset at Jingshan Park.

Jingshan Park
Purportedly affords the best sunset views of the Forbidden City. So the three of us literally ran up to the viewing platform only to find a) not so great views of the Forbidden City b) the North Gate of the Forbidden City covered in scaffolding and green tarps c) hundreds of other tourists clambering for better viewing spots at a tiny pavilion. We discovered later that hands down better views could be had from the White Pagoda in Beihai Park, or from the ground, at the Forbidden City moat. Beihai Park
Great people-watching. Non-stop taichi, line dancing, water calligraphing, opera singing, action. Who can resist the adorable senior citizens of Beijing? Apparently neither Yann nor my dad. Lao She Teahouse
The Sunday matinée Beijing Opera show here proved to be a pretty good deal. For a few dollars you get a bottomless cup of tea and three act Beijing Opera sampler. We were pretty close to the stage (but not too close because we hadn't shelled out the big bucks) and we had a good view, but we had to contend with the unbelievably rude staff, who talked loudly to each other just a few feet away from us. At one point a woman from the t-shirt selling booth was holding up a t-shirt and yelling something to another vendor all the way across the room!?! The last straw was when a staff member began imitating one of the singers on stage. This got him a pathetic "Shhhhh" from me, followed by a pointing of the index finger and a "Shut UP" from my dad which proved to be a more successful way of getting him and the rest of the staff to shut up. We moved across the room to an empty table anyways and enjoyed the performance much more. SHOPPING

Wangfujing Street
McDonald's, Haagen Daaz, KFC, Versace, Gucci... not even knock-offs. We checked out the 'Official Olympics Flagship Store', welcome to the land of excessive merchandising. Crystal Olympic mascot sets, watches, pens, bags, everything you could possibly emblazon with the Olympic crest. You can ride down the car-free Wanfujing street in the Yahoo! shuttle train, or watch the congress of the Chinese Communist Party broadcast live on a giant screen surrounded by golden arches. Is this for real? Panjiayuan Market
Beijing's giant flea market. You might have resisted the Terracotta warriors, but can you resist Chinese name chops, minority handicrafts, Buddha sculptures, Cultural Revolution posters, fake jade, pashmina shawls, turquoise and coral strands, Tibetan singing bowls, wooden masks, Chinese porcelain? Impossible! There's a reason why they've installed an ATM machine right outside the main gate. The three of us had to split up for this shopping extravaganza. I really wanted the giant acupuncture dolls, but I didn't know how my dad would feel about carrying them in his suitcase, so I got a set of smaller wooden puppets. Yann got a name chop and my dad employing his haggling techniques learned in Xi'an won a particularly hard fought battle for a decent price on a small incense holder. Sanlitun Yashou Clothing Market
"Hey lady looka looka, you want Gucci, Prada, cheapa cheapa". Welcome to knock-off heaven. If you can handle the annoying salesgirls and have some idea of what you are supposed to pay for things than you can probably pick up a few good value items. We mainly came to the market to get a suit tailor made for my dad, which at 1000yuan seems to have been a successful purchase. He and Condoleeza Rice now own suits from the same shop.

PEKING DUCK

Quanjude Roast Duck Restaurant
The longest running Peking duck restaurant in China. If you don't care too much for the duck, come for the lobby/waiting room excitement. Get your number and wait with the hundreds of tourists, Chinese and foreigner until you're called by the girl standing on a pedestal holding the megaphone. The Hepingmen branch where we ate is four floors of duck consumption madness. The corridors are lined with photos of various important people dining at the restaurant. The duck itself is carved in front of you, cooked with crispy skin and little fat. It is eaten wrapped (do-it-yourself) in thin wheat pancakes with scallions and fermented bean sauce. Delicious but extremely rich. Expect a Peking duck hangover the next morning. Dadong Roast Duck Restaurant
We could we rate the Quanjude duck without something to compare it to. We picked the Dadong restaurant, picked as the city's best Peking Duck by the annual reader's poll of an expat magazine. First major plus, free drinks in the waiting room. The three of us hung out by the wine boxes, giddy like underage drinkers whose fake id's just worked. Sharing the prized information with other guests: "the wine is free you know!". Three glasses each later, we were seated. We ordered a plate of duck hearts, which were scrumptious and the full duck. Along with the traditional wheat pancakes, scallions and sauce, we had six other condiments to try. We thought the Quanjude duck had little fat but it was no comparison to the dry, crispy Dadong duck. It felt so much lighter and easier to eat. With complimentary fruit plates and dessert, Dadong was a clear winner in the food and price category. Quanjude remained victorious on atmosphere however, boring expats can't compete with stampeding crowds of hungry Chinese.

November 1st in Chengde

2007-11-23T16:45:00.000-05:00

There is only one overnight sleeper train from Qingdao to Beijing and it seemed impossible for us to get tickets for it. There are however tons of the more expensive super fast trains between the two cities, that have been introduced ahead of the Olympics to get people to the sailing events on the coast. The trains are luxurious with giant reclining chairs, lots of leg room and a complimentary bottle of Tibet Spring water (the expensive brand). It took us less than six hours to get to Beijing. From there we had to catch a bus to Chengde, a city about 4 hours north of the capital. It took us a long time to get to the bus station, thanks to the taxi driver who decided to drive us around town for a few more yuan. When we got to the station I had already pulled out the map and started discussing with Yann and my dad about the ridiculous route we had taken (while pointing at the meter) the driver became visibly nervous, and ended up giving us a discount off the price of the meter (which has never ever happened to us and wasn't expected). We still probably paid too much.

We had just missed a bus to Chengde and were forced to wait a few hours for the next one, which was cheaper, so most likely slower. When traveling by bus, Yann always insists that we don't sit in the front seats, to prevent us from flying through the windshield. This time, for some reason, we chose the two front seats (my dad one row back), which evidently cursed us into getting China's most lunatic driver. If it wasn't the accelerating out of the bus station over the six consecutive speed bumps that signaled trouble, it had to be barreling onto the busy highway in the wrong direction down an offramp.

The next four hours are a blur of oncoming headlights, swerving, honking, smoking, and gravel road detours. Thankfully, the driver had an able copilot warning him when he was about to hit a cyclist or ram into a truck backing out onto the highway without any lights on (and of course without checking for oncoming traffic). Most of the trip was made in the dark, which added to insanity of the situation. We knew we wouldn't be taking the express toll highway from Beijing, as we had the cheap tickets, but the alternate route included driving over ditches on temporary mud bridges. Sometimes we would be drive along a side road parallel to the expressway, which we gazed at longingly. Yann cursed my seat choice the entire trip and my dad seemed to be in a state of shock.

Being late October the temperatures were hovering around zero Celsius and low season prices were in effect at the lovely Mountain Villa, a hotel with chandeliers, revolving doors and bellhops. Right across from our hotel was the Mountain Resort, the summer palace and hunting grounds of the Manchurian Emperors. Around the walled resort are the Eight Outlying Temples, giant temples built by various emperors to receive foreign guests on diplomatic visits. The temples are not active, and probably never were they were more about public relations than spirituality. The largest of them is based on the Potala Palace in Lhasa. When you get closer to it you can see that most of the windows have been painted on, and apparently many of the buildings are cement blocks. On our first day in Chengde we dragged my dad around to four of the eight temples, three others are closed to the public and one is falling apart. We visited most of the buildings completely alone, it was cold but the sky was perfectly blue and the views were outstanding. We devoted the next day in Chengde to the Mountain Resort. Compared to the Outlying Temples, this site is more about the grounds than the buildings. Peaceful lakes and forests with a few modest pavilions scattered throughout. We headed to the north end of the grounds where we had spotted tourists on the walls the day before getting great views of the Outlying Temples. As we approached the stairs leading to the walls, we noticed a sign informing us that as of Nov. 1st this section of the park was no longer open. We stood for a few seconds, first to figure out that it was Nov. 1st, secondly to decide whether or not we could access the walls from a different place. A woman approached us to tell us that we couldn't continue, Yann and I questioned her a bit, and my dad was off. By the time we concluded that we should ignore the sign (and the woman) my dad was long gone. We joined him in the off-limits area and came up with a brilliant plan to evade authorities: pretend not to understand Chinese. We spent the a perfect afternoon hiking along the walls, where we got great views of the Outlying Temples below, and through the back section of the park. Alone, but for a few cranky security guards wondering what we were doing there, and herds of deer savouring their first day of freedom from the tourists.

Tsingtaos in Qingdao

2007-11-21T09:23:00.000-05:00

Due mainly to my inability to make up my mind, we ended up standing in the middle of the busy bus station parking lot in Zhengzhou (the capital of Henan), not knowing where we were going next. Our original plan was to head north to a small village, to get a taste of rural Central China. This plan involved at least two more bus transfers, a possible taxi ride, and it involved backtracking along the same route on our way to our next destination. The second plan was to go directly to Kaifeng, have two days there, then catch a night train to Qingdao on the East Coast. I think Yann and my dad seemed to be leaning towards the tougher option, but I convinced them that we should go directly to Kaifeng.

Apparently alot of other people were on their way to Kaifeng, only about an hour away. We waited as two extra large buses filled up, including standing room only. The Chinese are still just learning to queue and even the metal gates designed to keep people in lines didn't do much other than create a giant swelling mass, enclosed by metal gates. I stood with my arms outstretched, holding on to each side of the bars to keep people from getting ahead of me, but amazingly, it didn't stop them from trying. The moment when we were almost at the front of the line, an old man lept over the gates right where my dad was standing. Well, he tried to leap over the gates, but got my dad's elbow to the face instead. The three of us managed to get seats near the back of the bus, holding all our stuff on our laps. Shortly after we sat down, the queue-jumping little man appeared in the bus, apparently undeterred by my dad's elbow. He arrived to the back of the bus and had the choice between the vacant seat beside my dad, or a seat in the very back. He gave a long hard look at my dad, then sat down beside him. Once in Kaifeng we gave my dad the task of purchasing our onward train tickets to Qingdao for the next night. That didn't work out, the ticket lady informed us that there weren't any seats available for tomorrow, the next day or the next day after that. What was available were tickets for a train leaving at 6am the next morning and making the 14 hour trip during the day. With no other viable options (that we knew of) we settled for a day of noodle-cup eating. Kaifeng turned out to be a city with more character than expected. It didn't seem to have been hit as hard by the modernisation drives in other big Chinese cities. The rickshaw drivers that ploughed the alleys of Beijing only two years ago have almost all disappeared, replaced by shiny new taxis. But here, they were still around, with the motorbike version being the more expensive alternative. The streets were filled with street vendors and we didn't meet another (non-Chinese) tourists while we were there. We had time only to visit the city's biggest temple, The Temple of the Chief Minister and get mobbed by an adorable crowd of yellow-robed novice monks. A large intersection in Kaifeng's centre is taken up by stalls and foldable tables and chairs for the daily night market. Although it was really nice to sit and dine outside, amongst so many other people, we felt the pickin's were slim in terms of dining options. Too many kebabs and way too much stinky tofu, not much else. We settled for the boring but safe, dumplings and beer.

The next morning we hit the streets before sunrise to catch our Qingdao bound train. With actual berths in hard sleeper class, the 14 hours flew by and we were in Qingdao by late evening, well rested. At least we were pretty sure we were in Qingdao. The main Qingdao train station was closed for Olympics renovations and we could only buy tickets to 'Sifang', which we knew was close to Qingdao, but just how close, that we weren't sure of. Up until we left the station, and realised that the platforms were planks of plywood, and that we were standing in an industrial park, I did finally concede defeat to Yann and admit that maybe we hadn't pulled into the train station, a century old German colonial building in Qingdao's Old Town.

At most train and bus stations in China you have the legitimate taxis queued up at a taxi stand, somewhere nearby you have the less legitimate drivers trying to usher you into their taxis. Due to its temporary status as the main Qingdao station, Sifang was a complete mess, with taxis everywhere, no visible queue and drivers shouting at us from every direction. As we didn't know where we were, we didn't have much choice other than to get into one. All we wanted was someone who was willing to use his meter on, even if he circled us around town for a while, it wouldn't cost us too much. We finally found someone willing to take us, loaded the trunk with our bags and pulled off. He stopped about 10 meters ahead where his associate who spoke a bit of English quoted us a new non-metered price of 30yuan/person. Furious, I opened the door, told the driver to open the trunk and we began getting out. A group of taxi drivers were yelling various things at us, while the driver was trying to get us back into the car. I just kept repeating "meter meter" and they kept repeating "no meter no meter". The tone was becoming more aggressive and my dad was now a bit ahead of me up the road repeatedly giving the double middle finger plus verbal fuck yous to the drivers. Meanwhile (I only heard about this later), poor Yann was watching the scene unfold from the back of the taxi, where he remained locked in, trying to get our attention. He was finally freed by the driver only to be greeted by a chorus of "fack yuu, fack yuu" (these guys were fast learners). The three of us now continued walking up the road, into the darkness, realising that we might have burned our bridges with the taxi cartel. Then a driver pulled up, nodded when I pointed at the meter and had us at our hostel within minutes for 25 yuan (we thanked him profusely, but our gratitude couldn't really express our gratitude in Chinese).

The next day, with the taxi madness behind us, we spent the day visiting Qingdao's Old Town. Being under German administration for a few years has done wonders for the city's architecture (note, that we don't love white tiles and neon lights). From our hostel room window we had views of the red roof tiles, the Catholic church spires and the ocean behind. Around our hotel the old streets were filled with activity, food vendors (lots of live seafood), restaurants and general mayhem. For lunch we lined up with the locals to get our hands on the deliciously fresh, fried fish with cornbread. After visiting most of Qingdao's German heritage buildings, we headed to the Zongshan Park, where we managed to get lost in what is probably the city's last remaining square kilometer of forest. We were trying to walk up to the TV Tower for views on the city (we eventually backtracked to the cable car, that we were trying to avoid taking). Although we enjoyed our day in the park, (who doesn't enjoy fake-flower sculptures, cable cars and TV towers?) it didn't really compare to the city's more historical areas, or even the views from the waterfront. But we managed to make an afternoon of it anyways. But we saved Qingdao's best site for last: The Tsingtao Brewery. The German's longest lasting contribution to China, where your admission ticket comes with a pitcher of beer. The entire neighbourhood surrounding the brewery is a shrine to the famous beer brand, including beer bottle sculptures, beer bottle-shaped park benches and the cleverly named 'Beer Street'. There is an on sight museum with old brewing equipment, photos of the original brewery and viewing windows where you can watch the beer being packaged. We learned about the nutritional value of Tsintao Beer, as well as the four steps to appreciating beer: Look, Swirl, Sniff, Sip. And at the end of the highly enlightening tour we got what we came for, our Tsingtaos, which obviously tasted better in their birthplace, Qingdao.

Touring Henan Province

2007-11-19T12:57:00.000-05:00

Luoyang, despite being only a few hours away from Xi'an and home to two major tourist destinations in Central China didn't seem to be overrun with foreign tourists (as Xi'an did). When we checked into our youth hostel, we seemed to be the only guests (and there wasn't anything noticeably wrong with the place). It was late when we arrived, so our first activity was to hit the night market in the old city for dinner. We walked for what seemed a long time, once we got to the spot where the night market was supposed to be, we were told by locals that it didn't exist anymore. So ... Yann and I did what we usually do for dinner, pick the first restaurant we happen to come across. This gave us the chance to demonstrate our perfected food ordering techniques:
1) Point at dishes that other clients are eating (not easy when there aren't any others, this time we ended up with some delightful deep fried fish bites)
2) Go to the kitchen (sometimes you don't really want to see what's there), point at ingredients that you would like to eat
3) Point at ingredients in the 'Food' section of our phrasebook (again, this can sometimes cause confusion, like when I asked for pork and got pork intestines, it's all the same right? Wrong!)
Technique one has proved especially perilous in the past, but this time we ended up eating a good meal, trying local dishes with an enthousiastic owner who spent most of the meal sitting in the corner with our phrasebook. We spent most of the next day at the nearby Longmen Caves, a series of thousands of grottoes carved out of the limestone banks of the Yi River (from about 500-700AD). Many of the carvings are missing various parts, but enough are there, relatively intact, to give you an idea of the immensity of the scale of the site. Especially from across the river, where you can see the hundreds of niches dotting the cliffs (too bad for the giant plastic pink lotus floating directly in front of the main cave). On our second day in Luoyang we made the trip to the legendary Shaolin Temple at Song Mountain. Immortalized in Chinese films and stories (see Shaolin Soccer and Kungfu Hustle), for generations this birthplace of Kungfu is not so much a reclusive temple among the misty mountains as it is a tourist-geared Kungfu Disneyland. Gone are the days of the Shaolin monks enduring grueling mental and physical training, living as quasi-hermits, intervening in times of crisis on the part of the good and righteous. What exists now is still a school, a giant one at that, with hundreds of young Chinese kids in Shaolin tracksuits, aspiring to someday be part of the Shaolin Temple entrance show (which I might add, is quite the show). If there was ever and peace and serenity at Shaolin, it is long gone, replaced by colourful costumes, tacky acrobatics displays and expensive admissions tickets. If you have no shame, you can even pose with a little monk doing the splits (we just took a picture of him instead). The Shaolin Temple itself is quite impressive, although rebuilt less than a hundred years ago after being burned to the ground by a local gangster who didn't get along too well with the resident monks. Behind the temple is the lovely Pagoda Forest, home to hundreds of pagodas, many crumbling and lopsided. Further away still from the mayhem of the Shaolin entrance gate, are the Song Mountains. We rode up by cable car to the path that hugs the limestone cliffs, not coming across too many other tourists (most of them are being whisked on and off tourists buses for speedy visits of the temple and maybe a jade factory or two). Other than the haze, which was pretty bad, the views were awesome and we stayed on the path for most of the afternoon. We were pretty hungry after such a long day, I managed to talk Yann and my dad out of the 24-course Luoyang Water Banquet (served with the speed of flowing water) and into dinner at an American chain restaurant which will not be mentioned here.

Buying Useless Items in Xi'an

2007-11-17T11:05:00.000-05:00

My dad had only been in China five days when we were briefly separated from him in the backstreets of Xi'an Muslim Quarter. Separated long enough for him to get his hands on a tiny terracotta warrior for 10 yuan. We forgave him his indiscretion and warmed him to consult us before future purchases.

The Muslim Quarter hadn't changed much since Yann and I had visited two years earlier, although a large sign now hung over the main entrance you "Welcome to Islamic Food Street" and way more vendors and waitresses seemed to be sporting the Hui Muslim caps, part of the new Islamic-themed tourist uniform? Along the backstreets are rows and rows of souvenir shops selling mesmerizing quantities of similar knick-knacks, including the ubiquitous terracotta warriors in various colours and sizes. I personally find it quite difficult to walk through the lanes without buying anything. So what if they're brand new, mass produced items that the vendors carefully antiquified with a bit of scraping and dirtying? They do a good job of making them look like unique little treasures...until you see them a thousand times. Despite ridiculous opening offers, you can still come away with a good deal, with a lot of haggling and the mandatory "I'm walking away now, I'm not interested" technique.

On our first afternoon in Xi'an my dad and I hit Xi'an's most famed tourist attraction, The Army of Terracotta Warriors (or as the Chinese like to call them The Terracotta Warrios). In about 200 BC, Emperor Qin, terrified of the afterlife has thousands of life sized soldiers built to escort his soul into heaven. Wooden roofs housing the army eventually collapse and the tomb of now crumbled soldiers is lost for over two thousand years. Until, in 1976, when farmers stumble upon them while digging a well. Now, thirty years later, you can visit the three pits of warriors, most still in pieces, some having been painstakingly reassembled (an amazing work, still in progress). Or, better yet, you can get the autograph of one of the farmer discoverers. As long as you buy the 20$ souvenir book. I was more impressed by the site the second time around, the first time I had thought that the entire 5000-strong army was still intact, and was shocked by the pits full of crushed body parts. This time I was ready, as I was ready for the army of terracotta warrior salespeople waiting for us when we left the site. All armed with the 5-piece set; horse, archer, general, foot soldier and Emperor Qin himself. Here's how to buy a set (if you really must):

salesman: Hallo 10 yuan, 10 yuan, very cheapa, hallo hallo (holding box)
Emilie: 10 yuan? You mean 10 yuan for a piece, how much for the whole box?
salesman: 12 dolla
Emilie: 12 dollars?
salesman: ok ok 12 euros
Emilie: huh?
salesman: ok ok 100 yuan
Emilie: 10 yuan
salesman: 50 yuan
Emilie: 10 yuan
salesman: 20 yuan, last price
Emilie (walking away): 10 yuan
salesman: ok ok
Emilie takes out 10 yuan from wallet
salesman: ok ok 50 yuan for horse
Emilie hands over 10 yuan, salesman smiles and hands over box.

I actually bought the set on my dad's behalf who had concluded that he really needed a box of terracotta warriors, since it only cost 10 yuan, and he had already paid 10 yuan for a single, smaller warrior without the complimentary box. As with all purchasers of terracotta warriors, the minute he had it in his hands, he wondered why the hell he had bought it in the first place. Moments after the first purchase we were besieged by another groups of salespeople, these ones even more persistent. One of them latched on to my dad, he tried to explain to her that he already had a set. Then she whipped out her secret weapon: the bronze coloured warriors. As she negotiated incoherently "10 yuan, 10 yuan, 12 euros...", my dad became more and more attracted to this lovely bronze set, as I could only stand back and watch in horror. For 6 yuan, he was now the proud owner of a second set of terracotta warriors, and was now averaging a respectable 8 yuan/box. Being of superior quality, if packed at the bottom of your bag, these warriors will end up looking exactly as they do in real life (pre-reconstruction). Although my dad seemed somewhat perplexed and discouraged that a sizable portion of his bag was now being occupied by terracotta warriors, he had nothing on Yann and I. The first time we hit Xi'an we left with a large quilt, half a dozen little red books, 5 cloisonnes boxes, two fake coral necklaces, four mao caps, two mao suits (one black, one blue) and a whole lot more crap that we didn't need (but only one box of terracotta warriors). We sent my dad off to visit some of Xi'an's sites on his own and he managed well, finding both the big and small wild goose pagodas, despite asking around for the big bird palaces (or something like that). On our last day in Xi'an the three of us hit the city walls. I finally got Yann on a tandem bicycle and we raced my dad around the 13 kilometers of wall. Xi'an's large Hui Muslim community offers great food alternatives, especially for rookies to Chinese cooking. At breakfast we replaced our pork dumplings with lamb or beef ones. We dined on roasted lamb covered in cumin and chilli two nights in a row, accompanied by naan bread, also covered in cumin and toasted on the outdoor grill. Sadly, we couldn't get any beer with that. The Muslim Quarter is a lively nighttime dining spot and is packed with people even on weekdays. Most of the restaurants have piles of roasted lamb from which you select a piece and pay for it by weight, it is grilled in front of you. One night we decided to attempt a hotpot dinner at an outdoor restaurant. Hotpots are a Chinese fondue, you sit around a big bowl of boiling broth, select various vegetable and meat skewers, cook them in the broth, dip them in sauce and enjoy. Unfortunately, they are problematic for tourists, due to the sheer number of items you can be overcharged for. The price of every item; broth, sauce, skewers, napkins, fuel, skewers, has to be asked in advance to avoid ridiculous final bills. The manager of this hotpot restaurant seemed to follow the usual pattern and it was difficult to get him to tell us any prices at all. At the end of the meal when a waitress added up the bill, he flew across the restaurant, trying to get her to add something to our bill. Thankfully she wasn't too quick and stood there looking confused (we had already worked our the price of our meal anyways). The usual friendly exchange ensued (my dad had no problems getting into the spirit of things), and we stormed away, having paid the original price quoted by the waitress.

The mood was sombre, until we heard it in the distance, the happy birthday song. The song used by Chinese street cleaners to announce the impending havoc they are about to wreak on innocent street vendors and restaurants. In another triumph of Chinese planning, the street cleaner is scheduled to pass down "Islamic Food Street" at the height of dinner time. The meat is roasting on the outdoor grills, the vendors have their items carefully lined up along the sidewalk, diners pack the streets picking out the perfect lamb leg, and the street cleaner blasts every last one of them with water. But not, without a happy birthday warning. As we watched the cooks and vendors literally diving out of the way, barbecues being soaked (along with the meat cooking on them), we couldn't help but cheer up a bit. Too bad the street cleaner wasn't passing in front of the hotpot restaurant.

Pingyao Two Years Later

2007-11-15T13:43:00.000-05:00

Before leaving for the train station, we had to stock up on dinner supplies. An introduction to the wide world of Chinese instant noodles. Most shops, even small ones, have at least one aisle dedicated to them. They come in a little tub in which you dumb the various scary flavour pouches, along with hot water, five minutes later, delicious meal in a portable disposable container. If you're lucky they'll have brands with some English on them, such as "Roasted Beef Noodle" (a perennial favourite), but most of the time you have to make due with the pictures (not an easy task). We didn't have to teach my dad about Chinese beer, he quickly discovered that it's cheap, widely available, you can drink it anywhere and it goes rather well with instant noodles.

Once on the train, my dad settled into his top sleeper bunk with relative ease (we all had top bunks because that's all we could get). We might have had a better sleep had I not told everyone that the train was scheduled to arrive at 5:30 a.m. when it was actually scheduled to arrive at 8 a.m. Yann and I chose to stop in the small walled city of Pingyao because we had enjoyed it so much the first time we visited (two years ago). According to our guidebook it is "possibly the best preserved ancient walled city in China. Pingyao has a movie set charm that makes the hearts of even the most hardened expats skip a beat." Hardened expats meet your match: my dad. When we arrived, it was cold and hazy and the fact that we were in coal country seemed difficult to ignore. Alot of the homes on the outskirts of town seemed to be run down, boarded up or abandoned. Closer to the centre of town we noted a new addition to the city's charm, giant LCD screens installed on the sides of buildings, showing videos of ... Pingyao, in cased you missed it? LCD screens aside, improvements to Pingyao might be in order, especially in the town's museums. Pingyao is famous for being the sight of China's first bank, which you can visit, if you like dark, disorganized displays with ridiculously bad English descriptions. Here we have mannequins dressed in period clothing, no wait, those are silk pyjamas and beanie hats with braids sewn into them, from the tourist shop next door. Actually, the English signs are pretty much the most interesting part of the museums, how is it possible to have such bad translations? The town's temples were more interesting than its former banks, especially the Huanglan Si, 7km outside of town which we got to on our matching one-speed rented bikes. Most of Pingyao's hotels (and there are lots of them) are well-preserved (or well reconstructed), all of them seem to be going for the 'traditional courtyard atmosphere' which pleases us tourists. Ours was set in such a courtyard, red lanterns hanging from the eaves along with unfortunate colourful cardboard goldfish. We got a good price on the room, there were only a few negative points that kept it from being a great price: 1) one bed for three people 2) toilet clogging after every use 3) staff getting huffy when being asked to unclog the toilet.

By the third day in Pingyao, the town had grown a little more on my dad and Yann and I were remembering why we had liked it so much, just in time to get ready to leave for Xi'an. We bought bus tickets from a small grocery store outside the city walls. As we waited in the shop for the bus to arrive, the owner struck up a conversation with my dad, asking him if he was sixty years old. I had to explain to my dad that in China it is courteous to estimate higher when guessing someone's age, in fact, calling someone your age 'grandchild' is an insult in China (two full ranks lower). I swear dad ... I read it somewhere.

A Meeting in Beijing

2007-11-11T18:00:00.000-05:00

From Danba, we were headed to Chengdu, the provincial capital. We had been there over a year ago and were eager to spend a night or two in one of the city's awesome and inexpensive hostels. We had been in China less than three weeks, and had already spent over 100 hours in trains and buses (mostly buses). We still had most of the country to cross and we had three days to do it, that's when my (Emilie's) father was landing in Beijing. After a ten hour bus ride from Danba to Chengdu we hopped in a taxi to the train station, hoping to book tickets for the 26 hour train ride to the capital. I got into the line, so confident that I still had my phrasebook tucked into away in my bag, I knew how to say the only three words I needed: Beijing, tomorrow and after tomorrow. I also understood the Chinese "meiyou" which means "don't have", the ticket lady repeated it lots of times for me. We had prepared ourselves for the ride in hard seats or worse even, standing. We couldn't let my dad loose on Beijing without us. As we held up the line, the ticket lady furiously typed away at her computer, trying the various train numbers, until she found us two upper bunks on the two night, 33-hour train, leaving that night around midnight. So much for our rest in Chengdu, but hooray for saving the price of two night's accommodation in Beijing.

A year ago, a 33 hour train ride would have seemed nightmarish, but Chinese trains have become one of Yann's favourite sleeping venues and I have also grown to find them cozy and relaxing. Yann spend alot of the ride talking with an English- speaking, extremely likeable bunk mate, an engineer living in Beijing. Although open-minded, we had to wince when he made statements such as "No Han Chinese is racist" and the "Uyghurs kill innocent Han women and children" (Uyghurs are the natives of Xinjiang Province and are mostly Muslims, a violent separatist uprising in the 90's (three buses blown up in Urumqi) was successfully quashed by the government with thousands of suspected terrorists/separatists executed or disappearing). I hid from controversy behind my pair of earphones, but Yann seemed to do a good job of challenging his beliefs.

We had two days in Beijing before my dad was arriving. We tracked down a great Chinese hotel with a triple room for under 20$, we were staying at a popular but crowded hostel nearby, in a thirteen bed dorm room for almost the same price. The hotel had all the features we were looking for in a welcome room; tacky decor, dirty shared bathrooms, loud mostly male Chinese patrons, rooms smelling of stale cigarette smoke... Unfortunately, the morning we attempted to check-in, they would only sell us the expensive deluxe suite, so we moved down the street to the slightly more expensive, recently opened youth hostel, set in a lovely old courtyard home, ten minutes away from Tianan'men Square. My dad's plane arrived on time, actually early but by the time he collected his (impressively small) backpack and we caught the shuttle bus back to central Beijing, it was already dinner time. Feeling that my dad might be tired, we though we would make it easy and have dinner nearby at a small restaurant, where Yann and I had been eating most of our meals since our arrival in Beijing. Apparently, our opinion as to what constitutes a great restaurant has been slighly skewed from months on the road. As we ploughed through the gongbao chicken and Chinese cabbage my dad sat perplexed, barely touching his white rice. The grimy surrounding and oil soaked food remained imperceptible to us as I proudly proclaimed that we had bargained the price of the chicken down to 8 yuan (1$). Thank god for the bottle of wine from the duty free shop.

Breakfast was more successful; the pork dumplings were more palatable and my dad even ordered a second tray, although he preferred dipping them in soya sauce than the Northern traditional vinegar.

Yann and I had been unable to secure earlier train tickets wo we had to fill one and a half days in Beijing before we set off. We decided that we would hit the Great Wall if the skies were clear. The Great Wall is known to be a little bit of a tourist zoo, we chose to go to the second busiest section of the wall near Beijing. We visited on a Monday, the sky was blue and the wall was nearly empty. We were actually able to get photos of the wall without a single person on it. My dad had managed to bring clear skies and get rid of the tourists at the Great Wall, two things we thought to be pretty much impossible.
We filled our second day in Beijing with a visit to the Temple of Heaven, one of the city's most well-known landmarks. We weren't so lucky with the crowds this time, the place was overflowing with tourists. The temple is lovely, but frankly it doesn't quite measure up to the neon-lit topiary version on Tianan'men Square. Yann and my dad's favourite feature of the temple was the old cypress tree with a boob-resembling knot in it. "Here on our right we have the UNESCO Heritage sight, symbol of Beijing, largest imperial worshiping altar in the world"..."but look at that tree! It has boobs!".

Danba's Wondrous Watchtowers

2007-11-09T08:50:00.000-05:00

From Dege, we boarded a bus making a 24 hour, two day trip to central Sichuan. We passed countless monasteries and picturesque villages, wishing we could get off the bus and stay there. We spent a night in a small bus station hotel, in a room with television for less than 5$. The next day, we loaded back on to the bus before sunrise and arrived to the highway junction in the afternoon. From there we hopped into a minivan, chauffered by China's most annoying driver, to the town of Danba a few hours away. I got praise from two adorable migrant workers who had been on the bus with us since Dege, for telling the minibus driver not to talk on his cellphone while he drove (talking on cellphone while driving is annoying, but usually wouldn't warrant an intervention, but this guy just couldn't do it without pretty much stopping the van in the middle of the highway).

The town of Danba is built along the banks of the Dadu River, and was under major renovation when we arrived. We saw the remains of an obvious landslide. In the afternoon we raced out of town, to a village across the river from Danba. We were greeted by two villagers at the foot of the bridge, collecting a small admission fee from tourists. From there we walked up a dusty path, until we hit a group of four watchtowers, the easiest (and not easy) to get to, among the dozens of them that covered the hillside. The villages are inhabited by the Qiang minority group, whose ancestors built the stone towers to guard their homes hundreds of years ago. Little is actually known about the structures, apparently even by the locals themselves. They stand alongside many of the beautiful Qiang homes, which are architectural wonders in themselves. Yann payed a villager and climbed up to the top of a watchtower, using the rickety wooden logs, steps chopped out of them. We watched the sun set over the river valley, and raced it, as we headed back down to the main road. The next morning we headed out to the villages outside Danba once again, this time we planned to visit those on our side of the river. The watchtowers of this village were way further up, so no villagers stood guarding to collect admission and no other tourists were anywhere to be found. The village homes and fields are carved all the way up the mountainside, we passed dozens of Qiang women making the trip back and forth between their fields and their homes, carrying huge baskets of corn or other crops on their backs. As we weaved up the road along its necessary switchbacks, they used the shortcuts through village yards and forests. Most of the Qiang homes are guarded by stone gates covered in thorns, making it difficult for outsiders to get up the mountain, other than by the main road. At one point we crossed two old men, who pointed us to a small path straight up the mountainside, we were weary to stray from the road, but it seemed that they would be exceedingly disappointed if we didn't follow their advice, so we did. It lead us right to the base of the village's first watchtower. We walked up for almost four hours, still not having reached some of the village's higher inhabitants. It took alot of convincing/whining to get Yann to turn back, he had decided we would walk until we reached the clouds. They were actually hovering around one of the watchtowers up ahead. Our walk through the village, past the Sichuan pepper trees, the quiet streams, crossing the hard-working, smiling villagers left us with a peaceful and relaxing day, despite being a bit of a sweaty one.

Over The Tro-La Pass, Twice

2007-11-06T02:20:00.000-05:00

We got up before sunrise to find a minibus to our next destination, a monastery town across the provincial border, into Northwestern Sichuan. At some point in the early morning, we realised that we had seriously miscalculated travel times. Most of the towns on our route were linked by at most one public bus a day, some were only linked by private transport (if there were enough customers to make the trip). We made the last minute decision to race to the bus station, where we had inquired about tickets the day before. We knew there was a bus heading to Manigango, a small Tibetan village where we planned to stop for the night. When we arrived at the bus station, we found it completely deserted, the ticket counter closed up and not a single passenger in sight. We were nervous, sitting around on an empty sidewalk, while the other options out of town, the minibuses, were filling up and leaving from the other end of town.

After about 15 minutes a taxi pulled up and we were joined by another passenger. We were able to confirm that there was in fact a bus scheduled for that day. Our delight at seeing another passenger quickly faded as more and more of them started arriving and lining up on the sidewalk alongside us. Eventually the bus and driver pulled up and it became clear that there were far more passengers than seats on the bus. Being the first people to have arrived, we felt that if there were any seats available, they should be ours, but that wasn't going to happen without work. If only we had known how to say "we got here first" in Chinese or Tibetan, instead I roamed around pointing at myself then raising my index finger, as in "I'm number one". My fiercest competition was a gigantic monk who had no problems elbowing me out as we chased the already besieged driver around. I finally got the driver's attention by shoving 200 yuan into his hands, he then pointed at two seats in the very back of the bus and I nodded in agreement.

Ticket purchase madness continued for a while, with about twenty people fighting for the five remaining seats in the bus. To get two of those five seats, I had agreed to paying the fare all the way to the last stop, even though we weren't going there. The bus eventually pulled away, I was squeezed beside the giant monk, who had also managed to secure himself a seat (although he was not one of the first to arrive at the station). We had assumed our 200 yuan was gone, with the extra money in the driver's pocket, but as we pulled off, the attendant delivered our two tickets and our change.

We travelled through barren, high-altitude, seemingly uninhabitable landscape for most of the day. We passed a large colourful monastery in Sershu, where hundreds of nomads and pilgrims had gathered for a festival. Over the course of the day we crossed four mountain passes. Every time we did, the monk next to me would begin to mumble his prayers, most of the Tibetan passengers would belt out "Yeeeeeee (slow, high pitched) so so so so so (fast, low-pitched)" while throwing prayer papers out the bus windows. Yann and I contributed the pack of prayer papers handed to us by the giant monk. Our bus seemed to be a particularly rowdy one, which helped the eight hours in the back of the bus go by. We arrived in Manigango at dusk, found a room in a small hotel and dinner in the town's largest (if only) restaurant. Like Yushu, Manigango remains almost entirely Tibetan. Dusty and run-down but atmospheric and friendly. We only spent the night there, using it as a transport hub for our trip over the nearby Tro La Mountains. We would be taking one of the less traveled highways into Tibet (but stopping short of it), the Northern Sichuan-Tibet Highway, crossing the mountains at the Tro La Pass, 5050m.

We woke up early to organise transportation, and sat for a long time as the only two passengers in a minivan until Sean and Fanny, a Chinese couple signed on. Sean and Fanny negotiated a discounted price for the extra empty seats, and we left right away. This turned out to be a sound investment, as Sean is a professional photographer, Fanny a keen amateur, and they requested frequent photo stops. Our poor driver ended up with a five our drive instead of the usual three. The scenery was truly spectacular; the snow-capped Tro La Mountains, Yihun Lhatso, a turquoise alpine holy lake, hundreds of yaks dotting the scenery and the occasional small wooden Tibetan home. The most impressive sight however, had to be the all female group of pilgrims, lugging giant packs, making their way to Lhasa, on foot. We had taken a photo break when they caught up to us on the highway. The old women and the young nuns dropped their packs and rested on the side of the road. Two of the pilgrims made their way to a home, whose owner spotted them and came out to fill their alms bags with rice. The women would be making the journey fueled mostly by rice and bread. Some of them were clearly well over 60 years old, hunched over, under the weight of their supplies. We couldn't help but admire them, especially as we chugged up the multiple switchbacks leading to the Tro La Pass in our hired minivan. At the top of the pass we stopped for photos while our driver threw the customary pack of prayer papers into the wind. Descending from the pass, we entered an alpine valley, the road sandwiched between cliff walls and a clear blue river. We saw more trees than we had seen in weeks.
We arrived in Dege in the afternoon, where we checked into a dorm room with Sean and Fanny and were treated to a Sichuan lunch (Fanny is Sichuanese). We had made the trip to Dege, even though it was somewhat of a dead end (as we didn't have permits to enter Tibet) to see what is marketed to tourists as "The Heart of Tibetan Culture", the Bakong Scripture Lamasery. It is a 300 year-old lamasery, responsible for the production of over 2500 prints of Buddhist scripture a day. The three floors of the lamasery are lined with shelved of hand carved wooden printing blocks (there are almost 300,000 of them). Using only natural sunlight (to reduce the risk of fire), dozens of workers bind scriptures, mix glue and paints, hang prints to dry and stack the hundreds of prints for delivery. The printers themselves work in pairs, one using a roller to apply red paint to the printing block the other flattening a blank sheet of paper onto the fresh paint. They work incredibly quickly, hardly taking breaks as they lay the scriptures on their legs so that they can flip them and print the other side. In a small room we found a group of old men looking over the newly printed scriptures, discarding any poorly printed ones. Outside the lamasery, pilgrims circumambulate it for hours on end. Behind the scripture lamasery, there is an even older monastery. Although slightly less important, it is beautiful and has a large number of resident monks. When we visited, the prayer hall was packed to the brim with monks, in prayer session. We decided to camp out on the balcony overlooking the courtyard (and the only exit from the prayer hall), to get photos of the monks crowding into the courtyard after prayers (we got the idea from the handful of photographers already waiting on the balcony). We gave up waiting fairly early, but returned later only to find the photographers still waiting, and the monks still praying. The stand-off didn't last much longer, with the photographers packing it in first, then Yann and I. When we left, the monks had been praying for over three hours and there was no end in sight. Dege is of understandable interest to tourists, but owing to its isolation, receives less of them than it probably should. When we were there, pilgrims far outnumbered foreign tourists. For dinner, we passed on the Tibetan food again, and had Sichuan cuisine with Sean and Fanny as well as a fifth traveller from Beijing. Sean shared photo tips with Yann for most of the evening and promised to take him to a used camera market when we visited them in Guangzhou later on in our trip. The next morning Yann and I were headed back over the mountains to Manigango and further, while Sean and Fanny were continuing into Tibet, unhindered by permit requirements. We bought our pack of Tibetan prayer papers (from the Han Chinese shopkeeper) and were ready for one more trip over the Tro La Pass.