When we came to China, very briefly, the first time, we were grossly unprepared. We got as far as Kunming, no guidebook, no phrasebook, no maps and definitely NO Mandarin. We found the place so interesting, and the stay so memorable, that we planned almost an entire trip around returning to China and doing it right.

This time around, Kunming was a much more approachable prospect. Sure, it had a lot to live up to, having been our first taste of affluent China, but we’re much more seasoned now - China hardy, if you will - and I for one was keenly looking forward to revisiting the place.

We only stayed for a few days. Ate at the “point and choose” restaurants of the type that we’d come to rely on last time, wandered into the reception of the hotel we stayed in last time, and booked bus tickets out of the country at the travel office we got tickets to the Stone Forrest from back in the day.

Kunming is actually very western-friendly. There seem to be a far amount of youngsters living there while they study Mandarin in the local universities, preferring the young city with its reasonable climate over one of the bigger cities to the north.

We capped off the experience with a visit to the cinema, where we watched The Curse of the Golden Flower, subtitled thankfully. Turns out you buy a ticked to a specific seat in China. Makes sense because the early comers are in the middle and you don’t have to push past people to get to a spare seat as it fills up.

Reluctant to leave the modernities of China behind completely, we booked a bus from the city all the way into Luang Prabang, Laos. The bus ride was a fairly pleasant THIRTY TWO HOUR marathon, complete with an extended stop to load up the luggage hold with what I can only assume was contraband of some fairly tame nature. We went over the actual boarder on foot, bidding farewell to China with a mixture of eagerness for the bread and coffee we knew awaited us ultimately, and sadness, for the bland, easy tourist circuit we would now be injecting ourselves directly into.

Indeed, a dinner stop at what I once believed to be the fairly remote and uninteresting Udom Xai saw more Aussie travelers going past in skimpy clothing than we would see weeks at a time in China.

So long, China.

Dali was of a similar nature to Lijiang - an old walled city and popular tourist spot.

The town had a bit more life to it. On the other hand, the western tourists were more plentiful and the food was fairly lackluster.

We stayed a few days and explored the city. This was the first place on the trip, and the only place in China, where I’ve been offered drugs. Who taught all these old ladies to call the stuff ganja, anyway? Damn irresponsible backpackers!

You can get onto the wall for a decent view of the surrounding mountains, as well as the rest of the town.

Lijiang. We knew we were heading towards south east Asia by the time we got to this little tourist town.

As with many viable tourist destinations in China, this one boasts an old city, alongside the sprawling newer suburbs and industrial estates which tend to spread out a long way from the original villages.

Old Lijiang was a completely cobbled town with next to no motor vehicles. A real tourist maze, the winding and confusing streets were sign posted with maps that didn’t conform to the traditional NORTH IS UP standard.

A spring feeds a narrow canal which runs all around the town, following the streets in most places. The buildings are quaint, the narrow streets shady, and the view from the top of the hill on one side of town is absolutely amazing.

The place itself has little to offer in the way of genuine cultural minority experiences. Han Chinese, who can’t actually pronounce the name of the local people (Naxi) properly, dressed in the local traditional dress, sell everything from gen-ew-ine Tibetan style butter tea and deep fried yak (former is gross, latter is gamey and good) to Thailand souvenir shirts. Almost every building has been converted into a guesthouse, restaurant or souvenir shop. The place still has a certain charm, but it’s difficult to cling to it when droves of acne-scar-faced, fat, rude, business-suited tourists are intentionally shoulder barging you unnecessarily while you’re trying to take a photo of something. (Makes my blood boil..)

A very successful Chinese tourist destination, basically. I’ve read that the actual minority group, the Tibetan descended, matriarchal, Naxi, have generally left their old kingdom now, while the Han people have moved in to exploit the tourist potential. Feels like some kind of fucked up Disney land.

Leaving Sichuan province and its array of spicy food all to soon, we made our way into Yunnan, one of the southern most provinces of China. By this stage we were taking our anti malaria tablets, following the advice of the travel doc back in Sydney, and admiring the beautiful scenery - banana trees, glittering rice paddies and rolling mountain vistas.

The view from the bus to our first stop in Yunnan, Lijiang, was a welcome distraction from the immediate situation - women violently vomiting in the aisle of the bus the whole way. Our back seats gave us a fantastic view, whenever we forgot to stare diligently out the window, or avert our gazes into a book. If it wasn’t so surreal it would have been disgusting.

No. Fuck that. This was the most surreal and disgusting bus ride ever. The woman sitting on the other side from Lili was the worst. I’d spotted her leap from the first bus and dive to a drain with some kind of strangled, involuntary, banshee yell as she proceeded to vomit convulsively in reaction to the first ride. On the second leg of the bus ride, this woman took up two seats as she lay down trying to block the entire ride out of her mind. She would scramble for the window and hang her head out, moaning and choking as she dry heaved into the slipstream. By the end of the trip this woman was crying, and had this vacant, haunted look about her, animalistic body language as she clung to the seat on all fours. Her facial expression was vaguely familiar. I’ve seen it on junk sick beggars in Sydney, too ill to panhandle.

Of course, this woman would have been that one person on the bus who gets sick. It would have been anomalous that she was reacting SO UTTERLY AND VIOLENTLY. But then, at the first rest stop, the bus itself projectile vomited something like 90% of the other women onto the side of the road where they all squatted down and emptied their stomachs.

This scene went on and on, and the longer the ride went on, the sicker they got, until they seemed to be lining up to spew into the rubbish bins so thoughtfully placed in the aisle. Unfortunately, the bins were tied to the seats, which got their own light coating.

It was with a certain numb relief that I got off the bus in Lijiang, and walked away from the bus station, shellshocked.

While we managed to situate ourselves in the fairly relaxing old city in Xi’an, Cheng Du saw us firmly in the midst of the city’s fervent renovation scene.

We took a guest house in the city, down a road which was supposed to be pretty cool. It was torn up and every building bar our hostel was being rebuilt in some faux-traditional style. There were skilled artisans of every kind going about their work on the rubble strewn street, including a team of people chipping massive bricks out of rough-hewed blocks of stone. Their precision with a chisel was awe inspiring.

It was with some effort that we picked our way between our hostel and the city proper, and once we got there, famed sights like the city’s (apparently) impressive Mao statue were behind partitions while building work went on within.

Given the frenetic pace of the construction work that was going on, it seems surprising that Cheng Du would ultimately be one of the more relaxing places we visited in China. Sichuan Province has a great tea “house” tradition, with places catering to every economic niche. We found ourselves at the extremes of the economic pole, taking green tea in a park on little plastic stools while children cavorted around and families met to gossip over plates of sunflower seeds, then later finding ourselves in the top floor of some boutique shopping-cum-business-complex, sipping coffees and taking advantage of the comfortable seating.

The real Cheng Du treat, however, is visiting The Giant Panda Breeding Research Base. Another triumph over local transport got us out to the bamboo rich base early enough to catch feeding time, while enamored tourists quietly watched the giant fluffy creatures rolling around and stuffing themselves silly on bamboo.

Apparently zoologists can’t agree on whether these are akin to bears, cats or raccoons. Cute is what they are though, pure and simple.

After Beijing we hit the sleeper trains again, with Xi’an as our next destination.

Heading south took us into much more established backpacker land, Xi’an having a reasonable array of hostels and an easy, logical, local transport system.

The old city is bounded by a well preserved wall, with the two major attractions, the Bell Tower and Drum Tower, centred in a huge roundabout leading off to the four cardinalities, through the ancient gates and into the surrounding urban sprawl.

We stayed right in the middle, with a view from our room of the Bell Tower and the seemingly chaotic intersection that surrounds it.

Food was okay here, a well established Muslim quarter within the old city region provided excellent street food. Apart from exploring the old town, with its towers, traffic and shopping malls, the prime activity in Xi’an is visiting the famed army of Terracotta Warriors.

This sprawling tourist attraction is actually the site of an on-going archaeological dig. Apparently some farmers unearthed some rather extravagant pieces of pottery and brought them to official attention. I don’t know what happened to the farmers after that, but the farmland got surveyed and three troves of warriors and their mounts, made from terracotta and brandishing actual bronze weapons and gear, were located - the spiritual forces of Qin Dynasty Emperor Shi Huang

One trove seems to have been completely dug up. Rank upon rank of solider stand stripped of their weapons in the pits from which they were excavated. The scale of the collection is impressive, but the raw archaeological dig nature of the site makes it a rather poor stage from which to view the warriors. Bad lighting further squelches any hopes of getting a really good look at them from the viewing platform. I have no idea what has been done with the bronze weapons. And this was the best of the three pits. The others looked like abandoned works in progress. It’s probably hard to continue serious archaeological work while your efforts are being turned into a massive tourist-herding cash sink.

A few squads of damaged warriors being patched up took the prize for most interesting. Telephoto lens to the rescue!

All in all, the Terracotta Army was worth checking out. It would be hell in tourist season, and I would have been very frustrated if we’d payed for a tour group to take us there and rush us around, as we witnessed at the time. Local transport and DIY tourism wins again.

This the seat of royal power for part of the rule of the Ming and Qing dynasties. The royal family lived in the city, and no other be-testicled males were allowed within its lavish walls. Something like ten thousand concubines serviced the emperor, and thousands of eunics tended to the royal needs.

The stereo typical image of the Forbidden city is of snow capped Chinese roofs and huge courtyards. We were not disappointed, as snow drifted down around us as we explored the citadel. An impressive palace, to be sure. Many of the buildings have become museums for various royal artifacts. Some interesting things, like extravagent boxes and chests of drawers specifically for holding Jade-ware treasures.

I got the impression that the lives of the Emperors of the time were primarily involved with affairs of state, with leasure time spent cross legged in the imperial chambers, toying with various bits of pretty stone and metal work, with occasional bouts of creative energy spent doing calligraphy.

Indeed, judging by the exhibits, the imperial families were expected to be artists in their own right, as well as appreciators of the beautiful works plundered from far away lands.

The trip was marred two-fold. First, as was already mentioned, my toe nearly fell off. Secondly, somehow, a Starbucks coffee shop had set up in one of the buildings. Serving only huuge size coffees and biscuits. Yeah, we had coffees there. You haven’t really done China until you’ve wasted money on over-priced American investment swill, in the middle of the country’s most sacrosanct of cultural icons.

As I’ve been reminded via email a few times, it’s been a while since my last proper update.

For some reason accessing our web server tends to be incredibly slow, while much of the rest of the internet is almost at decent speed. I suspect this is still due to the internet cable stuff linking China to the outside world hasn’t been properly repaired, so some parts of the world are fast to access, and other parts are getting routed through some rather weird places.

Fortunately, Lili of the infinite patience has been putting up photos and increasingly interesting words, so hopefully that is some compensation for people left hanging on my every word (yeah right) anyway, it’s the same adventure, just a different adventurer, so if anyone is look at this and not her site, checkit: http://lili.estrange.org/china

Guess which wall this is. Apologies for the lack of posts. My luck with the internet and accessing my website has been nil until just now. Lots of time wasted getting it to work finally. More later.