My friends Bart and Esther (left on the picture) asked me to take a picture of them together with Esther’s brother and his girlfriend. They wanted to give this picture as a present to their grandma. Taking a good group picture is quite hard! I ended up combining three separate pictures to make just this reasonable one out of them…

Let’s just blame it on the models.

Click here for the three originals.

Arjen and Bin invited us to join them for the concert of John Gorka in Venlo. John Gorka is a fairly unknown Folk singer from America (youtube). I hadn’t heard of him before but Arjen and Bin have been fans for some years now. John performed solo on a small stage for about 70 people. Which gave the performance a nice and intimate ambiance.

I found time to edit the RAW China pictures and I have updated all the pictures on this blog with the edited new versions. I was travelling with my GPS logger, so you can also check where the pictures were taken on the map of the Picasaweb album.

Today is our last day in China, tomorrow morning we fly back to Holland. For our last day here Adrienne and I went to Zhujiajiao, a town close (1 hour bus drive) to Shanghai. With its canals it is known as a sort of Venice of China. I’m happy that the golden week is over, everything is much more quiet now and judging from the amount of tourist shops that they had in Zhujiajiao it can be awfully crowded there.

After a month in China there are some things I will miss and somethings I won’t.

Things I will miss:

• Chinese food, it’s great to go out and have a delicious meal for only a few euro’s
• Taxi’s, you can go everywhere you like by just waving at a Taxi driver (if you can explain where you want to go that is)
• Having all the food cooked for me and my room cleaned every day
• Fresh fruits and fruit juices; don’t think about the pesticides that were used
• The landscape and the country side; even though dirty it was very beautiful and interesting
• Adrienne will miss being “regular size” and blending in with the locals
• A new adventure every day
• The great hospitality of Bin’s family; ganbei!

Things I won’t miss:

• Spitting in the streets
• Talking on the phone at the volume and speed of a fighter jet
• Chinese food; noodles with dried shrimp for breakfast or seacucumber
• Public toilets; when standing in front of a urinal it is difficult to keep from slipping on whatever that stuff is on the floor
• Hotel staff that doesn’t understand one word of English
• Smogg, although it does help better against a sunburn than UV factor 50
• Bag bag, watch watch, looki looki!
• People staring at me and wanting to have their picture with me (liang mi!)

All in all I had a really great time here in China, it was a fantastic experience and I can recommend it to everybody that is a bit adventureous. But after this month in China I’m also happy to go back and see my family and friends again and most of all I really want a peanut butter sandwich for breakfast!

I just came back from eating some very spicy “hot pot”, so this isn’t going to be a very long story! The table next to us was enjoying a full portion of slimey pig brain.. Yum!

The last two days we spent in Ping’An to see the famous terraced rice fields there. Our hotel was on the top of the hill with a great view. Two local elderly ladies carried our luggage up as if it was nothing. I was ashamed to be sweating like crazy trying to keep up with them.

The harvesting of the rice had just begun so we missed the view of a totally golden mountain, but none the less it was very impressive. We stayed over night to see the sunset and sunrise. Due to the clouds and the smoke (the farmers were buring a lot of stuff) the view wasn’t perfect, but I was able to take some nice pictures. The pictures need some Photoshop and I took some HDR images, but this has to wait until I’m back.

-I have updated the pictures (19-10-2008)-

Tomorrow we leave for Shanghai, our final stop, to meet up again with Bin and Arjen.

Like yesterday we rented bikes and went around in the country side. We took less busy roads than yesterday. The pollution of the traffic on the main roads is horrible. Biking from Yangshuo to Fuli yesterday probably had the same impact as 50 years of hard core smoking.

The route we took today was amazing. The people in the rural areas here really live in very poor conditions, small huts with hardly any facilities. Much in contrast to their animals (water buffalo’s, chiken, ducks, dogs) which can walk around where ever they like and are well fed. Perhaps their end in the strange foods of the Chinese cuisine is not so nice, but their life is much better than even a “biological” chicken in Holland.

Tomorrow morning we leave for Ping ‘An where we will visit the terraced rice fields. We stay there for one night, and hopefully this time we will be able to see a nice sunrise the following day.

Yesterday and today we rented bikes to go around in the neighborhood of Yongshuo. We rented the biggest possible (but still far too small) mountain bike for me and drove off to Fuli, an old town nearby.

In Fuli there was a large marked where almost everything is for sale. Perhaps you like Nike NBA basketball slippers, well they have them… Sort of… Spelling English is not the best quality of the Chinese locals (check out the picture). 

The food section was amazing and appalling. I won’t put all the gruesome detailes here on the website otherwise my friend and colleague Evgeniya would not be able to sleep for the coming weeks. For the people who checked out her website, know that she is fond of dogs… as pets… Let’s just say that some of the Chineese like dogs for their other qualities. The only thing I will say is that a big pot of boiling water, a blow-torch and a couple of bald dogs really gave a different meaning to the old Dutch proverb “de hond in de pot vinden“.

After the market we went on to bike around in the country side. The strange landscape and the rural people with their water buffalo’s really made this a great experience.

We were in Guilin the last two days together with Arjen. Today we took a boat from Guilin to Yangshuo where Adrienne and I will stay until the 7th (Arjen went back to Shanghai today). Strangly shaped mountains with even stranger names such as “Camel Mountain”, “Solitary Beauty Peak”, “Nine Horses Painting Hill”, form a very nice landscape.

The Chinese are very creative when it comes to making up names for things. Tourist information brochures would for example talk about “beautiful little bright pearls from heaven, like galaxies, dancing in the sky”, where in Holland we would just call them damn rain drops…

The weather isn’t that great, it is a bit foggy and we even had some bright pearls from heavon today. I hope it will get better in the following days because we will rent bikes and go around in the landscape.

The Chinese treat their animals differently than what we are used to in Holland. Perhaps this scales with the living conditions of the people in each country, who knows.

We were quite shocked when we visited a Zoo in Guilin (it was part of the Seven Star Park we visited). The animals were kept in small concrete cells without anything to play with. They even had two great panda’s! These panda’s had a small walking area outside and a concrete cell inside. In other places in the park you could have a picture taken with monkeys or pay 5 RMB to have your picture taken on a swing with two live peacocks on it.

This evening we went to see the Cormorant fishermen here in Yangshou. These fishermen have Cormorant birds fish for them by tying a rope around their necks and having them catch fish like they normally would. When they catch a fish they can’t swallow it because of the rope so it gets stuck in their neck. The fisherman then gets the bird out of the water and gets the fish out of its throat.

The strangest thing however we found in the reet flute cave. For a fee of 10 RMB you could enter a “turtle cave” in which turtles lived which were over one thousand years old. The oldest turtle was supposedly over 1300 years old (yeah right). These turtles were put on small wooden tables, the Chinese would touch them for good luck and would rub coins and other things on them so that these coins would bring luck. Some also put money on the back of the turtles. Very very strange people…

In Guilin we visited two different caves, the “Reed Fulte Cave” and the “Seven Star Cave”. Both were quite nice, with colorful (and unrealistic) lights, but they were also very crowded and touristic. I can’t wait until the golden week is over (this should be tomorrow) and all the Chinese people have to go back to work!