China

After Japan we took a flight to Beijing to start our next adventure in China. Even though both countries are considered Asia, Japan and China are completely different in so many ways. As easy and comfortable traveling was through Japan, so complicated and difficult is traveling through China. But even though we needed a holiday after traveling for a month in China ;-), we both wouldn't have want to miss a second of it. China is so big and so diverse. Most Chinese don't speak a word of English, but it was amazing to see how especially the young generation always tried to help us with just a few words of English and their translation apps on the phone. We became real experts in communicating through saying a sentence in English

in the phone that translated directly in Chinese and then the people spoken to their phone in Chinese and It was translated for us in English. Very time consuming, but amazing that in that way you are able to communicate with people that don't speak a word of English!

We started our trip in Beijing, the capital of China. A crazy overwhelming city with everywhere you look there were people and grey buildings. We read before we went, that in the period that we visited, the smog over the city is the worst, but you can't imagine how smog effects everything. It feels like all the buildings are kind of grey, everywhere is a layer of dust, you can't see in the sky if it's a beautiful day or not, because of the smog clouds and at the end of the day your

throat hurts because of breathing the air all day. As good tourists we visited the Forbidden City that is enormous and very impressive, the Temple of Heaven where we stood in the middle of the Heart of Heaven or the Supreme Yang, where the Emperor would pray to heaven for favorable weather. Not a bad place to stand on ;-) On one of the evening we also went to the Tiananmen Square, where you see the daily flag ceremony of taking down the flag at sunset with a whole official ceremony. But definitely our favorite and most impressive was the visit to the Great Wall of China. Even when you look at the pictures it's difficult to imagine how long, impressive and mostly how steep the Great Wall is! It's much harder to walk on top of the wall then we thought beforehand, but so worth it! It is one of these places in your life that you realize on how much history you are walking on and how special it is that we have a chance to be there ones in our life:-)

After Beijing we continued to Xi'an,that is located more inside the country. But before we arrived there, we needed to get ourselves into the train. In the travel guide they warned us to take enough time when you travel through the Beijing central train station and we thought we did, but my g's, no travel guide can prepare you for the craziness at the Beijing central station. Think about standing in the middle of a Kingsday party in A'dam in Holland or in the middle of a street party during Purim in Tel Aviv. OK, as you start to get the picture with the amount of people ;-).... now you need to go through 3 different entrances with hundreds of people pushing themselves through as well. First you push yourself through the first entrance to get to long lines to buy your ticket, than you go back outside, push yourself through the next entrance to get checked if you have a ticket, before you continue pushing to get your luggage checked, than you are allowed to continue to the next entrance to enter again with hundreds of people to get your ticket checked again. Chinese people are small, but don't underestimate them, they know how to push themselves though lines!! It's a general thing we really needed to get used to in China, especially after being in Japan, where everyone waits in line, in China people don't stand in lines and when you give little bit of space in front of you or you are ,for example, trying to give the person in front of you at the ATM some privacy, the moment it is your turn ,without realizing, someone jumps in front of you. And I don’t think it's even intended as rude, because if you say something they look really surprised and say: "of course you can go first!", it's almost as they think that you didn't really wanted to go first, because you gave them space to go first :-) :-) Anyway... we made it just in time into the train :-)

Xi'an was a really nice city that we really enjoined. The most important place to visit is the Terracotta Warriors. An impressive place where over 8,000 life-size terracotta figures are burried. It's the army of Qin Shi Huang, the first Emperor of China and it is a form of funerary art that they buried the army with the emperor in 210–209 BCE and whose purpose was to protect the emperor in his afterlife. Very impressive to see in real life, mostly because all figures are individual and you can't find a warrior or horse that looks alike. The next day we went to visit the old City Wall, a nice 13 km long walk that shows you the city from a different angle. After in the evening we visited the Muslim Quarter, a big neighborhood that in the evening is full of people and amazing street food, a must see when you visit Xi'an!

After that, on our way to Chengdu, a great place to spend a lot of time,

because there are also a lot of cities around the city that are really worth visiting. The most popular attraction in Chengdu itself is the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding, a big park with a lot of panda's, definitely the favorite animal of Yohan. And I can understand, we spend hours starring at them, as they are ridiculously cute!
Outside Chengdu we visited the Giant Buddha of Leshan, an enormous stone Buddha of 70 meters and that is considered the larges stone Buddha in the world. When you stand completely below, after climbing down the mountain, next to his huge toenails, it makes you feel so small and humble.
One of the other days we did a day trip to Mount Emei. This mountain is more than 3000 meter high and is one of the Four Sacred Buddhist Mountains of China. We planned to make it a day trip, but after being an extra 4 hours stuck in traffic, because of weather issues we only

arrived in the end of the afternoon and they told us we were only able to get up the mountain, but wouldn't be able to come down before the last bus would leave. After a lot of frustration, because literally nobody of the hundreds of people spoke a world of English we met a few super nice young girls that helped us and advised to take the hotel they took the night before, go up the mountain, sleep at the hotel and then climb just before sunrise the last kilometers up the mountain. We decided to take the risk and they were really nice by calling the hotel, tell them we were on our way and to write on a paper in Chinese where to ask the bus driver to drop us off. And even though nobody in the bus or in the hotel spoke one word of English... we managed and not only that, we climbed before sunrise the mountain on super icy walking paths with little metal hooks that we bought that you tie with a string under your shoes to arrive just before sunrise on top of the mountain. Yohan is much braver than me, because going up a snowy mountain, without knowing where we

go and nothing and nobody speaking English makes me nervous, but he kept on saying that it will be OK and I am so happy I trusted him, because it was absolutely amazing! Seeing the sunrise at a 3000 meter high snowy mountain, just above the clouds is breathtaking! After the sun was completely up, the sky was bright blue and the golden Samantabhadra, seen as the place of enlightenment, makes you feel like standing between heaven and earth. Absolutely one of the most beautiful places we saw in our world trip!
On the way back in the bus we had the funniest experience. Suddenly in the middle of the road on a narrow bit of the mountain road, the bus driver suddenly stopped the bus, jumped out of the bus and started to run after a fazant/pheasant (a big kind of bird). In the end he didn’t manage to catch it, but came back to the bus and continued driving like nothing happened. It seriously looked like he tried to catch it for lunch ;-D And just before we arrived at the central bus station he surprised us again, he suddenly drove the bus, with all his

passengers through a car wash, apparently he liked clean busses ;-p
Besides beautiful places we also had the luck to be in Chengdu during Chanukah and New Year. When you are traveling for so long, it's nice to go to a Chabad evening where they light the candles of Chanukah and to see how many Israeli there are in a city like Chengdu :-) On New Year we got an unexpected invitation of the owners of the hostel we stayed the night before to come back and to join them for their traditional dumpling making that they would do every year with their family and close friends. Except for one of their friends that studied for a while in the States, nobody spoke a word of English, but with a lot of pointing and laughing we had a great time making the dumpling together and after we had a great meal. Homemade dumpling with just a little bit of soy and really spicy sauce is really delicious :-D
In general in our month in China we had most of the time no idea what we ordered, as we would mostly only eat in places with a photo

menu, so we could just point and show the word "pig" in Chinese. Would the answer be "no" then the decision was easily made ;-p But even though ordering food was difficult, we really enjoyed the food in China! Every region has its own kind of dishes and practically everything we ate was delicious :-) Definitely our highlight was the Peking duck we ordered one night in Beijing. As I am not a meat eater at all, and happily not eat meat for a month, OMG.... that Peking duck was AMAZING! It was seriously one of the most amazing things I ever ate in my life. We were the only foreigners in the restaurant and when some people behind us noticed that we didn't really know how to roll the rice pancakes, they told the waiter to give a demonstration, because suddenly they waiter stood in front of us with big plastic hand gloves and started to prepared the first pancakes in the correct following order with the sweet sauces, peking duck and vegetables on top ;-p Haha... at least we are upgraded now from stupid tourist to professional Chinese Peking duck eaters ;-P ;-P

After Chengdu we flew to Lanzhou in the North West that now is part of China, but was in the past part of Tibet. From there we took another 4 hour bus ride to the city where we wanted to stay for 2 day's: Xiahe. It's a tiny city with one big street, with at the end the famous Labrang Tibetan Buddhist monastery, one of the largest Tibetan Buddhist monasteries outside Tibet. Also in the town itself are mostly ethnic Tibetans living and it felt for us being completely in a different country. We read in the Lonely Planet that it was recommended to join the morning praying and that was the best advice ever. It was freezing cold (around -10 degrees!!), but absolutely magical! People from all over the area come at sunrise to the outside of the monastery, to walk the 3.5 km of outside wall that is covered with praying wheels. And everyone is doing their morning walk, while meditating and giving a push to every praying wheel they pass. We were super lucky, as we exactly entered the main monastery

hall, when hundreds of monks where sitting down and doing there morning prayers. Officially we weren't allowed to take pictures, so unfortunately we weren't able to take good quality pictures, but believe me, even though we aren't Buddhists, we both had goosebumps of siting there and listening to the monotone praying of the monks. It's a very strong and almost religious experience to have been part of that...
On a funny note, on one of the pictures you can see a goat lying next to the praying wheels. We saw the goat a few times wondering around by itself, but now with researching some facts in order to write this blog, I found out that it's apparently the famous village coat that listed to the name Nigel ;-P Haha... good to know for next time we visit ;-). Another amazing funny scene was that we also saw a goat sleeping inside an ATM cabin, just resting… so funny!
From here we needed first to return to Lanzhou, in order to take the plane to Guiyang, much more South in China. From there we were supposed to take a connection flight to Zhangjiajie, but when we arrived in Guiyang, we found out that the next flight was cancelled and that this flight is most of the time cancelled because of bad weather, so the chance we could take the next day a flight was very small. So the advice of the people on the helpdesk was to take a bus to Fenghuang and from there another bus to Zhangjiajie. On the map it doesn't look so far, but my g'd, that were the worst 11 hours we spend in a bus in

China! Arrived in Zhangjiajie we quickly tried to forget the whole nauseous making bus ride in the mountain by visiting the Zhangjiajie park and that is pretty easy. It's a beautiful park with very special kind of mountains that by many people is called the "Avatar mountains". There is been said that the inspiration of the movie Avatar comes from this nature park and I totally believe that! It looks exactly like the Avatar movie. Only the blue avatars are missing ;-) We visited at a cloudy day, so on the pictures it doesn't look as impressive as in real life, but trust me, no way the director of the movie wasn't inspired by this very impressive park and his mountains! We walked a full day around in the park and it took longer to climb up the mountains then expected, so we ended up on the mountain, with the knowledge that we could make it back down, but it would be already dark and we would have to take a taxi back to the hotel, because our last bus left already. While we were deciding

what to do, we met a really nice Chinese girl and her mother. The girl spoke really good English, because she studied for a period in Germany and she suggested to check in their hotel if they maybe had another room, to stay the night next to the park, so the next morning we wouldn’t have to travel back to the park and in that way to have the chance to spend more hours in the park the second day. We ended up doing that and it worked out all great, their hotel was much nicer for much less money (as tourist you are only allowed to stay in hotels that have special permission from the government to host tourist and they are generally much more expensive) and we ended up eating dinner together. It was so much fun to have dinner with local people, to learn the correct Chinese table manners, to order something else than you see on the pictures and most of all, to be able to speak about China and to ask all the questions we had all along during traveling in China :-) After seeing a big part of the park the second day, we needed to catch the next flight to Shanghai. That's

where we spend our last days in China. We visited of course the Bund, the very long and famous boulevard were everyone loves to walk and where you have a nice view of all the high building with billboards on the other side of the water. And of course the Shanghai museum and the cute former French Concession with the nice restaurants and boutique shops. To finish our trip with some last extra history we went for a day trip to the ancient water city of Zhujiajiao. It's a sweet little town with canals and lots of tourist stores. Cute, but very touristic and not as impressive as the original "real" old cities in China we saw. Haha... or maybe I am just spoiled and saw already too many canals in Amsterdam and Utrecht in my life ;-)
In order to catch our flight to Australia we needed to travel back to Beijing, where we only stayed that day in a hotel next to the airport, but where we found out the happiest news we could have gotten :-D We found out that I was pregnant of a little baby! The biggest present

that China could have given us :-D "A little baby boy, made in China", we could have not left China with happier news than this :-D
China, we hope to come back one day!
Australia, get ready, here we come!

(Travel plan: Beijing, Xi'an, Chengdu, Leshan, Emeishan, Lanzhou, Xiahe, Lanzhou, Guiyang, Fenghuang, Zhangjiajie, Shanghai, Zhujiajiao, Shanghai, Beijing)