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...