So Shines a Good Deed In a Weary World

I'm poaching wireless internet (sort of, I've been buying drinks...) from an awesome hostel in Guilin called Ming Palace. The downstairs reception and lounge area is really inviting and I'm making lots of mental notes for what the interior of a great hostel looks like should I ever open one.

This morning I arrived on an overnight train from Guangzhou. The train ride was pretty uneventful. I shared a four-bunk soft sleeper compartment with two others. The guy on the bunk below mine snored vigorously for about an hour, but other than that I got great sleep.

I also had this trippy dream that I was in a childhood house helping three friends move furniture when an earthquake struck. The room was just shaking and shaking for what seemed like an hour. I woke up to the train rocking back and forth in a motion that matched the quake.

The last time that my dream incorporated the outside world, I woke up chewing my hand as a proxy for the hamburger I was enjoying dreamside.

As comfortable as the train ride was, they turned the A/C down halfway through and I woke up to the humidity on my skin. I travel with a handful of moist towelettes for this very purpose, but they also make a poor substitute for a shower.

Lonely Planet reported that there was a friendly hostel 5 minutes walk from the train station. I was hoping they would let me store a bag for the day. On a whim I asked it they'd let me pay and take a shower too. They agreed and wouldn't take money, so I booked a night here for when I come back before heading on to Kunming.

The shower was sensational. After a 12-hour train ride you earn it in a similar way to running a 5k.

Renewed, with a lightened load, I took off for a stroll around downtown Guilin. It reminds me of Xi'an with wider roads and just as much pollution.

After finding the bus station and confirming the time of the last bus to Yangshuo (9pm, an hour later than written in the guidebook), I called Erin to let her know. She's due into the Guilin airport at 5:20, but we figured it would be 7 before she made it to the city. The extra hour of buses gives us plenty of cushion.

I stopped to grab some egg tarts to eat since I didn't have any in Macau. The pastry crust was a little tough but the custard was light and delicious.

I made my way to Jingjiang Park which has a little 400ft. peak that is supposed to yield a great view of the city. Given that the admission had jumped to 88 yuan from the 15 reported in the guide, and that I was going to do a river cruise, and that I generally don't pay to go in parks or temples anymore, I passed.

Over by the Li river, there are plenty of people willing to give bamboo raft rides. Perhaps later, but the heat and a little drowsyness was getting to me, so when I say the Ming Palace's inviting terrace, I stopped in.

The desk staff is friendly and speaks fluent English, but also humors me practicing Chinese.

I could spend a few days in this place, but I feel guilty about my shower deal at the other hostel.

I think what I'll do is offer them money again when I pick up my bag and then head to Ming Palace when I get back. Seems fair.

Seems like an average day traveling.

Getting here to there...

For longer trips like this one, I've evolved a style of planning that's not unlike carving a sculpture.

It's starts with coarse manipulations, and then I work on one section at a time until the trip I want emerges in relief.

I have just under three weeks left in the trip and will depart Macau tomorrow morning overland to meet up with Erin who will be flying to Guilin in Guangxi on June first. From there I know I want to travel to Kunming (which is looking like more of a transit stop now), Dali, Lijiang, Leaping Tiger Gorge, Shangri-La and then back to Shanghai for my flight home.

Something I'm sorting out now, and will blog for your reading enjoyment, is how I'm going to make it to Guilin. I know I need to make it to Guangzhou, about two hours north of the Macau/Mainland China border, and then catch an overnight train to Guilin.

It's a bit of a gamble because it's the end of the weekend and there are only two trains than make the trip. One starts in Guangzhou, the other arrives from Shenzhen. If I can't get tickets for either, I have to cross my fingers for passage on an overnight bus -- the good news is I should have about 6 hours to sort this out once I arrive in Guangzhou.

Here's what I have worked out so far:

07:00 - Depart Erin's House By Bus AP1 for Macau/China border (4.20 MOP)

07:45 - Arrive Macau China Border

08:30 - Clear Customs and stop to buy China Mobile SIM card for phone (60 to 100 RMB depending on how "lucky" the number is 8=good, 4=bad, more on this later)

09:00 - Depart Gongbei Border by taxi for Jiuzhou port (4km / 15 RMB)

09:15 - Arrive Jiuzhou port

09:30 - Depart Jiuzhou port by bus 3A (opposite port exit, 3 RMB) for Zhuhai North Station (32.3km...

Okay, so I'm doing this as I go and just realized that even though a bus from Gongbei takes 2 hours, it will ultimately probably be faster to do that then to taxi - bus - lightrail it up to Guangzhou. So, to revise from 9:00

09:00 - Depart Gongbei Border by long distance aircon bus. (55 to 75 RMB, 2.5 hours, every 20 minutes)

11:30 - Arrive at Guangdong long-distance bus station, just a stone's throw from the main train station.

11:45 - Check for overnight sleeper train tickets to Guilin. Looking for either K36/K37 ($60 USD) which leaves Guangzhou Main at 5:50pm and arrives to Guilin at 6:30am the next morning (continuing on), or K952/K949 ($50 USD) which leaves Guangzhou Main at 7:32pm and arrives at 7:35am the next morning (terminus).

If this works, I just kick back and ride the gravy train all the way to Guilin. If it doesn't work, I go back to the bus terminal and try to sort out an overnighter to Guilin.

I'll have about 12 hours in Guilin before Erin gets there, and during that time I'm going to check out the main part of the city and arrange our transport to Yangshuo where we're staying. I'm hoping that we'll be able to arrange passage on a boat down the Li River. If not, there are always busses.

I also need to buy my onward ticket for Guilin to Dali while I'm there which will be the evening of June 1st.

And that's as far as I have travel arranged...

I have to say that unless something is going to sell out, I like doing it this way. It allows for flexibility and only takes a little bit of time at the end of a travel day to make the next accommodations. I can't imagine having made a day-by-day plan for five weeks and not feeling like I was chained to an itinerary.

Sometimes I have loads of energy. Sometimes I'm wiped.

Macau is a perfect example. I was only planning to stay here for a day, but I'll have been here for three by the time I leave. It's been nice to have some downtime and to get to rediscover a city that I mostly blew through last time I was here. Singapore was the same way.

All things considered, I think it's important to find a level of planning that suits you. For some people, it can be just as maddening not to know what's coming next and that's worth listening to.

Packing It In

I’m occasionally asked what I pack when I go on a month-long trip.

The short answer is always, “too much.”

On the first trip to Europe it was three or four extra pair of jeans and other unnecessaries that were mailed home from Berlin and arrived after I did. In India, the overpacking was repeated but overseas shipping was slightly more entertaining. There, Gina and I spent the better part of a morning at a DHL counter and then wandering the streets of Bangalore to have three copies of our customs manifest typed out by a man sitting with a typewriter in front of a shop stall.

Long-distance backpacking cured me of overpacking to an uncomfortable extreme. On the Colorado Trail I hiked 500 miles in 28 days with a pack that weighed about 20 pounds fully-loaded.

Now I subscribe to the clown car school of packing where a modest exterior (backpack) hosts a never-ending stream of the useful and (usually) necessary. It’s very much in line with the advice Rick Steves gives to take “half as much stuff and twice as much money.”

Here’s what I packed for this trip:

For the basics I have four shirt, sock and underwear sets. Nearly everything is lightweight and/or synthetic so that I can do wash in the sink if I need to and wear it the next day.

I brought a light down vest, thermal, softshell, and goretex rain shell for the mountains. I brought boardshorts for the equator.

If you haven’t checked them out, GoLite has some rad travel/outdoor items that have pockets in all the right places (pants and shorts), are lightweight, and inexpensive if you buy them at the warehouse sale in Boulder or Denver.

One area where I pigged out on weight and space was the camera setup. I have a Canon PowerShot SD1300 point and shoot for candid photos, but also brought my Rebel T2i with the 24-105 L-series lens to get higher quality shots.

I’m on the fence about this one. As you can see from this picture, my camera backpack (which includes my Asus netbook) is almost the same size as the backpack with all of my clothes.

If I don’t put anything else in my clothing backpack (a GoLite Jam2), I can actually squeeze the camera backpack in the top. This is handy for just having one thing to hold onto at airports and trainstations though after I pick up even a few souvenirs this no longer works.

I rarely take my netbook out during the day with me, so I think the ideal setup would be a more flexible day pack (the camera backpack is rigid) with a protective sleeve for my camera. Then I could throw everything in one bag for moving around.

What about you? What do you take on your trips and how do you pack it.

This Chocolate is Lil' Jon Approved

I swear, I'll write a real blog post soon...

A Break for China

Yesterday, I gave my final presentation for the second semester of Chinese class. It was a riveting 10-minute show on my plans for summer. As one classmate noted, it was a lot like the last day of elementary school -- on account of both the subject and the level of grammar used to express it.

Hu Jintao and Barack Obama engage in a little 文化的交流 (Wénhuà de jiāoliú), cultural exchange.

By the numbers, our textbook says that we've studied about 700 characters. They say that it takes nearly 1,000 of them to be able to read a newspaper. From my limited attempts to read Chinese news, that seems accurate. I have to either read the news online or with a dictionary handy to make sense of it.

I'm heading back to China in a few weeks. This time I'll be in Yunnan province in southwestern China, just East of the Tibetan plateau. The last trip was big-city and I'm looking forward to spending some time in this scenic part of the country.

If you haven't seen them, the BBC's "Wild China" documentaries are awesome. They're available on Netflix and one of the 6-part series is all about Shangri-La (中甸) where I'll spend about a week.