Lost and Confused in Northern China

I had heard how hard it is to travel China if you don't know Chinese so I booked a group tour for most of my time here. But there was one place missing from the itinerary which I was dying to see. The city is called Datong and is most famous for the Yungang Grottoes, a cluster of ancient Buddha figures carved directly into the side of a mountain. You can get there in 6 hours on a train from Beijing so I thought it would be a simple affair to go there and come back in two days.

The only problem was that I waited until the last minute to book anything and ended up just barely getting train tickets and a hotel - no tour guide. Phoebe, my tour guide in Beijing, was less than thrilled with this arrangement; warning me it would be hard to get around because few foreign tourists ever go to Datong. I don't think she realized her argument just made me want to go even more. I was nervous about the whole thing but went ahead with my plans. How bad could it be for someone who doesn't speak a word of Mandarin?

I used to think no one spoke English in Beijing....absolutely no one speaks English in Datong and most were not happy to meet the single stupid foreigner in their city. I would ask vendors for prices. They would respond using the Chinese words for numbers. When I told them I didn't understand, they would write down the Chinese character for the number as if somehow this was an improvement. My physical appearance clearly worked against me in these situations as people assumed I was Chinese and would dummy down their sentences in increments as their disappointment increased. Conversations with the locals ranged between non-existent to frustrating. My English words seemed to repel people away like poison gas. I'm willing to admit that for the first time on this trip I felt truly lonely.

Despite the troubles communicating, I did manage to see the grottoes. The bus routes to the site are mostly straightforward and I fumbled my way through the day to get back to the city by 4pm.

Since my train departed at 10pm, I spent a couple hours moseying about town aimlessly. This was not on purpose. I took a different bus route back to town in a greedy attempt to see one more temple and found myself completely disoriented. While walking, I saw a 5-star hotel and entered the lobby in search of wifi. Lucky me, their network was unsecure. I was actually close to the temple but it was now closed so I sat in the lobby reading emails for the next several hours before heading back to the train station. I had survived Datong!

I was so proud of myself at this point, I wanted to tell Phoebe all about it and get some kind of gold star for not being a troublemaker. But it was on the train to Beijing, on the very last piece of the whole itinerary, where things went wrong and I lost my chance at the gold star. The train got into Beijing station at 5am and I was ready to disembark. However, the car door didn't open and I noticed that everyone around me was still sleeping. I figured I must be too early so I sat and waited for an attendant to come and open the door. After a few minutes, the train started moving again. This was mildly concerning. I found an attendant for help but ofcourse he didn't speak English. In a few minutes, a gang of attendants were trying to help me, stringing together whatever English they could gather to form a message. I had missed my stop.

One of the attendants called Phoebe and eventually settled on the following plan. The tour group was taking the train to Shan Hai Guan station that day and the train I was on happened to be going that way as well. So it was a simple matter of getting off at that station and waiting for them there. The only thing that sucked was that she would have to pack and carry my large luggage from Beijing for me.

Overall, the train attendants were pretty amused with the situation and used the transit time to practice their English, rummage through my passport, and attempt to figure out where I was from. They seemed to find it incomprehensible that I wasn't Chinese.

In China, when public scenes ensue, curious crowds will begin to gather and I eventually found I had an audience around me. One little girl used her phone to type questions in Chinese which would translate to English. It was probably the kindest encounter I've had in China so far. I gave her a toy turtle I had hanging off the zipper of my backpack.

Once the train got to the designated station, an attendant took me to a waiting room and gestured for me to sit down on a couch. I sat there for 3 hours until I finally saw Phoebe and the gang walk toward me. Salvation was here! I was like the kid who gets lost at the mall and is picked up by their parents from the mall police office. 

I won't be venturing out alone into the boonies of China again anytime soon but I'm still glad I took this weekend trip. Getting to see those grottoes was well worth the ordeal.

Wooden entrance placed in front of the caves

Detail of wooden entrance

 Large Buddha statue

Small Buddhas adorning the wall of the cave

  

Larger buddhas got to have two cave doorways

Buddhas looking down at the tourists

Buddha decorated wall

 Inside Lingyan Temple next to the grotto area

Snarling lion and girl on phone. A random picture I took while wandering the city streets.

The Datong city gate all dressed up for Chinese New Year

 View from my train window at dusk

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Lost and Confused in Northern China

I had heard how hard it is to travel China if you don't know Chinese so I booked a group tour for most of my time here. But there was one place missing from the itinerary which I was dying to see. The city is called Datong and is most famous for the Yungang Grottoes, a cluster of ancient Buddha figures carved directly into the side of a mountain. You can get there in 6 hours on a train from Beijing so I thought it would be a simple affair to go there and come back in two days.

The only problem was that I waited until the last minute to book anything and ended up just barely getting train tickets and a hotel - no tour guide. Phoebe, my tour guide in Beijing, was less than thrilled with this arrangement; warning me it would be hard to get around because few foreign tourists ever go to Datong. I don't think she realized her argument just made me want to go even more. I was nervous about the whole thing but went ahead with my plans. How bad could it be for someone who doesn't speak a word of Mandarin?

I used to think no one spoke English in Beijing....absolutely no one speaks English in Datong and most were not happy to meet the single stupid foreigner in their city. I would ask vendors for prices. They would respond using the Chinese words for numbers. When I told them I didn't understand, they would write down the Chinese character for the number as if somehow this was an improvement. My physical appearance clearly worked against me in these situations as people assumed I was Chinese and would dummy down their sentences in increments as their disappointment increased. Conversations with the locals ranged between non-existent to frustrating. My English words seemed to repel people away like poison gas. I'm willing to admit that for the first time on this trip I felt truly lonely.

Despite the troubles communicating, I did manage to see the grottoes. The bus routes to the site are mostly straightforward and I fumbled my way through the day to get back to the city by 4pm.

Since my train departed at 10pm, I spent a couple hours moseying about town aimlessly. This was not on purpose. I took a different bus route back to town in a greedy attempt to see one more temple and found myself completely disoriented. While walking, I saw a 5-star hotel and entered the lobby in search of wifi. Lucky me, their network was unsecure. I was actually close to the temple but it was now closed so I sat in the lobby reading emails for the next several hours before heading back to the train station. I had survived Datong!

I was so proud of myself at this point, I wanted to tell Phoebe all about it and get some kind of gold star for not being a troublemaker. But it was on the train to Beijing, on the very last piece of the whole itinerary, where things went wrong and I lost my chance at the gold star. The train got into Beijing station at 5am and I was ready to disembark. However, the car door didn't open and I noticed that everyone around me was still sleeping. I figured I must be too early so I sat and waited for an attendant to come and open the door. After a few minutes, the train started moving again. This was mildly concerning. I found an attendant for help but ofcourse he didn't speak English. In a few minutes, a gang of attendants were trying to help me, stringing together whatever English they could gather to form a message. I had missed my stop.

One of the attendants called Phoebe and eventually settled on the following plan. The tour group was taking the train to Shan Hai Guan station that day and the train I was on happened to be going that way as well. So it was a simple matter of getting off at that station and waiting for them there. The only thing that sucked was that she would have to pack and carry my large luggage from Beijing for me.

Overall, the train attendants were pretty amused with the situation and used the transit time to practice their English, rummage through my passport, and attempt to figure out where I was from. They seemed to find it incomprehensible that I wasn't Chinese.

In China, when public scenes ensue, curious crowds will begin to gather and I eventually found I had an audience around me. One little girl used her phone to type questions in Chinese which would translate to English. It was probably the kindest encounter I've had in China so far. I gave her a toy turtle I had hanging off the zipper of my backpack.

Once the train got to the designated station, an attendant took me to a waiting room and gestured for me to sit down on a couch. I sat there for 3 hours until I finally saw Phoebe and the gang walk toward me. Salvation was here! I was like the kid who gets lost at the mall and is picked up by their parents from the mall police office. 

I won't be venturing out alone into the boonies of China again anytime soon but I'm still glad I took this weekend trip. Getting to see those grottoes was well worth the ordeal.

Wooden entrance placed in front of the caves

Detail of wooden entrance

 Large Buddha statue

Small Buddhas adorning the wall of the cave

  

Larger buddhas got to have two cave doorways

Buddhas looking down at the tourists

Buddha decorated wall

 Inside Lingyan Temple next to the grotto area

Snarling lion and girl on phone. A random picture I took while wandering the city streets.

The Datong city gate all dressed up for Chinese New Year

 View from my train window at dusk

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My farewell to Pai

The worst part of having too aggressive a travel itinerary is that you always find yourself saying goodbye too soon to people and places you just fell in love with. So this is my farewell to Pai, a tiny little tourist town in Northern Thailand which I saw almost nothing of in my two days here. Had I stayed longer, I could have lived out some amazing life-changing stories not suitable for sharing with posterity. But as it is, I'll just miss the crazy cool people I got to share two days with in this quaint little traveler's Disneyland.

View of Pai's main street at sunset

The view as I walk home

My front porch

What's next on my itinerary? Thanks to some really poor last-minute planning, I get to spend two full days in transit moving from Pai to Beijing. Here are the great times I've got lined up for myself:

• 2/12 - Take the overnight train to Bangkok
• 2/13 - One day of site-seeing in Bangkok
• 2/14 at 2am - Fly out of Thailand
• 2/14 at 9am - Land in Seoul, Korea for a day of site-seeing
• 2/14 at 9pm - Catch my next flight
• 2/14 at 10pm - Land in Beijing and spend the next month in China, the country now famous for burning as much coal as the rest of the world combined.

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Photos from Northern Vietnam

I fell in love with Vietnam for the second time. Here are some pictures from the very photogenic places I saw on this trip, all taken between January 18 - 25.

Trees lining the edge of Hoan Kiem Lake, Hanoi

A doorway at the Temple of Literature, Hanoi

A typical Hanoi street. Note there are no sidewalks. Tourists cross the street at their own risk.

Halong Bay on a cloudy day

A floating village in the bay

Inside the Surprising Cave, one of the many limestone caves here

Rice fields in Sapa. I went during the off season when the fields were mostly filled with mud rather than rice.

Meat vendor smoking a cigarette

Ladies from the nearby Hmong Village

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Being eaten alive in Asia Pacific

Today I'd like to share my more memoriable encounters with parasites and animals on the trip thus far. Meeting these pests have come at some cost to me, whether it was in the form of physical scarring, money, or just plain mental grief.


I'm sure everyone the world over is familiar with mosquitoes. But I never knew there was a species of bloodsucking fly until I got to New Zealand. They're called the sandfly and you'll only get bitten by a female as they need your blood to facilitate egg laying. Below is a picture of my legs as they looked on January 17. The larger pink scars are from mosquitoes. The smaller browner ones are sandflies. The sandfly bites itch more and last much much longer than mosquito bites. Now, in early February, the sandfly bites have transformed into pervasive purple scars.

A medley of mosquito and sandfly bites running up my legs

While I was in Bali, I visited a place called the Monkey Forest. I did not feed any of the monkeys nor did I try to touch one. I sat on a bench to wait for my friend in the bathroom and a monkey came and bit me on my arm for no reason.

At my doctor's recommendation, I started the two-week program to get vaccinated for rabies. It consisted of 4 hospital visits and 7 shots total. The local doctors told me there was no known outbreak in the area and the vaccine was not necessary but my American doctor was much more cautious, reminding me these were wild animals and the local doctors couldn't know for certain these monkeys were clean. Getting bitten without provocation was an especially bad sign. I also got tested for hepititis C, as some websites stated these monkeys are carriers for that disease. I've since spent almost $2,000 USD on treatments.

Don't be fooled by their cutesy faces. One of these assholes decided it would be fun to munch on my arm for dinner.

Lastly, and most recently, I picked up bedbugs at my hostel in Phuket, Thailand. These bedbugs are pitch black and almost look like flat beetles. Because I'm used to seeing the more common red, translucent version, I didn't immediately realize I was in danger here and my luggage sat in the hostel room for several hours. I changed rooms as soon as I realized what they were but now I'm carrying the critters in my luggage and am infecting every new hotel room I stay in.

If I can only give one piece of advice to future travellers, it would be this. Do everything in your power to prevent getting bedbugs in your luggage before you start travelling. Bedbugs are the armageddon of household pests. There are bedbug sprays on the market now which you can use to line your luggage. Some solutions contain the neuro-toxin called DEET, which I personally don't want to use. I'm using one natural alternative called tiger balm as bedbugs apparently don't like the smell of camphor. 

Read More

Being eaten alive in Asia Pacific

Today I'd like to share my more memoriable encounters with parasites and animals on the trip thus far. Meeting these pests have come at some cost to me, whether it was in the form of physical scarring, money, or just plain mental grief.


I'm sure everyone the world over is familiar with mosquitoes. But I never knew there was a species of bloodsucking fly until I got to New Zealand. They're called the sandfly and you'll only get bitten by a female as they need your blood to facilitate egg laying. Below is a picture of my legs as they looked on January 17. The larger pink scars are from mosquitoes. The smaller browner ones are sandflies. The sandfly bites itch more and last much much longer than mosquito bites. Now, in early February, the sandfly bites have transformed into pervasive purple scars.

A medley of mosquito and sandfly bites running up my legs

While I was in Bali, I visited a place called the Monkey Forest. I did not feed any of the monkeys nor did I try to touch one. I sat on a bench to wait for my friend in the bathroom and a monkey came and bit me on my arm for no reason.

At my doctor's recommendation, I started the two-week program to get vaccinated for rabies. It consisted of 4 hospital visits and 7 shots total. The local doctors told me there was no known outbreak in the area and the vaccine was not necessary but my American doctor was much more cautious, reminding me these were wild animals and the local doctors couldn't know for certain these monkeys were clean. Getting bitten without provocation was an especially bad sign. I also got tested for hepititis C, as some websites stated these monkeys are carriers for that disease. I've since spent almost $2,000 USD on treatments.

Don't be fooled by their cutesy faces. One of these assholes decided it would be fun to munch on my arm for dinner.

Lastly, and most recently, I picked up bedbugs at my hostel in Phuket, Thailand. These bedbugs are pitch black and almost look like flat beetles. Because I'm used to seeing the more common red, translucent version, I didn't immediately realize I was in danger here and my luggage sat in the hostel room for several hours. I changed rooms as soon as I realized what they were but now I'm carrying the critters in my luggage and am infecting every new hotel room I stay in.

If I can only give one piece of advice to future travellers, it would be this. Do everything in your power to prevent getting bedbugs in your luggage before you start travelling. Bedbugs are the armageddon of household pests. There are bedbug sprays on the market now which you can use to line your luggage. Some solutions contain the neuro-toxin called DEET, which I personally don't want to use. I'm using one natural alternative called tiger balm as bedbugs apparently don't like the smell of camphor. 

Read More