Why helloooooooo there! It's been a long time since I wrote to you last. You'll have to excuse my recent lack of blogging, I've been off gallivanting around China and Laos for the past 3 weeks.
I only returned to Vietnam yesterday and my brain is still in holiday-mush mode so today's blog is coming to you courtesy of Dan. Below is Dan's account (in his own words) of my time in China, annotated in order to make more sense and/or to defend myself. Enjoy!
Day 1: Hotel tells us they do not have the special we booked, even though they told us they would put us in the same room we booked through the special. We booked a room through a discount website but Dan booked the wrong dates (he was one day ahead of himself) - so the hotel wouldn't give us the room at the discounted rate. Then we had to give them a deposit for the room which was double that of one night's accommodation. Given that it was after 10pm we had no choice but to agree. Not the best start to our holiday in China!
Day 2: Spent 4hrs in the morning walking around Kunming trying to find an ATM that worked and/or would accept our cards (during this period we could not even afford breakfast). Spent 4hrs in the afternoon walking around trying to find a travel agent, all of the ones in the lonelyplannet had shut down or moved (we could have passed quite a few on our walk, but no way to tell as no signs in English) Kunming sucks!
Day 3: Isabelle gets food poisoning during a 9hr bus ride to Lijiang, at the end of which she is thankful for squat toilets!! I got food poisoning off a vegetarian mushroom dish - vegetarian is meant to be the safest bet when you are travelling! Food poisoning was not meant to happen! And I was not thankful for the squat toilets - they were, hands down, the most disgusting toilets I have ever been in. Some of them were just concrete slabs either side of a ditch - and the 'cubicules' were just <1m high walls with no doors: you could see all the little old Chinese ladies squatting down and attending to their business. The only thing that I was grateful for was that there were frequent toilet stops and that, being squat toilets with no flush buttons (or any means of flushing at all), I didn't actually have to touch anything.
Day 4: Isabelle camera disapears. It didn't 'disappear', someone in Liajing knows exactly where it is. Grrr!
Day 5: Get lost trying to bike to a village in the countryside, turn a 18km roundtrip into a 30-40km one, still no English signs to help us on the way. Dan forgot to mention that, for the most part of the 30-40km trip, we were biking over cobblestones, which gets really uncomfortable after a while.
Day 6: Plane delayed, Isabelle gets a really bad bout of food poisoning as we board the plane, which continues long into the early hours of the morning as we search for a hotel. Worst food poisoning ever. We didn't find a hotel til after midnight, I'm pretty sure the one we ended up in is the absolute worst hotel in China - broken squat toilet, dirty room, hardest beds, rowdy guests and a couple out front having a domestic from about 2.00 - 3.30am. (Coming in a close second for the worst hotel award was the one we stayed at in Kunming - it was freezing there and the heating was centrally controlled: so they wouldn't turn it on til about 10pm then turned it off at 4am).
Day 7: Daniel gets food poisoning while we get stuck in a transition town with very little to see or do. It really was a boring little town, we were only there because it was handy to the China/Laos border crossing. We spent pretty much all our time there in the hotel room and feasted on instant 2minute noodles for our dinner.
Day 8: Leave China.
Luckily my time in Laos was a lot more enjoyable. I did like Liajing though, it is a remote city up in the mountains near Tibet. It has a beautiful old quarter full of lovely old Chinese buildings - all of which have been converted into guest houses, restaurants and souvenier shops. The food there was pretty good (apart from whatever gave me food poisoning that is), Dan particularly enjoyed the yak kebabs while I was more of a fan of the yak yoghurt. I credit the yak yoghurt for curing my first bout of food poisoning, unfortunately I didn't have any with me when it struck again.
Seeing as my camera is gone I can't post any photos until I get my hands on Dan's camera, this may take a while. But never fear, I'll get around to it... eventually...
More about Laos in my next entry.
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