if you’re wondering where plastic bags go to die, it’s china. what should be rows and rows of brown dirt waiting for planting, are studded with multicoloured plastic bags everywhere. sad.

so we took the bus to wutai shan, leaving the stopover port of datong (proud designee of one of the most polluted cities in china) gratefully in our wake. in South america, they’re affectionately known as “chicken buses” – here they’re just impossibly crowded, ancient, and dirty buswes with roadside farmers jumping on and off every few miles. However the fact that they require automatic purchase of life insurce awith your ticket should give you some idea of the quality of vehicles we were travelling in. At one point during the 6 hour trip, there was a heated discussion between a group of farmers over one guy who got on waving a packet of old polish zlotys – not sure what the gist of that was all about, but the outcome was that he was unceremoniously dumped off the bus.

wutai shan is one of the most holy buddhist spots in all of china, but it’s farily remote, and has, as yet, been relatively untouched by foreign tourism. we had been running low on cash, as there wasn’t a working atm in datong, but weren’t particularly worried, as there was a national bank of china in wutai shan. so we checked into our hotel, did a little wandering, and stopped off for lunch, with about 70 yuan in our pockets. given that even the most expensive dishes usuall only cost about 20 yuan (the equivalent of a little less than 2 pounds) we had more than enough for a light lunch of some noodles and rice. the proprietors of a small cafe off the sqaure beckoned us in, and poured us some tea as they handed us teh menus – completely in chinese. when it became clear that we hadn’t got a clue, they started pointing to the 120 yuam dishes, to which we replied a firm “no”. paging through the guidebook for “everyday dishes”, I ordered a bowl of wonton soup, and j ordered some chicken fried rice. what emerged from the kitchen, however, was a bowl of wonton soup, a plate of fried rice, and what can only be described as a small vat of chicken stock, complete with gristle, bones and neck. it was the size of a small washing up tub. of chicken soup. unsure how to attack it, j decided to leave it untouched and we asked for the bill. which came to… 186 yuan. (as a further point of reference, our two nights in a dodgy hotel only came to 160 yuan).

seems that even after firmly declining the exact dish they’d originally pointed to, we’d somehow *magically, and inadvertently* managed to order the very same thing. what a coincidence. it suddenly became crystal clear that they were taking the piss, and had decided to see not only *what* they could get westerners to eat, but *what* they could get them to pay for it, and pulled something off the back of the stove and put it in a bowl. after hemming and hawing amongst ourselves, we emptied our pockets on the table, shrugged, apologised, and left. what could we do? my first “dine and ditch”.

this little expensive lesson, however, left us with not a single yuan to our name. so we headed off to the bank. with no atm in sight, we dug out the reserve travellers’ cheques. which were met with a clear “no”. we went slackjawed in disbelief. we clawed out the emergency cash – pounds and u.s. dollars. negatory.

at a loss, we pondered out options – starve for the next 24 hours and try to buy a bus ticket to the nearest big town on credit, or um….. that was it. in a village without an atm, without a proper hotel, and without even the slightest concession to the tourist, the sudden very real probability of being stuck here without any resources available – well, panic set in. luckily, i do some of my best thinking under pressure, and marched up to the cits office. (explanatory note: the cits is the governement office in charge of the safety of tourists, and basically they usually act as glorified travel agents, but their ultimate responsibility is for the foreigner’s well being.) the lovely cits woman had about 10 words fo english to her vocabulary, and basically sent us back to the bank – who again turned us down. returning to cits again, we were getting nowhere fast until in a fit of desperation i showed her my american dollars with tears in my eyes. appparently the greenback still talks. she marched off to the bank, then came back eith a friend of hers, whom she’d persuaded to withdraw 300 yuan from their own account in exchange for $40 bucks. we were saved.

i’m pretty sure i got sscrewed on the exchange rate, but i’m not complaining.

the influence of communism in china isn’t immediately apparent until you start looking at all the multitude of ways that utilitarianism pervades the everyday ethos.

fashion sense is utilitarian in the extreme – if it covers you, and it’s warm, why not wear it? high-falutin’ notions of colour-coordination don’t even enter the picture. that rattling deathtrap of an automobile? if it still goes forward, then health and safety be damned. if you can squeeze an extra person into a sapce, you do. if you can do without something, you do. everything is spare and there is very little waste. even in the workforce, there is an understanding that everyone can be put to use in some way. everyone has a very specific job, a purposeful role to play – from the street sweeper to the woman who approves the bus to leave the station.

nothing is left unused.

it’s amazing how much information you can glean from roman numerals. if you know the general layout of the situation you’re in (a train station), and what you should be looking for (time, platform) you can muddle through with numbers, even when everything else is gibberish.

thank god for them, or we’d be fucked.

we’re headed on a 7 hour trip to datong. this wasn’t the first choice of destination. we’re trying to get to wutai shan, one of the sacred buddhist mountains, and left it too late to book our tickets, so that all that were available were “hard seat”.

train travel in china falls into three different classes. “Hard seat”, “hard sleeper” and “soft sleeper”. hard seat is the cheapest for a reason, as it is essentially “chicken bus” class – only not as nice. it involves sitting on wooden pews, smooshed up against throngs of people, all their families luggage, and several pieces of livestock. not what you want on a 13 hour journey.

hard sleeper is usually the backpackers’ ticket of choice – pricier than the hard seat, it’s still better value for money than the plush “soft sleeper”. hard sleeper is basically rows of bunk beds. if you’re a small person like me, and don’t need a lot of room, the middle or top bunks are your best bet – you can get a little space to yourself and stretch out to nap and pass the time. provided, of course, you aren’t nothered by the thick curtains of cigarette smoke which hang down from the ceiling, or the less pleasant aromas which waft upward. the people on the bottom, bunk, howevere, get shafted, as during the day, the bottom bunks are used as a communal seating/eating/spitting area. not so nice, though it does offer advantages to the taller guy who can’t be clambering up and down.

so really, hard sleeper is the preferred option, if at all possible. and faced with the extortionate cost of soft sleeper, the horror show of hard seat, or the rising cost of another 2 days in beijing waiting for our choice of tix, we decided to head to datong, and take a bus from there.

see you when we get there.

there’s nothing like being in a completely foreign country to foster honest and frank discussion with your spouse about the state of one’s bowels.

i’m just sayin’

(some catching up to do, so these entries will be dated when i wrote them, not when they were posted)

today was my first experience with relying solely on our wits and resourcefulness to get by. first off, the guide book suggested that the easiest thing to do to visit the summer palace was to take a taxi from the subway. so upon arrival, we approached taxi driver after taxi driver with out mangled pinyin and hopeful “summer palace?” each one smiled, pretended to consult our guidebook, look thoughtfully at the pinyin, etc., but bless, them, we might as well have been speaking martian. after the first 8 drivers, it became clear we needed a new communication strategy. i pointed out a western bookstore and bar, and headed straight to see if i could find a map. jonno, on the other hand, headed straight for the bar, found someone who spoke english, got them to write out destination in chinese, and took it to the nearest cab, who nodded in understanding and motioned us in.

and that, ladies and gentlemen, is why i married him.

First things first: the internet connection here is incredibly slow (maybe all the filtering?), so although I will continue to try, I’m not sure how soon I’ll be able to post pics.

So i lost the bet – I’ve had a head cold since we landed and am therefore officially the first person to get sick. IT is not at all eased by the massive quatities of dust infiltrating my respiratory system. Also not helping: the fluffy clouds of pollen which make walking around not dissimilar from floating through the aftermath of a gigantic pillow fight. And unfortunately the random stray puff which makes its way into my nostril, does nothing to clear out the grime already in there. Not to mention tHe fact that I managed to quit smoking 10 months ago turns out to be of little benefit in a country where breathing and smoking are nearly one and the same anyway. My poor lungs.

We journeyed to the Great wall yesterday – a three hour bus trip from beijing, which lends proof to the theory that it’s not the quality of the roads that matters, so much as the quality of the suspension system. The journey was only made longer by the fact that in spite of the jet lag, i could not nap in either direction. To explain: I am not a very high maintenance girl – I can deal with the pit toilets, and the indiscriminate evacuating of mucus everywhere… however the *only* thing which really grosses me out is grubby headrest covers. so my phobia about stranger’s hair prevented me from catching a few winks.

We elected to climb the section of the great wall which stretches from jinshanling to simatai – a rigourous 3 hour trek. Jinshanling is the less touristed and unrestored section of the wall. And by unrestored i mean allowed to quietly crumble into disrepair for the last 600 years. the wall is immense and vast and on a scale completely inconceivable even to today’s engineers. it is high and deep and passes through some of the most inhospitable land to be found. something so huge and untouched presents a formidable challenge even to a relatively fit hiker – and woe betide you if you are even moderately out of shape. “Hiking” is somewhat misleading terminology – in fact much of the passage involves nimble (or in my case, not-so-nimble) scrmabling of unending piles of loose rock and decayed stonework, surmounting incredibly long and steep stretches of perilously narrow stair, and navigating several areas where one is in distinct danger of tumbling *off the wall* with even the slightest misstep, landing bonebreakingly far below. Being a bit of a natural klutz, I admit to being quite scared at several points, and consider it nothing short of a miracle that i did not fall once.

So we huffed and puffed and clambered and climbed and sweated for three hours to arrive at simatai, an area under heavy restoration by the government. And by restoration I mean completely redoing. At the great wall, the forbidden city, in fact, all over beijing (presumbly in time for the olympics) there is lots of “restoration” taking place. Unfortunately, “authenticity” has precious little to do with the notion of “restoration” in china. things are not lovingly restored to their former antiqued glory, but rather rebuilt, as if they had been just finished yesterday. (in fact, today at the summer palace, i audibly gasped to see workmen scrambling around on qing era rooftops, haphazardly putting new tiles on.) so if we had started at simatai, i would have had to admit to being gravely disappointed. “Hey! Look at the concrete they poured last week! Just like the original great wall!” It’s not really conducive to communing with the spirit of ghengis khan, now, is it?

overall, however, i feel truly grateful to have seen the wall in its original state, and to have had the chance to get a real feel for the amazing feats of architectural brilliance and sheer manpower required to construct a structure of such imposing magnatude that it’s still being marvelled at 600 years later.

My thigh muscles, on the other hand, are still screaming at me.

next: we’re heading to datong and wutai shan, on of the sacred buddhist mountain ranges. will try to check in there.

no matter how different beijing may be in a million little ways, at it’s heart, it is still a big city – and i find that comforting. i seem to have a strange innate grasp for big cities – i know how to navigate and operate them in a way i can’t quite describe. i feel at ease, no matter how foreign the language, and it is a gift to be able to get my bearings, even when i can’t make out a single word or sign.

beijing is pretty full-on. it’s gritty and pushy and smelly and incredibly noisy, even for someone used to the urban hum. yet things are also kept refreshingly simple. we took the metro from the airport to our hostel, and it makes you appreciate how little there needs to be to complicate the task. we got on a queue, paid 3yuan each, got a small slip of paper, and gave it to the ticket attendant at the entrance. end of transation. no machines to break down, no fare zones to learn, no computerized cards to go haywire. simple.

beijing is not an easy city. god help you if you are less than fuly able-bodied. it’s not a city for the squeamish – if the thought of unrefridgerated meat, copious amounts of spit, and squat toilets where the bullseye has been missed make you squirm, then this is not the city for you.

but it’s an exciting study in contrasts. ancient history lies cheek-by-jowl with cutting edge modernism. traditional crumbling terraced hutongs in narrow alleyways are situated just opposite brand new highrises. dubious hygiene practices and state of the art electronics. sparkling clean streets and thickly polluted air.

today we awoke to a city which has been coated in a fine mist of yellow dust, courtesy of the winds from the gobi desert. masses of bicyclists headed off to work wearing their finest face masks, and a golden haze hung in the air. we decided to spend the day walking about, and headed first to the forbidden city. we entered throught the furthest gate and saw the whole thing in reverse, which turned out to be even more spectacular, as the scale of the city just continued to build in size, until we reached the climactic and impossibly large entrace. it truly is a city unto itself, just going on and on with gate after gate, building after building. a whole building which functioned solely as the dressing room for the emperor for state ocassions. the mind boggles at the scope of the detail and breadth of sheer size and grandeur. from there we passed through tiananmen square – a sober reminder of the political oppression which exists even today, and the pervasive state control of the people’s will. we wandered to the hutong shopping district with its shops featuring everything from tacky memoribilia to shoe insoles, and it’s sensory onslaught of sights, sounds and smells. there is food everywhere you turn, from backstreet kebabs grilled on the pavement, to corn on the cob hawked by a vendor in plastic bags, to ornate restaurants with staff in costume whose sole job is to stand outside and entice the passersby. we then walked to the posh shopping area which rivals oxford street or madison avenue. we bought exotic snacks to sate out curiosity, and familiar dumplings to fill the stomach. we must have walked 15 miles if we walked a step, and by the time we returned to the hostel, our nose and lungs and mouths were full of the choking yellow dust. next investment is a face mask.

tomorrow we’re off to the great wall, so more then.

zaijian for now.

So here we are. about 16 hours from leaving for the airport. I have winnowed everything i will be carrying around for the next 6 months down to this:

meanwhile, my husband has not yet packed a single thing.

suppose that tells you just a little bit about the difference in approach. and that’s probably a very good thing.

we definitely have our roles to play in this trip. i am the planner who’s trying not to be. he’s the drifter who’s trying to be a bit more organised.

i am excited, and a little nervous. doing some last minute ipod loading (what was I *thinking* with that janet jackson cd?!?)

but really – this is a big one on the list. something i’ve wanted to do, dreamt of doing for so long – yet never really thought would actually happen. through sheer stubbornness and a healthy dose of self-sacrifice, we made this happen.

I am inordinately proud, a little bit terrified, and incredibly tired. time for a good night’s sleep. next stop, beijing.

see you there.