Time is relative... isn't it?

Five months is not a very long time when you are grinding away at home, working, and not much exciting is happening... it seems to be hard to remember what you did three days ago sometimes... not when you are travelling, every memory seems so strong, vivid, and lasting.

Five months ago I flew to Singapore with certain expectations, but they were all surpassed by far, and now I am happy to be home for a short spell, to charge up the batteries and spend time with family.
This last part was very excitinglast and painful, as it goes sometimes. The last part didnt quite work out how i had planned and I had to come home 10 days early, what had happened?

We finished off the very nice trip in nepal by travelling from the trekking destination pokhara to the main city kathmandu via a big national park, royal chitwan, where we booked a jungle walk, river cruise and elephant ride to chase various animals (or get chased vice versa, we got told excactly what to do when encountering rhinos/slothbears/tigers, etc) ...once we got there I already had a strong case of flu and diarrhea, and had to stay home for most of the trip, but still got to do the elephant ride (saw several rhinos, a crocodile, etc)...

Streets of Kathmandu had some snake charmers too....

When we returned to Kathmandu, and met up with Joseph, a guy we knew from my hometown, who has been living in nepal for 10 years and is the head of a large aid organisation that builds roads for nepal (he employs 15000 people). We got a very interesting and thorough insight into his work...and since his wife owns a swiss restaurant there i got to have a terrific dinner, the best bratwurst outside of switzerland i have EVER had, seriously.!! He also showed us around the non-touristy parts of town and we got to see large stupas (holy shrines) and got an inshight into the almost medieval handyworks still carried out at the durbar square...

Buddha statue...

This is not for feeble stomachs, skip this section if you dont like gross stories or are about to have lunch. I like eating where locals eat in any part of the world, touristy restaurants just done have the charm I am looking for, 3rd world country or not..

We did this pretty much every time, but also forgot about the golden rule sometimes,....eating at a very sad looking and deserted restaurant (eat where a LOT of locals eat), i had Chow Mein, chinese noodles, when upon my second to last spoonful I noticed a big cockroach I was about to swallow, entangled in my noodles. I am used to lots of specialties but that was probably just some poor creature that had fallen into the pot and was fried to death... decided though to put it aside, eat the rest anyways, (was still hungry and decided if the food s been contaminated it was already too late anyways....) well that did not get me sick, but something did, days later....

Deli downtown... your usual New Deli street scene....

We decided on a whim to continue to India, and travel down from New Deli to Calcutta.
Well India sure was krass i must say... arriving there we soon realized that almost as many people in much less space than china makes very overcrowded and polluted cities... there is a lot of suffering on the streets, its extremely hot, enormous amounts of people hassle Tourists o­n the streets (the only way to make money for most), trying to lure you into obscure buys, transports even if you dont need any, or just trying to convince you of something you dont need... We were quite toughened up by our travels, and the many quite colorful reports of other travellers, and not so easily intimidated, but it was still difficult traveling at times. Overall, we were really enjoying our trip there though, visited many beautiful sights such as the Red Fort in Dehli, the Amber Fort in Jaipur, and most extraordinary, the marvellous Taj Mahal in Agra.

The beautiful Taj Mahal

However, all good things tend to come to an end and so they did a little too early... while eating, what else: Manfred and I are very different with different opinions and personalities, so when it came to eating, he would never eat something that was not peeled or boiled, while I, on the other hand, over the first four months, enjoyed many great salads, fruits and local specialities, even when those turned out to be unboiled, cooked, or peeled,....

At the Taj....

I was aware that I stood a greater risk of getting sick, and so in India I finally did... I am feeling a bit better now, after having had severe stomach issues and high fevers for the last 12 days. I visited a Doctor in Calcutta, and was told that its best to go home and get treated in Switzlerland since they could not really figure out which bug(s) were in me.....

I was easily convinced... I had spent 3 nights in two different overnight 3rd class train squat tiolets (sometimes up to 45 minutes at a time, barely being able to unlock myself from the squat position)... hey s@#$ happens!

The doctor in calcutta was working with a drug in an FDA approval framework of an american company which produces an antibiotic against travellers diarrhea, so I got paid to use it,.. not a bad deal!

Home now, I feel like i have learned a lot on this first part of the trip, and cannot wait for my 2nd.... my grandmother is dying so I will stay here a few weeks to spend time with her and then head out to South America....

Life's adventures at 10000+ feet

So i have been in Nepal for a good three weeks now and my feelings are mixed, just like the reports in the newspapers.... the country is very beautiful and though i generally feel pretty safe the reports say otherwise, and many tourists have already left the country. Maoist attacks almost every day, bombs going off in Kathmandu, and police and army presence by the hundreds, fully armed, among the beautiful and calm mountain sceneries make this trip here almost surreal, no tourist has been harmed by maoists in ages and still i believe we will leave Nepal a bit earlier as expected.

Our luxury tourist bus...

But thats not really what i was looking forward to writing you about... after a very quick stop in Kathmandu we headed out to Pokhara to drop off about 25 lbs of our travelling gear and limit backpacks to sub 30lbs, makes trekking a whole lot easier and its amazing how little you need when you need to carry it around for 10-12h a day on your back! We headed out in the morning to catch a bus to Besi Sahar, the starting point of the Annapurna trek.

New and older crop to feed the many hungry mouths of the valley

On the 5 h bus ride to the start, we immediately started talking to Lucas, a swiss mountaineer and recent medical doctor, and Wendy and Natalie, two travelers from New Zealand on a round-the-world trip, not knowing that we would be spending the next two weeks hiking together....the bus hosted some overly loud and obnoxious israeli traveling group with scores of guides and porters. To escape being trampled down or deaf by sundown, we immediately started the trek to start ahead (we had now guides or porters).... As we hiked it became more and more apparent that we had the same interests, hiking speed and got along really well. I had never hiked longer than 3 days in a row so the planned 14-16 days were posing some interesting obstacles (blisters from hell, that could only be treated with second skin and lots of cussing and swearing, tired legs, and hella stinky socks!!)

Our hiking group

Mani stones, beautiful carvings....

Funny substitution for a prayer wheel... whatever works!!

We ended up working so well together as a group that the trek took a lot less time than anticipated.... for the 12 days we were out there, we usually got up around 4-6 am, hiked until lunch-time, then relaxed for 1-2 hours in the sun (as its dry season and always sunny), then hiked for another 1-2 hours to arrive around 3 pm at a lodge, where we would secure a room for 20 rupees (no joke, between 15-25 cents per person!!), and order Dahl Bath (traditional dinner) for the whole group. Dahl bath is the nepalese natioal dish and is eaten EVERY day by locals, usually for an early lunch and for dinner. Its all-you-can-eat rice, curried lentils and vegetables, doesnt taste like much after the second day, but conserves energy (very important to have a low impact while trekking there) and fills the stomach.... We were all very keen on following the excact guidelines from the annapurna conservation project, as in the year 2000 about 80,000 people did the annapurna circuit and left hundreds of tons of garbage up the mountain while using so much firewood that whole wooden areas were cut down (to heat showers, and cook special food ordered by foreginers, as lasagne and cordon-bleu are not really ideal meals to be cooked up there... I was fine accepting these guidelines, but not being able to drink much coca cola was the hardest one!!!

One of my favorites... Annapurna in the back

Lucas being threatened by a goat...

Anyhow, to finish the story of the trek, after an acclimatization day in manang at 3500 meters, (to avoid altitude sickness or even worse a lung or brain oedema), we hiked up to thorong phedi where we trided to sleep at 4500 meters, (no luck there for me, did not close an eye at this altitude), then got up at 4 am and started the most strenuous day from 4500 meters to 5416 meters (thorong la, the worlds biggest pass).... and then descended down the pass to 3800 meters extremely exhausted to find sleep come easy (after a more than 8 hour hiking day.....

Made it to the top of Thorong La! (5400m)

Up the pass manfred and I were in very good shape, probably due to the altitude acclimatization from tibet the weeks before, so we were able to help others over the pass, especially Natalie, who was suffering from frost-shakes and exhaustion, but with her i-wont-give-up personality still made it up the mountain.... Lucas, by the way, who brought lots of medical supplies, was able to use the stuff he brought and help rule out pulmunary oedemia (water in the lungs) and treat a sick swiss couple along the way, so having a doctor along with us was certainly very comforting.... Anyhow,up the valley, the green rice fields and vegetable gardens gave way to higher altitude forests, then bushes and only rock-landscape, and on the way down it happened vice versa, and this over several days. It was so pretty, no wonder each year travelers return to do the same annapurna trek yet again, leaving behind all possibilities of communications (telephone, internet, heck electricity alltogether) and the better part of luxuries, accepting the fact that blisters are a part of hike just as sore muscles, but hiking through mountain sceneries such as the 5 annapurna peaks, or a dalaugliri icefall that compares to the worlds most stunning mountain pictures....

Curious faces...

Lamb too tired to walk...

On the way down we stopped in Tatopani (translated: hot water), hot springs and cold beer, no need to say more! We spent a day relaxing, sunbathing and drinking/eating like we hadn't done in weeks (well we really hadn't actually). After Natalie and Wendy offered a couple of bottles of wine for our help (I hauled up their packs the last few miles when the pass was almost reached and their altitude sickness kicked in), so we drank a bit much and got up with a slight case of headache, hiking our last day down to Beni and catching a bus to Pokhara, where we now have been for a few days, doing nothing but relaxing, eating great pastries and lots of meat, and planning our next few weeks....

The search for the inner I

This post comes a bit earlier than originally anticipated, partly due to the fact that my impressions of Tibet are still very strong, and partly due to the strike in Kathmandu, opposing the Kings measures in Nepal, which forces us to stay in the city for a few days longer, not good to travel when demonstrations are planned, especially since there have been pretty fierce retaliations by the King's military before.


One for the engineering nerd in me... solar power: tea kettle heater!

The last 15 days i have spent on a semi-guided tour around Tibet and into Nepal, following the friendship highway.... Semi-guided mainly due to the fact that China is milking the Tibet Cow as much as it can, and only guided tours through Tibet are allowed, with many permits which are cheap for our standards, but still too expensive compared to the previous travel budget we had.....
After Wulumuqi we flew to Chengdu and organised a trip which would take us to Lhasa by plane, spending 6 days acclimatizing to the altitude change (3700 meters over sea level, or appx. 12000 feet...) then travelling onwards with guide and driver in a Toyota landcruiser to Nepal.

Roger standing in front of the potala palace....

Once arrived in Lhasa we did acclimatize for 6 days really, we spent the first four days walking around the beautiful old town (the part the Chinese did not spoil with their architecture), hang out in cafes drinking yak butter tea (which 99% of all non-tibetans despise but I somehow really like, call me an oddball), writing postcards and doing a little bit of trekking gear shopping, to be used in Nepal on our 20 day trek.... During this time not much else happened, so after the second day my hyperactive nature kicked in and I had to climb some mountains, as Manfred was not silly enough to join me i walked up two 4000+ meter mountaintops, and spent some time reading books between the prayer flags which span most tibetan mountains... really nice...

No words necessary....

After the 4th day we started by visiting the Worlds most famous monastery, the Potala Palace in Lahsa where 12 of the 14 Dalai Lamas are buried in beautiful stupas which are covered by up to 200 kg of gold per stupa, and decorated with immensley beautiful jewelry. The potala palace is gigantic, once had roomed 7000 monks before the cultural revolution, before the Dalai Lama had to flee to India. After visiting the palace, we visited 3 more great monestaries in Tibet, all with a guide that is active buddhist and that gave us a good insight into the buddhist tradition and way of living...

After the 6th day we rose early and started our 4WD trip to Kathmandu, which would last 7 days... we first passed 3 mountainpasses of which 2 were over 5000 meters (16.500 feet), and rested on a beautiful mountain lake, admiring the tibetan landscape.... After three days visiting further monasteries along the way we went onwards towards Rongbuk monastery (worlds highest monastery at 5000 meters) and the Mount Everest basecamp, just 5 miles up the road....

Scary driving manuevers got us there, not before getting stuck a few times...

Tibetan prayer flags.. always an inspiration
Unfortunately, I did get my deserved ratio of Travellers Diarreha that almost everyone gets here and there when travelling in 3rd world countries... but getting it at 5000m elevation with temperatures ranging from freezing to lets not go there.... this was no walk in the park.

Mount Everest and a Yak in the way...

Let me quickly tell you about bathrooms in

Tibet (really just citing the average out there)....
-Imagine the worst squat toilet at train stations you have EVER seen in france or italy..
-Multiply by 10
-Remove the top of the building, add freezing temperatures and high winds...
-Reduce the wall height to 60 cm (with surrounding buildings much higher so everyone can watch the foreigner suffer)
-Remove all doors
-Add smell to that equation
-Much, MUCH smell
I do have a tendency to exaggerate but not on this one, trust me...


Anyhow, no complaints here, that belongs to it as much as actually being able to SEE mount everest when you have to go Nr.2, YEEEHAAW!!

To round up that trip, we did get to the everest base camp without a cloud in-sight, it was beautiful really, very cold but amazing.... sleeping at 5200 meters above sea level does not allow you to sleep much (I think i slept most of us with no more than 3 hours that night), so we descended the next day to "only" 4200 meters, where sleep came easier....

Now i am in Kathmandu, about to leave for a 20 day trek around the Annapurna mountain range, a trek of pretty epic proportions, 200-220 miles, about 10000 meters of elevation changes, and which will take us up to 5416 meters at highest altitude.... bring it on!

Wulumuqi! (yeah, you d like to know what that means right?)

I am about to leave for the biggest, most exciting adventure of this trip so far, that will take me to Tibet, starting in Lhasa, travelling with a 4WD throught the Tibetan Highlands via the Friendship Highway
The last three weeks in china took me around regions sparsely populated and visited by very few foreginers. The northwestern regions of Gansu and Xinxiang, which are about evenly populated by Han chinese and Uighur people. Leaving Chengdu, i took a 22 h train to Xian, where the word famous terracota warrier army is situated.
However gave that a miss as i had seen it in 98' when I travelled the north with my ex-wife Theresa, but met up with Manfred and Francesca to continue our travels together.
After a night of good sleep (the 22h in a sleeper train do not qualify as quality rest time, the compartments are nice, but the chinese snore louder than canadian woodworkers), we took another 33 h train to Dunhuang.

Some city wall...

Random friendly locals wanting to take a picture of the weird, bearded foreigner

The train ride was much more beautiful, I like the north better, even though its sparser in terms of vegetations, the changing colors of the deserts and mountain ranges are super impressive! Thirty-three hours of constant train riding (maybe two times 30 minutes to strech the legs at a larger train station) is no picnic for the faint-hearted traveller, but with books, games (even though Manfred and Francesca do not want to play!), and a couple of interesting tourists such as the canadian guy that I chatted to for many hours about philosophy and philantropy.

The camel on the camel's back

Crescent Moon lake nestled between two large sand dunes...

Sand dune sledge race!

In Dunhuang, the lush green regions ofchina give way to sand dunes, mountain-tops covered with snow and deserts of all kinds (sand, rock, dirt)...
After a bit of a fallout wiht Francesca (gosh is she complicated, close minded and terribly boring), Manfred and I went off by ourselves for a day and decided to play real Tourist just that one time.... we rode a camel!! , and also surfed down the sand dunes on a boogie board, causing massive sand deposits all over my body which seemed to last for days to clean out... but boy was that fun! There was like a bit of a fair between dunes with tours, camel riding and boogieboarding down dunes, plus we rented a bike and explored the whole area which was much more fun than taking a taxi.

The real reason to go to dunhuan was naturally not the camels and sandunes, but the word famous 1000 buddha (Ma-Gu) caves, which were built around the time the silk-route was flourishing. Over about 1200 years, new caves were constantly added by rich and poor buddhists, adding up to 750 caves that can be visited today!!! Surprisingly most of them survived the cultural revolution, it is unclear why, the very decentralized location, or maybe they were hidden.... We spent many hours there and looked at a good two dozen caves and were astonished by how wellthese amazing caves were conserved... clearly because after the English, French, Russians and Japanese explorers stole most of the valuable goods, deporting them to their museums, the chinese ended up closing the caves again for a long time, thus no sunlight could destroy the thousands of wall paintings and buddha statues....

After Dunhuang, the real hardcore travelling started, taking bus, overnight train and overnight bus in a row. We wanted to make it to Kashgar in one step, but even with good travel organisation, one can not avoid the MASSES of people travelling in china. Coincidentally, October 1st and a week thereafter, several hundred million people were planning to return home to see their families due to a big national holiday....

We started off by taking a beater bus and then tracking down one last 1st class compartment from Dunhuang to Korla, about halfway to Kashgar, where we intended to go. There we did not know what expected us, no city for tourists.. in fact noone had heard of it, and the fact that its not in the lonely planet speaks books of how unimportant it is to tourism..... Well we got there fortunately in the morning, and after talking to about 75 different random people on the street I did what I always do... statistics.... see most people tell you their best guess, and they never say no, its supposed to be unpolite.. so deducing the correct information can be tricky...

After a bit of searching and constant asking (it helps the conversational chinese so it really is a win-win situation) we found the bus depot and one bus that claimed it would go the 600 miles or so to Kashgar..... "only" 16h.... yeah, right... and i can fly. These are very common things to get used to when travelling, why tell the truth when you can make it sound better... not that we have a problem with that, whether it takes 16 or 30 hours, we need to get there, so lets hop in....


The bus was half empty (or almost empty) when we left the station, yeehaa, would we have a row of seats all to ourselves until we reached Kashgar? Hehehe, here is a funny one... buses have to charge passengers an added tax (like 20 cents) when in a bus station, so its a bit cheaper to track down the bus along the route, even if for a 600mile ride that means after 0.25 miles... so there were hordes of people (mostly sheperds with a LOT of livestock) waiting along the road to track down the bus... cheaper, but with the risk of the bus blowing by.... well this one didnt, and stocked up about 20 of the smelliest men plus chickens, goats, whatever you can herd... in the bus. So we ended up squeezed into the back, for 28h (16h plus the time they did not account that is needed driving through completely rutted river beds, and fix a broken bus by pounding on something at the bottom with a metal object for hours during the middle of the night when we tried to sleep. We got there, not though before we saw the most amazing and scary thing during the first 5 months of travelling...... the driver was heavyset to make him a compliment, more like 5ft tall and 300lbs (1m60 and 150kg), and had a seat with shock absorber.... at one time, when we finally were able to get the bus above 60mph, we hit a huge pothole and the driver's seat ended up as a spring, catapulting the driver out of his seat, straight up... somehow he held on to the steering wheel and ended up landing back on his seat... the bus swerved like crazy and we almost tipped over at full speed.... there it goes... Roger's first encounter with Death during traveling #1, with many more to come!

Anyhow, I am exaggerating a bit as usual.... we got to Kashgar finally, the norhwestern most city of China, where in the vicinity of few hundred miles, countries such as Kyrgistan, Kasachstan, Usbekistan, India, Pakistan, Afganistan and Russia lay, and one finds an immense multi-cultural scene, even exaggerated by the worlds biggest Sunday market, where about an additional 50'000 people from the surrounding cities and countries flock into to sell everything from rug to potato, from watch to camel....

Hordes of well dressed men selling grapes at the market...

Spending 3 days in Kashgar, we did nothing much other than eat tons of mutton skewers and enjoy the different kinds of Uighur breads (much like bagels in the states), sit around and watch the people (and being watched too, obviously)... it was traveling at its best... just being part of the city... watching and interacting...

After Kashgar we decided to make our way to Wulumuqi, all the way north, trough travelling the southern silk-route to hotan, and via several busses, cross from there through the taklamakan desert via a 700 km road straight through the desert. We used a sleeper bus, wich is really only slightly more confortable then the small busses, where even 1.60 meter (5ft) chinese suffer, not to talk about my 1.93cm (6ft4), which really gets in the way sometimes i must say.

Colorful vegetable store....

I really enjoyed that part of the trip and was happy to practice my chinese and guide our travel group savely to Wulumuqi....There, in the largest city in the north (3 Mio), we left quickly for Heavenly Lake, where a lake serves as a backdrop for a scenery much like the Swiss mountains...

Colorful Market

We stayed for 2 days and slept in Yurts with Kasak people, enyoing the warm hospitality and food in the cold surroundings, and absolutely stunning views.... it was a great start for acclimatization and getting ready for the Tibetan and Nepali Mountains, with more, much more to come.....

Of Horses and Men...

When I grew up I wanted to be a lot of things (firefighter, spaceman, professional soccer star (i know, how prissy)) and do a lot of things... but riding a horse came about at the end of the spectrum, right around competing in creating the longest apple peel. This I have to say has not changed much in recent years, except maybe that time when Bo Derek was riding around in Bolero, but that s a different story :).
Anyhow, when travelling there are few better ways to explore the surroundings than by foot, as you can really intake the stunning landscape beauties and get to places that cars/busses may not.... however in the pre-tibetan highlands getting very far (high altitude, distance, terrain) is hard, and horseback riding is the best way to explore.
Not being one to shy away from new experiences I changed my mind, and signed up for one.... but how did I get there....
We all got to Chengdu, which we knew was split up town for us... Manfred wanted to go check out Shanghai/Bejing, Manuela had to go home, and Monica wanted to go visit friends, so Vi and I decided to go check out the mountains.... not before we would explore the town though. Chengdu is gigantic...., a 10+ Million City, it sprawls with life and shopping here feels like NY city, especially after the countryside where there was no western influence at all. We spent two days there, visiting the pandas and walking about town. The panda breeding center is the largest in the world and we got to enjoy seeing some young ones play around and even saw some newborns..

Baby Panda's playing around

Roadside hot pepper drying, we are in Sichuan after all!

So after that Vi and I booked a bus trip to SongPan, a small town in the pre-tibetan highlands that offers horseback rides through the mountains, ranging from 2-15 days... two days had to be enough I figured, so that is what we booked.

The ride (bus that is) up there was nice, a new road ensured a fast 5h trip (as opposed to the 16h it was the year before they built the new road), and we found ourselfs in a pretty touristy town, bustling with a few foreginers, more chinese tourists, and good cheap shopping for arts and crafts. The mainly tibetan population is very good with making arts and crafts and the off-season gave way for some nice deals to stock up presents for family and friends when returning home, Manfred being a shopping addict would have loved it up there! Before getting a good night's rest we went and tried some Yak and Beans (Yak is good and a local delicacy!) and then haggled the horseback ride to a ridiculous 10 dollars a day (everyone else paid 15$, not sure if we were that good or the guy just too tired to care), which apart from the horse, each person's guide and his horse, camping and all you can eat, what a deal!

So we left that morning and rode two days through the mountain ranges.... Vi and I were joined by two teenage swedish guys and a dutch couple that had been travelling for over a year alreay!

Six travellers and six guides, twelve horses, .... the first hill of the day was a 3000 foot ascent in very gnarly terrain, and by the time we got up to the hill one of the swedish guy's horse was already dying, it just fell over when we got to the top... not sure if it played dead to lighten the load but the guide decided to let the guy use his horse, walk and have the "dead" horse walk without any load..... at the "hot springs" where we camped, we found out that the "hot springs" were mineral water springs, hardly warmer than your average mountain spring... so bringing the swimsuit was a bit over the top, but oh well. We spent all evening watching the guides put up an extremely sieve-y makeshift tent, cook while smoking 20 cigarettes nonstop, and then ate, drank, and sat by the fire singing songs from our countries... I sang "Vogellisi" and everyone understood about as much as when the tibetans sang their folk songs, sounded a bit like Bejing Opera to me, but the stashed beer (that the tourists brought) and 200-ish proof rubber alcohol (that the tibetans brought) eased the vocal pain a bit....

We be ridin' dirty...

Brrrrr, why am I doing this again?

The night was wet, cold, and filled with intermitten sounds of freight trains moving through (which was actually the men snoring until someone got up and kicked them quiet), and I got up with a heavy head, not looking forward to another day of pain in the @$$, e.g. riding a horse.

Vi and Roger with their borrowed tibetan overcoats...

We made it back allright, and it was certianly an experience I am happy I did, doubtful I will ever become an avid rider though.

Alles hat ein ende nur die Wurst hat zwei...

Nope, ain't gonna start with all ze german now... this is just a funny song and saying in german, all has to have an end only the sausage has two... speaking of two... or three, after two weeks of travelling we all split a little, Vi and I are the last men standing here in Chengdu, Manfred took Manuela to the airport in Shanghai (well they had to fly there, it was about 500 miles away), Monica left, and Vi and I are about to go horseback riding in the mountains... yup, Roger s gonna become a chinese cowboy, yeehaaaw...

So after a good five days in Yangshuo biking through rice patty fields, rock climbing a bit and teaching Manfred his first chinese sentence he could say almost perfectly (san ping pijiu pin de, "three bottles of cold beer please") by constantly having him re-iterate the sentence every time we saw a waitress walk by....


During that time in Yangshuo we all figure out a way to travel together for a good while longer, by slightly adjusting our schedules... and so we all left for Kunming, a bustling city in the highlands of the Yunan province, and a major turnoff point to Lhasa/Tibet. However we were there to hop on a bus headed for Dali, the only other backpacker haven that established itself like Yangshuo a long time ago. Dali, in comparison, is a small town surrounded by big city walls in the pre-tibetan mountains, where one can relax from the otherwise so busy chinese city life.

Three golden pagodas above the roofs of Dali


Climbing the wall of Dali..


During the few days there, we were riding bycicles and reading/relaxing at the very nice backpacker hostel (large wooden building complex with ancient chinese architecture and pirated movies shown every night on a projector, where old and new mix well! ).

After a few days Manfred, Vi and I got restless, while the girls wanted to hang out some more in Dali, so we did an overnight trip to the Tiger Leaping Gorge.... not sure if the smart chinese named this due to some rock formation that looks like a tiger taking a leap, or such that more tourists would come visit the gorge, c'mon, I totally feel cooler now that I have trekked the Tiger Leaping Gorge! Anyhow, the adventure was a hoot, taking a bus out there, staying at the CRAPPIEST hotel in all of china (I swear you do NOT want me to talk about the bathroom situation there), then getting up at 3 am to sneak by the entry gate to save the 7 dollar entry fee, and therefore being there in the middle of the night, taking the wrong (well marked in the daytime) route and basically criss-crossing the valley for hours without ever really finding the right path... ending up at the road ten exhausting hours later and hitching a ride back... hehe, serves the cheap bastards well... but we actually had a lot of fun off the beaten path.....

Vi caught a bit of a surprised gecko...

Back in Dali we immediately took off to Lijian, a UNESCO cultural heritage site with its famous chinese style roofs and narrow cobblestone pathway, one finds himself like in a 40s chinese movie, incredible.

Typical Lijiang pictures, temple-style roofs and cobblestone walkways, with intermitten rivers

There was not much to be done in Lijian other than enjoing the scenery, but we found a hike out to some monestary that was torn down by the Maoists and there encountered a roughly 90 year old man who returned after the distruction and ended up staying there, an interesting trip into the history of china and an unforgettable, eery place.

Yummy, typical lunch noodle soups for about 12 cents...

Bus haiku

China has the fastest growing economy in the world, combine that with roughly one billion people and you get one mean powered machine when it comes to forward progress.... not just that, but with a quasi-totalitarian regime that can invoke just about any law they see fit, and quite modern thinking processes (favoring forward movement over antique ideas), a rapidly changing country is the outcome... DUH, like I just told you something you did not already know... but here is the jist of it in a day's travel.
While we as travellers would love to have the places stay the way they were then (e.g. 1998 for me), it is nice when it comes to transport to see the progress, like building new roads.... when a new road is built in europe, it is usually planned to death before a couple of ten guys start buidling it with big machinery, moving at the speed of glacier towards completion...
In China this seens to go like a fast forward compared to Europe, well if you have to pay someone 0.05$/h vs 25$/h it is a little easier getting 1000's of workers to the site, give em all a hammer and have em hammer away (somehow they all seem to know what to do, even though it looks super chaotic.)
Ok, I am finally getting to the point...
We took the bus from Lijiang to Chengdu (or near there, last part by train)... heard that there is a new road that they are building, and that right now it is really difficult to say how long the trip will take.. partly due to the fact that it is rainy season and partly due to the road building... so it was going to be roughly 300km to get to the train station and it was supposed to take 16h.. what!?! Hmm, I was seriously considering biking... sub 20km per hour sounded ridiculous...
So we took off and rode out of town on a newly built freeway going 80km/h, the tar looked half-past fresh and the chrome rails were shiny like some english butler just polished them... 16 hours my @$$ i though! After about an hour of going at full speed we started seeing a couple of chinese workers cleaning up the road, and the quickly became more numerous, when we started slowing down... well we had covered 100km in less than 1.5h, clearly we d be there in less than 10h... chinese bus times were notoriously unreliable. After a bit of a traffic jam dropping onto the old road, I realized this would be an entirely different trip now. The road was rough, narrow, the potholes were so huge that small childred could have swam in them, every time our bus would go faster than 20 km/h a big bump would send us bobbing up and down... not the most comfortable feeling when your butt is sitting on a wooden plank. Now we saw the extent of chinese roadbuilding... hundreds of workers lined up left and right to the road in distances of just a foot or two and were kneeling down, chiseling away whatever it was they were doing, an impressive sight. This continued on for what seemed like an enternal distance, but certainly a couple of kilometers... amazing. The sheer power of masses, these roads were built in minimal amounts of time.

Our trip ended up taking forever, well not quite, but even longer than they announced, 21h I believe, and which was due to party the bad road conditions, the many "normal" traffic jams, but the two most excruciating 2h delays were caused by a fallen over truck (overloaded) and the ability of the chinese drivers to jam themselves into a one way road from both sided so far that neither south nor north was able to retract to let the other party through (would have cost 5 min and saved 2h)... such is traverllers life... no pain a good book cannot alleviate.

Close but no banana... we almost made it past the stranded turned over truck, but unfortunately the bus ahead of us got stuck sliding into the accident vehicle...

Swiss Miss and Representin Deutschland YO!!

A month on the road, and not regretting it a bit... not like I ever thought I would....
So after a very quick stint in Bangkok Manfred and I flew off to Hong-Kong, beginning our longe Superman S shaped journey through China, if all goes well, South, Shouthwest, East, NorthEast, Northwest...
We met up with Manuela, another aquisition by Manfred's ad in some travel magazing that suggested travelers to join us at various parts of the journey.... do I sound sceptical? Well I am a little less now after we are 1 for 2... Manuela is cool and a good travel companion for our trip through China since she speaks Chinese at about the same level (say 2nd grade with a learning disability and a heavy stutter :) than I do, so we are double tackling those chinese railway stations talking to the girl behind the counter while Manfred blocks off the pushy crowd of anxious and impatient chinese that would very well crawl underneath your legs and pop up in front of you trying to snatch a ticket....

Train Tickets: cheaper than an ice cream at a touristy spot in downtown Zurich and harder to get than a front row seat at the superbowl... you have to literally beg borrow and steal, and without persistance there is always going to the local chinese foregin travel office and paying the extra 50% on the ticket so they will do it... but what about honour?? Seriously... I have spent five months in China in 1998 and therefore must be able to buy a ticket by now... so here is how it goes.... you say blablablabla the ticket lady says "mei you" (we dont have it), you say blablabla and something else the ticket lady says "mei you"... you say it (phrase #1) again and she starts realizing that you will probably just stand there all day saying it again and again.... meanwhile Manfred is too bulky and good of a blocker than any of the chinese can run through and stuff money on the side of the little window to buy tickets.... so she gives up and actually looks up all possibilities and you end up wiht a ticket... AMAZING!! Now I am really not making fun of the Chinese of the system, I love the lines, the haggling, and the train rides themselves.. but nothing there comes easy that s for sure.


HongKong in the smog...

So Hong-Kong was pretty good, but a bit anticlimactic after Krabi.... the good part was we got to fly business since the plane was super empty and china air choose to rather let the five dirty funny looking tourist fly business than the well dressed chinese... weird but hey I did not mind!
After buying an altimeter watch and doing my first substantial amount of haggling in chinese we climbed the Victoria Peak and walked down to Aberdeen and took a Songchow (funny looking boat) for a spin... Manuela joined and we took off to Guangzhou to travel onwards to the famous Guilin/Yangshuo (just like Aberdeen/HongKong yet another scene from the Tomb Raider 2 movie coincidentally!)....

Along the way I had a chance to talk to a 23 year old very pretty chinese girl during the 18h train ride.... hey, brushing up on my chinese can be easy on the eyes! :)
Truly though those long train rides in sleeper compartments are the best way to relax and learn some chinese.... the chinese are very curious about the foregin travellers and not shy at all about asking all kinds of questions once they figured out you speak even just the littlest bit of chinese...
So on that same train we met Vi and Monica, not usually very big deal, we meet plenty of travellers... who would have known that these two germans would follow us (or we them!) for a long time!


Cycling in Yangshuo...


Kormoran fishermen use the birds to get the fish out...

They both are finishing their degree in Germany in Chinese and Business.... funny, now poor (or lucky!) Manfred ended up travelling with four bloody foreginers (Vi is Vietnamese and can slightly pass for chinese at times) that all speak chinese.... needless to say funny situations occur like that when we are in stores or restaurants.... it comes wiht the gigantic advantage that we pay the chinese not tourist price wherever we go, we eat at local inn's and hole in the wall restaurants where they have never seen or spoken english language, and the food is better and much much cheaper.
Monica taking a picture of Vi, Manuela, Manfred and I having "Baozi" for breakfast, a massive amount of vegetable and meat dumplings for 5 cost about 30 cents per person...



Yangshuo is phantastic, set with limestone sharp hills with plenty of vegetation surrounding the Li river they are a perfect backdrop for tourists to relax, rock climb, bike, or take trips up the river by boats... unfortunately this backpacker haven has already been discovered by the mass tourism and now (4 years, later, I was there in 1998 with my ex-wife Theresa) there are a lot more "tourist cafes" and resort style hotels.... however there is still plenty of room for cheapo backpackers like us too....

Bouldering wiht the local climbing guides












Typical limestone formation along Li river

Of Lion King, Babes in Thailand and Genghis Bond

These names, my friends are not just ramblings of the sun-fried, curry overloaded and beer withdrawn mind.. they are what we so eagerly try to tackle and redpoint these days here at raylay bay.... still not understanding me.... ok, let me back up a bit....

Thai fisherman bringing us to the penninsula...
I met Andrea and Jan ten days ago and they have become great friends in no time, particularly Andrea who is the quintessential travel buddy and climbing partner in so many ways... Jan is a bit slow at times but an exceptionally strong climber so we spend a lot of time waiting for him to get ready while climbing a few routes to warm up or just smoking too much... my cigarette throughput has triples since I ve been climbing, due to the fact that everyone here seems to smoke....
Ok, refocusing here to try to tell the story.... Raylay Bay, incredible, an absolute paradise for climbers.... for 50 thai bath (roughly 3 dollars) a night we get our own bungalow and food is no more than a few dollars a day, for fantastic Thai food, incredible.
So this is what we do pretty much every day.... sleep in, get up, have a very tasty "museli", the cambodian girl that takes the breakfast order sure does not know how to spell "muesli" but it sounds so much better that way :)


Lunch: Sticky rice in bamboo canes is the best!


Bored? Well lets bury Roger in the sand... cant climb 24/7

End result...

So a big old muesli with plenty of exotic fruit and soy milk for the sore muscles, then off to explore another climbing area, intermitten lunch from the guy with the bamboo canes filled with sticky rice, a bit more climbing and then laying at the beach with a cold beer, playing guitar or going for a swim.... it can't get much better than that. They don't call Raylay Bay the southeastasian bermuda triangle for nothing... travellers have been planning to spend a few days there and ended up staying there for weeks, months, even years... no joke!

On my way up to Genghis Bond, 6b


Yeah you guys are the coolest...





The climbing here is OUT OF THIS WORLD... a couple of pics will hopefully document that....
I am now climbing in the high 5.11's (or 6c/c+ for the rest of the world) and that gives me a fair amount of choice here, the routes are mostly overhanging (see below Jan in Tidal Wave, 7b), and have "motorcylce holds" but still one needs a fair amount of technical skills placing the feet, and a good chunk of power....

Jan in Tidal Wave, 7b, and plenty of admirers....

Since I have started climbing I have transformed my exceptional tiny upper body into something like a climbers upper body, not too big but fairly muscluar, and I like it.. it does not require powders and shakes, just plenty of training which comes natural here, 5-7h of climbing is no exception. I have been working on Lion King (6c+) all week, and am pretty close to finally redpointing it, these projects are cool, and Lion King is close to our quaters so we can just walk over to go and try it one more time in the evenings...

Lion King (6c+), close to the top, trying to hang the rope...

A week ago, after climbing for about 7 days Jan and I decided to join another austrian climber and do one "big wall" climb, which essentially is only 4-5 pitches here, but still when you are about 300 vertical feet above the beach where everyone is laying out sunbathing or having a coke at the restaurant IMMEDIATELY below, it gives you a bit of a funny feeling... below is a picture Jan shot immediately across the bay from where we climbed.... if that is not the classic Krabi/Raylay climbing picture, nothing is..... there is actually a climbing route (5 pitches) that includes a vertical tube one has to climb through to get to the top... NICE!
Time passed quickly, spent climbing, bouldering, getting 3 dollar massages (1 full hour!) at the beach by thai women with years of experience, nothing better after being sore from all the climbing....


Outch! Nice! Outch! Nice!... repeat...


Jan and I on a 1/2 day multipitch mission to the highest point out there...


View from the top...

Lots of time was spent enjoying the delicious Thai food and hanging out with fellow climbers at the few bars that were open (it was officially raining season, though it barely ever rained during the two full weeks spent there).


Dumbass drunk try (included a couple of concussions) to climb around the table without hitting the floor... yeah right!

Last night came for me, it onward to Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland to travel to the northwestern asian countries, and it was hard to say goodbye.... since I did not want to leave without a big last bang we decided to go to one of the bi-monthly big parties at the other side of the island, where drinks are huuuuge (though they cost almost 10$ they come in gigantic buckets and several straws that everyone can join in!)....
It was a wild night I wont forget so quickly, saying goodbye to all the friends I made, most I will never see again but I am sure Andrea I will, we became great friends in just two weeks time and without her this climbing vacation would have been less than half the fun...


A bucket of MaiTai... hey it was my last night! Jan looks a wee bit drunk.

So I left, took a 20+ h sleeper bus to bangkok where some israeli girls were incredibly obnoxious and would not shut up yapping through the night, thanks to my MP3 player I got some rest anyways looking back at Raylay with a smile, knowing that i had just spent two of my greates weeks in my life there....