Quick synopsis of travel so far

Okay, want to write a little bit about my current travels, still have
a lot to finish writing about from May, but that will have to wait.

Anyway, I finished teaching a week ago last Friday and then that
afternoon went up to Guilin to pick up Mom and Chris from the airport.
There was some confusion checking into the hotel (they needed to hold
onto my passport, I thought they'd call me when they were done, but
they didn't) and I ended up getting into the airport late.

We'd planned to take a cab back, but they cost more than I'd expected,
so we were going to take a bus when some people I know from China
Climb came out of the airport and offered us a ride towards town in
their bus. They'd just dropped off a big school group after a long
day, but we weren't out of the way and it worked out for them to drop
us off pretty close to our hotel.

The next day Mom, Chris, and I took a cruise down the Li River, on one
of those big boats I was complaining so much about before. They're
really not so loud if you're actually on them, they're built to block
most of the engine noise from the passengers. It was a great trip,
the day started out gray and foggy, with wisps of clouds swimming
between peaks, and ended up getting a little sunny.

We spent the next few days in Yangshuo doing some of things available
there, saw Impression Liu SanJie, rode around on bikes, went to the
Butterfly Cave (better than I'd expected, a cool cave with some
interesting water-worn figures, including one of a butterfly, plus a
hill to climb and look out from, some dancing, and a butterfly
garden), Chris and I went rock-climbing, ate some of the local food
I've been eating, and my taiji teacher took us out to dinner.

On Thursday afternoon we headed back to Guilin airport, having
arranged tickets and a well-priced ride through a continually helpful
CITS travel agent in Yangshuo. He also got Echo and me tickets to
Heng Yang in May and lots of other tickets for stuff around. For most
of the time in Yangshuo I took care of stuff, but since then Echo's
been travelling with us and usually ends up making the arrangements in
consultation with us. It's been immensely helpful, since our
itinerary is so scattered across the country.

So we flew to Chongqing, formerly a part of eastern Sichuan, but now
an independent "municipality" like Beijing and Shanghai. It's a big,
dirty, hilly city. We were lucky to find a helpful driver at the
airport who took us to a decent hotel and a place to get tickets for a
Yangtze cruise. The next day we had lunch at a widely recommended and
delicious hot-pot restaurant (two bowls in one, one has a white broth,
the other is spicy, red oil, and you boil the food in either then dip
it in sesame oil with garlic and salt, or just eat it straight, it's a
local specialty that's very good when done well).

After that we went shopping for food on the boat trip. We were
heading back to the hotel to pick up our bags to go to the ferry
terminal and decided to stop in on an interesting sounding Buddhist
temple on the way. Unfortunately, instead of the reputed 500 brightly
colored, life-size statues of arhats (Buddhist saints), there were
only about 18. I felt mildly betrayed.

Then we didn't have anything else to do, so we picked up our bags and
went to the ticket office. Where it turned out that our boat was
delayed (a recurrent problem on this leg of the trip, the amazing
thing is that we actually docked on time, at 3 am Saturday morning),
and we didn't really need to be there until 8:30 instead of 6. The
charge for checking bags was exhorbitant and we didn't really have
anything else to do, so we sat around, except for a trip to get an
additional bag (the best I could find in the right size and price
range was a dark blue Nike duffel) and to get some baozi for supper.

When we finally got on the boat at 9:30pm, and got up to our room, we
first discovered that the A/C wasn't working, and were then informed
that in order to see the first site, the ghost city and temple at
Fengdu, we'd have to get up at 5am. Of course we didn't actually get
there and off the boat until something like 8 or 9, but it was the
start of us all being overtired, overheated, and cranky. The A/C
worked intermittently throughout the two-day trip, keeping the room
pleasantly cool when functional, but leaving us in stifling heat when
not. Overall it was a cool trip, but we snoozed through a fair amount
of it towards the end. I'll try to write more specifics later, on a
time budget now.

We got into Yichang, in Hubei province at 3am on Saturday morning and,
rather than try find a hotel and risk not finding train tickets to
Xi'an in the afternoon, we opted to take a bus to Wuhan, a bigger city
a couple of kilometers further east. The bus ride was miserable, with
hopelessly undercompensating shocks that left us bouncing up and down
at the slightest bump, of which there seemed to be an inordinate
number. The main road we travelled on also seemed to be almost
entirely under reconstruction, at least that part I managed to open my
eyes to see.

We found a good street stall to have breakfast and then caught a cab
to the train station, where we got tickets for Xi'an and checked our
bags. We spent much of the morning and early afternoon in the Wuhan
museum, which has a number of interesting exhibits, although the
English is a bit sketchy. It was then past time to find lunch, but
Echo strongly objected to the food available at stalls outside the
train station, so I suggested catching a bus elsewhere. She asked a
woman for advice on where to go, but the woman didn't tell us how long
it would take to get there, and it ended up being a 40-minute bus ride
and an expensive cab ride back to the station, just in time to hop on
before the train pulled out.

We then read and mostly slept for the 12-hour journey, which got us
into Xi'an at 5am. On trying to find a hotel outside the station, we
were harassed by several touts, and eventually found some guys who
seemed okay who offered to give us a ride into town for 5 kuai. We
took it and ended up getting dragged to a couple of hotels we hadn't
been interested in, but the second one seemed okay, decently priced,
so we took it. Then the same group offered to give us a bus to use
for 20 kuai/person to get out to see the Terra-Cotta warriors and
stuff out east of here in the vicinity of the Qin Imperial tomb. It
was impressive, Qin Shi Huang had way, way too much power and wealth.
In my opinion. The stuff's pretty cool though, it's just, well, he
built a full-scale palace around the site he chose for his tomb, and
it took 720,000 people something like 38 years to complete, most of
the laborers were forced away from their homes to work on it, many
were killed to maintain secrecy... The only problem was that these
people who had offered to arrange transport, get us to a hotel, etc.,
there was some miscommunication, at first we were about to be joined
by a group of Chinese tourists, which would have forced us to move
much faster than we'd be interested in, and they also made us stop at
a jade exhibition (cool, but it was not a museum, they were definitely
trying to sell to us), and then they wanted us back in two hours,
which we just ignored. We wanted as much time as we needed, and it
was with the understanding that that would be available that we took
the offer.

It worked out, but then when we got back to the hotel the guys we'd
talked to before seemed not to have gotten train tickets for us, which
they'd said they would do. It was frustrating, and we had to make an
extra trip to the train station before dinner last night. Now we're
on a different train than the one we'd originally hoped for, leaving
an hour earlier. It's all working out, and I'm looking forward to
Beijing. More soon, I hope.