Our Triumphant Return to China

Our train to Xi'an was also an interesting experience. Since we missed the first train we had to suck it up and go hard-seat for the 34-hour ride (those of you who traveled with me in China on SAS will know the greatness of hard-seat) It actually didn't turn out too bad and there were some empty seats in our section so we could spread out a little bit to sleep. Our neighbors shared food with us and we took shots of rice-wine out of bottlecaps and played some good 'ol Texas hold'em, in which Mike and I both lost tons of fictitious yuan to this really lucky Kazakh kid we met. We finally arrived in the ancient Chinese capital of Xi'an after two full days on our seats on the train. Got to do laundry for the first time in more than a couple weeks, I'm sure the smell coming from our socks didn't win us any friends (though there were a good many other interesting smells on the train, mostly emanating from the bathroom) Mike unfortunatly discovered he had been robbed of 3000 yuan (about $425) while wandering around the city, so we comiserated with a couple of Qingdao brews and some McDonalds (our first fall to western food so far) Xi'an is a really cool city, and although it is a bit touristy we found some pretty sweet areas just wandering around the backstreets.

To see the Terra-cotta warriors we took a day tour which also stopped at the site of a neolithic village and a model of what they think the tomb of Qin Shi Huang looks like (not really worth it, I feel like the mound itself would have been more interesting) The army of terra-cotta warriors itself was incredible though; we saw about 1,000 of the 8,000 unearthed so far and there may still be tons more encircling the tomb that have not yet been discovered.

We celebrated my turning 23 years old in style at the hostel bar in Xi'an. We bought some cheap cornerstore beers to start us off and then moved on to the more expensive hostel beer. A couple of random Brits we met challenged us to a game of pool and after a tough game (our performance was pretty sad actually) we lost. When the clock struck 12 we all took some tasty shots of Jameson and I chugged a beer to celebrate the beginning of a new year. We were greatly entertained watching the Brits hitting on these pretty cute Chinese girls at the bar and tried to do some translating for them which turned out to be pretty funny. All in all it was a great celebration and thanks to everyone for the birthday wishes!

After Xi'an we took a train down to Chengdu where we sought out an awesome-sounding funhouse in the park in which you can ride a cart into the mouth of a shark. A lady led us to a creepy underground tunnel and told us to follow it until we got to the "fun part" After a few twists and turns we decided she had locked us in there and would come down later to do whatever evil deeds she had in store, but we eventually turned a corner and were shocked as a halloween-masked dummy jumped out of the darkness at us with a scream. We went through about 20 or so similar exhibits (many of them broken) but never found the shark's mouth.

Later on we visited a taoist temple in the city and the following morning took a minibus to the Panda Breeding Research center on the outskirts of town. This is where the Chinese government is pouring tons of money into trying to rehabilitate the panda population with captive breeding and reintroduction programs (just about the only animal China is working to save, sadly) We saw lots of pandas rolling around and eating bamboo and generally just being funny. We both took some good videos we will put up later.

Our final train in China took us to Kunming, capital of Yunnan province, where we immediately got on a bus to the old town of Dali to get out of the big city for awhile. Dali is nice but it is completely overrun by Chinese tourists. We found our guesthouse which unfortunately had some poor animals locked up all day in cages in the courtyard (standard practice in Asia, sadly) and then went out to explore the town. We soon found a fun bar called the Bad Monkey where we enjoyed several drinks being lit on fire and something called chili vodka, which turned out to be vodka saturated with loads of hot chilis. Mike ran screaming from the bar while I nonchalantly put down my glass and and wondered what the big deal was about (more like the other way around actually) Afterwards we went to a smaller place frequented by Chinese and Mike watched me make a fool out of myself buying one of the waitresses a drink and trying to talk to her in broken Chinese. The next day We went to a local Bai market in a little town called Shaping (the Shaping market, get it? haha) and had some tea by the lake to try to reach inner peace.

Our final day we decided to climb a mountain up to this temple. There is a cable car set up for those less-adventurous folk to go up but we decided to take the maze of steep local paths up, passing by a cemetary and many barking dogs. This is the first place we have seen large dogs in China actually, the pets in the cities tend to be quite small. We did some Indiana Jones-style exploring and climbed up a waterfall. On the way down we tried to follow a path by this stream but it ended eventually and we were forced to take the expensive cable car back down to the highway. The last night in town we returned to the Bad Monkey where Mike convinced me to do a final shot of chili vodka to commemorate the end of our China experience, to the great amuesment of the bartenders who proceeded to put our tab under the name "dumbasses".

After a long busride from Kunming involving many stops and the driver loading and unloading several large, unmarked boxes in random towns along the way we made it to the border and crossed over the Red River into Vietnam. We got to a small town in the northern Vietnamese mountains called Sapa this morning, which has also turned out to be pretty touristy but we are going on a two day trek out to the minority villages starting tomorrow so hopefully we should be able to escape the crowds of Westerners roaming about.

Thats about it for this update, we will soon fill you in on the details of drinking snake blood and wandering drunkenly through the streets of Hanoi. The blog should be updated pretty regularly now since we are out of China so keep checking it out to follow our adventures!