aventurasdeunatortuga

[aventurasdeunatortuga]

Seoul

Time for my last post of this trip. 😢

I’ve been able to spend the last 2.5 days in Seoul. I finagled my flight around purposefully to have this stopover since I was always gonna have a layover anyway flying to PDX from Xi’an so I thought I might as well use it to my advantage.

I’ve been to Seoul before, again just on a layover, back in 2017 I was there for 8 hours. We got to leave the airport and actually managed to do quite a lot in a short time (even though we almost missed our flight back home). The last 3 years or so though I’ve been really into Korean media and a lot of the TV/movies I watch and music I listen to is Korean so I’ve been itching to come to Seoul. It’s a truly amazing city and I really want to come back and spend a truly decent amount of time here, not just in Seoul but in Korea in general. I honestly could have spent a month just in Seoul and never gotten bored there is so much to do and see.

I got to Seoul on Friday evening and was immediately struck by how strange it was to see a diverse group of people. Not that Seoul is necessarily the most diverse city in the world but just after being in China where non-Chinese people were between 1-10% of the population outside of Beijing/Shanghai it was very refreshing. It was also immediately much easier to communicate and get around and no one was staring or pointing at me. Obviously Korean is the main language here but most signs and announcements are also done in English, Mandarin, and Japanese and the infrastructure is incredibly well organized, probably the best I’ve ever come across to be honest, it made everything much easier. I know 7-8 words total in Korean, I really did make a solid attempt to study it before going and I learned enough to be able to at least read it, since its at least an alphabetic language unlike Chinese, but between that and trying to learn Mandarin I couldn’t retain very much and the grammar and vocabulary was really difficult for me. Its been very simple though to get by with English here, but I hate assuming or relying on another people knowing my language when I am a guest in their country.

Korea is extremely convenient, but China still has everyone beat with the QR codes though…it was weird to go back to using my wallet to pay for things instead of my phone.

At the airport I met someone named Isaac from Kenya who asked for some help finding the metro. He seemed very lost and he had so many bags I have no idea how he was managing all of it. I showed him where to go and helped him buy a ticket and then he wanted to ride the airport train together and that’s when again I got into the dilemma of is this stranger being friendly or creepy. I helped him get his bags on the airport train because there was no way he would have been able to manage his bags by himself and over the course of that he made several friends with other passerby who helped him with directions, etc. and he would introduce me as his friend. Maybe it was a cultural thing and I am uncomfortable 100% of the time in social situations so I don’t know. He had wanted to exchange phone numbers and spend the entire weekend seeing the city together so that’s when I started feeling a weird vibe so I pretended to be asleep on the train.

The train took an hour to get from the airport to downtown and then later on in the train ride he asked how he could travel to the US and if I’d ever consider a green card marriage (I think this was said jokingly but still…that line is a red flag for me…) so at that point I got off the train because it had luckily arrived and lost him in the metro station so that was the end of that. I am really bad at making friends and talking to people but also there are creepy people out there so its always hard to know what to do in social situations. Sigh.

Anyway I made it to my hostel without incident despite at that point it being past 11pm. It’s an electronic hostel so there’s no staff except for a part time housekeeper. All the rooms have electronic locks and you only have access to the door codes during your stay and then they get changed. It was interesting. I was in a shared room with 3 Brazilians who had been there for nearly a month but they left the following morning so the rest of the time I had the giant room to myself.

I went out to the 7/11 downstairs for dinner. One of the many things I love about Korea is how accessible and convenient things tend to be. On the tiny little street I was staying on there were literally several restaurants, convenience stores, coffee shops, etc

that were all open late and very cheap. There’s always a lot of people out and about so it always felt very safe. The convenience stores here are on another level too. They usually will have eating spaces, microwaves, hot water, etc so you can buy an instant meal, cook it, and eat it all in the store. They also sell pre-packaged bagged coffees, teas, juice, etc. and cups of ice so you can make yourself iced coffee and milk tea and things like that and so even though its not the healthiest it is actually pretty high quality food and many are open 24 hours. Its not at all strange to go have your lunch break at 7/11 or go out and have a late night snack at 2am.

On Saturday I was really exhausted so despite me wanting to go out and do a bunch of stuff my body rebelled and I had a massive headache most of the morning. I finally got out and went to a coffeeshop though to revive myself. Seoul has the highest density of cafes in the world. Geographically and population wise there are definitely cities that are way bigger, but Seoul has the highest number of cafes per capita. Literally on a single city block it is not uncommon for there to be at least 3-4 cafes. A lot of them are themed and many have computerized ordering, cheap, high quality food and drinks, and many are also set up as workspaces so it is super convenient.

I was at a cafe for most of the morning and then in the afternoon I went to the Coex Mall, one of several enormous malls in Seoul. I saw the Starfield Library which is a famous library. I had thought it was a bookstore but it was literally a public library inside the mall. There was also an aquarium in the mall but I didn’t go there. I also went and saw the Barbie movie and had snacks at the food court, but was too overwhelmed by then to stay for dinner. I ended up somehow in the Gangam neighborhood which is known for high end shopping and big stores, I went to a couple of themed shops and even did a photobooth at one of them. Photobooths are super popular here and lots of places have them and will have props to dress up with, Irene even joined on a video call while I was in the photobooth so it was hilarious. I ended up buying a lot of stuff too, there is a trend in Korea for clothes with English phrases on them and a lot of them, either intentionally or unintentionally, are very bizarre and hilarious so I got a few of those.

Then I went back to my street where my hostel was and was overwhelmed by all the food options even at 11:30pm I eventually found a place and got a pork, kimchi, rice, and egg bowl that was really delicious but definitely put my spice tolerance to the test and some soju, a very popular Korean liquor that I like. The issue with soju though is that it is very light tasting, it doesn’t taste strong at all but it is in fact very very strong so it can be a bit dangerous.

On Sunday I had a ton that I wanted to do but it was raining. Its been raining a lot in Korea the last few weeks, monsoon season has hit the area badly these last few years. The rain itself wasn’t that bad it was more just drizzly but the streets aren’t really set up for rain so there are puddles everywhere and its really slippery. Also a lot of buildings are built with basements so there has been a lot of significant flood damage. The flooding was so bad a few weeks ago a train actually derailed, a bus overturned, and multiple historical monuments were completely underwater. I didn’t see much flooding myself, but my shoes absolutely got totally destroyed from 11+ hours of walking in the rain.

A lot of the street vendors in addition to selling umbrellas sell socks. I didnt understand why at first until I went through 3 pairs of socks in a day on Sunday because they kept getting soaked through. I had to throw my sneakers away by the end of the day because they were so destroyed and am down to a pair of flip flops that are barely clinging to life.

Despite the dampness, I visited a cafe called Greem 2D Cafe which is an illustration themed cafe. The whole thing from the furniture to the food looks like 2D drawings so it has a really cool kind of cartoony effect. Then later I went to the Insadong neighborhood which was historically an art and market neighborhood, so there were a lot of really cool shops there. Then I went over to one of the historic neighborhoods to look at the old houses and visited a tea house.

Then after that I did a night walking tour that I signed up for on airbnb. I hadn’t been able to do any tours at all since the one I did my first night in Beijing. A lot of international tour places I usually use don’t operate in China and even the ones that did weren’t offering tours to foreigners because there just weren’t any foreigners. There were plenty of Chinese tours but I didn’t know how to sign up for them and I didn’t think it would be very useful to join a tour I couldn’t understand anything in so I didn’t go on any.

Anyway, it was nice to not have to think about logistics and just let someone else who knew what they were doing do all the decision making and navigating for a bit as well as meet other people. I met some people from Nigeria, Singapore, and the UK on this tour. We got to see Changdeokgung Palace, one of I think 5 royal palaces from the Joseon Dynasty in Seoul.

For context, Korea was a monarchy up until I believe 1910. The Joseon Dynasty was the longest ruling dynasty for several centuries and it is considered something of a Golden Age in Korean history. In 1910 Korea was invaded and colonized by Imperial Japan who went to unspeakably cruel and horrific lengths to attempt to eradicate Korean culture and assimilate the population. Many historical artifacts/buildings were completely destroyed and others were turned into places like zoos in order to desecrate and diminish the heritage there. The surviving royal family was exiled to Japan to dilute the blood line. Thousands were killed. The Korean language was outlawed and only through courageous efforts of ordinary people was Korean language and culture preserved.

Japan released control of Korea after World War II but then Korea was used as the grounds of a proxy war between the United States controlling South Korea and the Soviet Union controlling North Korea. The country was split in half, many families were split right down the middle, with siblings, parents, children, and spouses being separated from each other to this day. Despite the peace treaty signed decades ago between the US and the Soviets and the splitting of the country in half; South Korea actually had no say in this peace treaty and wasn’t invited to sign it. Many Koreans consider the Korean War to still be ongoing, and it will only end when Korea is unified and healed back into one country. North Korea continues to struggle with dictatorship and famine; and even after the Korean War South Korea struggled with a dictatorship, government suppression of free speech, and with economic crises clear until the 90’s that led to many people immigrating to the west and lots of children being given up in international adoptions. Its only in the last few recent decades that Korea has begun to grow so astronomically, one of the biggest problems today is the same massive disparity we see in the US between the ultra rich and the poor.

Sorry for the impromptu history lesson that literally no one asked for there. All of this is a long winded way to say that Koreans are fiercely proud of and protective of their cultural heritage, and for good reason, as it has been threatened for so long.

Anyway, the main Joseon palace in Seoul is Gyeongbokgung, which I visited in 2017. The one I visited in this trip, Changdeokgung, was built as a sanctuary specifically for the women of the royal family. We learned a lot about the site from our tour guide Pearl and about some of the dramatic court history amongst the royal family during the Joseon dynasty, how the Japanese burned and destroyed a lot of the palace and turned the remnants into a zoo, and then how in recent years it was restored to look much how it did during the Joseon dynasty.

After visiting the palace we went and visited a local market and got to try 마걸리 (maekgolli, distilled rice wine served in a gold/metal flat pan) and eat 파전 (pajeon, savory Korean pancakes). It was really yummy and it was cool to eat them in the market especially because I would never have known about the place or been capable of ordering from the place on my own. While we walked to the next site the tour guide pointed out some filming spots from Korean dramas I’ve watched before so that was cool to see. Last we visited 조녀사 (Jogyesa) Temple which ia a Buddhist temple. Korea isn’t super strongly religious; it is mainly a Christian country with some traditional beliefs mixed in, but there are definitely some Buddhist temples mixed in with the churches. I always feel uncomfortable visiting a place of worship as a tourist especially if I am not of that religion, I feel like I’m intruding on something or like I’m being disrespectful by just nosing around taking photos, I’ve visited a lot of Buddhist temples before in Thailand but that was because I was invited to do so or because it was designated more as a tourist spot than an active worship site. But people were like actively praying and I didn’t want to intrude so I just looked around the outside of the building which was super pretty and waited for the tour group.

On my way back to the hostel the British lady from the tour, Nicky, invited me to Korean bbq the next day with another tour for lunch. I really wanted to go because I love kbbq and its really hard to go by yourself since the orders are so huge so I decided to accept even though that would mean maybe missing my flight the next day. I also walked down by the stream that runs right through Seoul, it was a very nice oasis to visit my last night, it had been closed due to the rain earlier.

On Monday I gathered all my crap and lugged it in the humid (thankfully no longer rainy) heat to the metro to store my luggage in a locker. The metro is super convenient here but the stations are enormous, I must have walked miles just doing transfers between stations today in my falling apart flip flops. All day today I tried to look for a place to grab a new pair of shoes but I was so pressed for time I didn’t get the chance. I very quickly joined a group for Korean barbecue, the group was also run by airbnb and Nicky from the night before had invited me to join. I stuffed myself with delicious food until I really truly had to get moving and then raced across the city and made it barely for my flight 15 minutes before the gate closed.

One day I will get to visit Seoul Incheon airport without having to sprint across it drenched in sweat, but today was not that day. I really had thought I wouldn’t repeat my mistakes from the last time I was here but I guess I never learn. There’s just something about Seoul that makes it so hard to leave.

Anyway, this has been a super long post in a series of super long posts. I’m sad this trip is ending. I really want to spend more time in Korea without feeling so rushed and there is so much more to see in China. Guess that just means I’ll have to come back.

I’m currently on a long long flight back to the US, and I’m missing Asia already.

Until next time,

🐢

#travel #solo travel #asia #korea #south korea #seoul

[aventurasdeunatortuga]

Xi’an

It’s already time for my last post from China for this trip.

I’ve been in Xi’an the last few days, in the province of Shaanxi in central China. Xi’an is an enormous city, nowhere near the size of Beijing or Shanghai but definitely a huge city. It is very very hot and dry here. For whatever reason the UV rays are also extremely intense here, every day the weather app has had a warning for extreme UV rays. It really feels like the sun is like a laser whenever you stand directly in it. Definitely missing the coolness of Lijiang now.

Xi’an is hot, fast paced, and very crowded. Everyone is constantly on the move and there are always way more people or vehicles than you ever would have thought possible in any given space. Even to cross the street you had to go into an enormous system of underground tunnels to avoid the traffic in the road, because the traffic never stops.

I think I’ve really been coming to grips with the fact that lack of personal space is a cultural thing here. People have no qualms about pushing, shoving, cutting in line, elbowing, etc. It’s nothing personal, it’s just how things are done here. You really have to stand firm and be assertive when you move or you’re never gonna get anywhere.

The hotel I’m at is a nice oasis from all of this. It’s very serene and my room has Japanese style tatami mats with all the furniture directly on the floor and a Japanese smart toilet which is super fancy. I spent Monday evening and most of Tuesday in my room because traveling at the end of a long trip is exhausting, especially in the heat, and I’ve still got about a week to go. The staff at my hotel is really nice and they even helped me order delivery food Monday night because I wasn’t up to going out to look for something to eat.

On Tuesday evening I ventured out a bit in the evening after it had cooled off. I’ve noticed in general in China things tend to stay open pretty late and the liveliest time of day is between 7pm-11pm, the streets will be very busy and lots will be going on. Even families and young kids will be out and about. I walked by a giant shopping mall and the bell tower and drum tower and ended up on the street referred to here as “Muslim Street”. Xi’an was for a long time a stopover on the Silk Road and there is a large population of Chinese Muslims in Xi’an which in turn has influenced a lot of their typical dishes. There is a large concentration of restaurants run by Chinese Muslims on this street and it has become a very popular walking street and a place for street food. I knew about this street but didn’t realize I had stumbled upon it on Tuesday and was blown away by the sheer size of the crowds there. Almost equivalent to the density of the crowds in Fenghuang but the street itself was enormous and yet still very crowded. I went in a few shops and noticed that every time I went in a shop I was surreptitiously followed the entire time by an employee who was pretending not to be following me around. This happened several times in several different shops so I don’t know if it was because they thought I was stealing or because as the only foreigner they thought I wouldn’t understand what to do and would have questions but it was a weird experience.

I ate a gigantic spiral cut potato on a stick and pomegranate juice and then hid in the dairy aisle of the 7/11 to escape the heat and humidity.

On Wednesday I geared up to go see the Terracotta Warriors. These were made for the Emperor Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China, upon his death in 209 BCE. He believed that if he constructed terracotta versions of his army and horses to keep in his mausoleum he could bring them with him to protect him after death. They were only recently uncovered in the 70s and are still in the process of being excavated because there are so many thousands of them.

I took a shuttle bus from Xi’an about 86 kilometers outside the city to the archeological site. The site sells 3,000 tickets per hour, so you can imagine how crowded it gets. The site is organized into 3 areas called pits. Pit 1 is the largest area. The crowd there was one of the largest I have ever experienced. I’ve only been afraid of being trampled once before, at a music festival in Guanajuato, Mexico. This crowd felt similar to that. I couldn’t control where my body was going, the crowd just kind of pushed me wherever I ended up going. It was all I could do to stay on my feet, let alone see anything. I ended up going out the emergency exit in a panic and then sat on the curb for about 40 minutes to recover. Then I pulled myself together and went to the smaller pits to try and see some things. It did somehow get slightly less crowded throughout the day, but it was still very packed. I managed to see all three pits and even went back to the first one again because I really did want to see everything.

It was very complicated to get back to Xi’an afterwards and so hot. I couldn’t figure out where the shuttle bus was so I had to take public transportation which took about 2.5 hours total to get back to town. Long story short, I was glad to see the terracotta warriors but my goodness was it exhausting.

I found a Starbucks inside a giant mall back in Xi’an to try and recuperate once I got back to town before walking back to my hotel. One thing I love about Asia is the malls. They are generally enormous and have just about everything you can possibly think of, like a small city, but its all air conditioned. I was at the mall for a while and was going to look for something to eat but I was so exhausted and didn’t have the brainpower to figure out how to look for somewhere to eat and translate the menu and order in Chinese; so I went to the McDonald’s purely because they have computerized ordering systems in English where you just click on what you want and scan a QR code to pay and you don’t have to talk to anyone.

Thursday was my last full day in China. I am definitely noticing how exhausted I am. I stayed in bed for most of the morning and ventured out briefly to visit a park at Wild Goose Pagoda and the Xi’an Museum. It ended up being way too hot and crowded and the museum itself was kind of underwhelming, I’m not much of a museum person to begin with and since I couldn’t read any of the signs and don’t know much about the local history it didn’t mean much to me although I’m sure if I knew more it would be really interesting.

I sat on the ground in the museum lobby for 45 minutes to recover from the heat and crowds and went back to my hotel until the evening. I wanted to end my time in China on a positive note despite how cranky I’ve been lately, I had to tried to book a walking tour but couldn’t because I was only one person and there weren’t any other foreigners signing up for tours. I eventually found a place that was offering dinner and a show at a hotel nearby and signed up for it just to get out a bit.

I didn’t understand anything that was going on in the show but it was showing the life of a famous Empress of the Tang Dynasty that was based in Xi’an and had a lot of traditional dancing and music. Xi’an is well known for its dumplings and I got to try a sampler of a dozen different kinds of dumplings which were really good. I ended up being seated next to the only other foreigner, a guy named Stefano from Italy who had just arrived in China that day. He was equally as confused about everything as I was but it was nice to have someone to talk to. He said that apparently this dinner show thing used to only offer shows for foreigners, then they opened it up for Chinese residents as well and it was about 40% foreigners and 60% Chinese people. Post-covid it is now less than 1% foreigners who attend tourist geared things.

Afterwards since it was cooler out I went and saw the old city wall and walked around in the park for a while, then I went back to Muslim street and got some 肉加缪 (roujiamou) a lamb based Chinese version of a hamburger that is a famous street food in Xi’an. I walked back to my hotel and made it just before a huge lightning storm that caused a power outage. It was literally like lightning multiple times a minute for over an hour, it was wild. I ate my food in the dark and reflected on this wild trip.

China has been fascinating. Traveling China mostly alone post-covid has been another level of travel. It has been at once very humbling and very empowering. While it was very difficult to figure out how things worked and to communicate, China is incredibly safe, well organized, and people are incredibly kind. I never once felt in danger during this trip which says a lot. It’s been a real shock feeling like such an outsider all the time for the last month. I have such a deep newfound respect for anyone who immigrates somewhere completely different from their home country, without knowing anyone and without knowing the language or culture. Being on vacation here has been hard enough as an outsider even with all the privilege I have as a white English speaking American.

Going several days at a time not talking to anyone while simultaneously being constantly surrounded by crowds and being stared and pointed at everywhere I go has been such a strange experience, but very eye opening. I’m glad to have had this experience and even though this entire trip was traveling on “hard mode” I feel sad to be leaving right when I feel like I’m starting to figure things out. China has been unlike anywhere else I’ve been before and despite being here a month I’ve barely scratched the surface. I’ll definitely be back.

I’m doing a quick 2.5 day stop in Seoul before heading home, will update again before leaving.

Until then,

#travel #solo travel #asia #china #xi’an #terracotta warriors

[aventurasdeunatortuga]

Lijiang Part 2

Alright I think with this post I am pretty much caught up.

After coming back from Tiger Leaping Gorge on Friday I made my way back to Lijiang where I’ve been for the last 3 days. Friday evening was nice and quiet. I stayed in my hotel. Every night all the staff in the hotel have homemade dinner together and invite any guests that want to join them which is really cool, and it happened to me one of the staff’s birthday. I had just finished eating dinner and they went “好的！ 蛋糕！” ok, cake! And at the door was a cake delivery of two giant cakes. I was so surprised, but given that I can’t understand the majority of what people’s conversations are I guess it shouldn’t be that surprising. We celebrated the staff member’s birthday which was super cute.

On Saturday I had a rest day. In the afternoon I went over to Black Dragon Pool Park, one of the bigger city parks here. I walked around for a while and got noodles and bubble tea from a food stand and sat by the pond while catching up on writing and listening to a busker play. It was very nice.

On Sunday I ventured out of town to the nearby mountain, Jade Dragon Snow Mountain. Weirdly I was able to take the regular city bus there even though it was like 30 km outside of town. It was very seamless once I found the right bus.

As generally tends to happen on the tail end of long trips I’ve been pretty tired the last few days so I wasn’t really up to pushing myself to leave really early in the morning to go visit the mountain or spend the whole day doing things. But as a result when I got there it was very crowded and due to how big the crowds were I couldn’t see much before closing time, which, honestly I’m fine with.

Jade Dragon Snow Mountain’s peak has significant elevation, I’m not sure what the elevation actually was or what it was at the base of the mountain but people were extremely prepared for it. I’d never seen this before, but everyone had small individual canned oxygen tanks they just took some breaths from every now and again to avoid altitude sickness. It was pretty cool and helped a lot with the altitude. Definitely could’ve used that for the 13,000+ ft elevation in Peru.

I had arrived too late in the day to visit the peak of the mountain, but I had some lunch at the base and saw a cultural performance which was pretty cool. They had over 100 performers from a variety of different ethnic groups in Yunnan and Tibet and they performed traditional dances. The stage was really cool set up against the mountains and the performance even had horses at one point.

I don’t know if this is a cultural thing or just this particular crowd of tourists thing or a me being cranky and sick of people thing but I got pretty annoyed at the people in the audience. People were just shoving and pushing left and right with very little regard for or awareness of personal space, talking loudly on the phone all throughout, and just getting up in the middle and walking around in front of the stage. So between all that it was kind of hard to see everything but it was still pretty cool. I’ve noticed a lot of shoving and pushing and lack of personal space especially while waiting in lines here and I feel like its just normal here and I just need to get used to it.

Anyway after that I got on a bus to go visit a really cool lake at the base of the mountain called Blue Moon Bay. The water was so turquoise and clear it was very otherworldly. There were also these natural pools that reminded me a lot of the travertines in Pamukkale, Turkey. There were literally dozens of people taking their wedding photos and there were a lot of other people so it was pretty crowded but it was still cool to see.

The sun was really really bright up by the mountain due to the elevation. Here in China people are very very conscientious about sun protection, but instead of using sunscreen they use UV protectant clothing. Usually this involves a long jacket that zips up to cover your nose and mouth, arm coverings, gloves, a large brimmed hat, sunglasses and an umbrella. Some people even have full face masks (forehead to chin) with eye holes. This is rooted in colorism unfortunately as having paper white skin is seen as highly regarded here, people go to great lengths to avoid any amount of sun exposure and use skin whitening creams in addition to this.

Since I’d gotten sunburned at least 3 times already this trip I finally caved and got a UV jacket to go to the mountain and it actually worked really well. The only part of me that got burned was my nose and chin because I didn’t zip it up all the way. When I went to buy it it was a weird interaction at the shop. It was supposed to be about 80 yuan, the old man at the shop I guess recognized me or something? I’d been in the shop a couple of times already and talked a little bit to him before. He only charged me 50 yuan for the jacket and a bottle of water, but then after I paid him digitally he got all worked up and started waving his hands all over the place. Then he took 40 yuan from the register and put it in my hand and shooed me away, so he essentially gave me the jacket for free. I was so confused and hope I didn’t misunderstand what was happening but I think he was just being really nice.

So anyway, shout out to that old man for helping me avoid getting burned yet again.

Anyway, sorry for the tangent, the sun was super super bright and intense at the mountain so it was a weird combination of being cold and hot at the same time. I started making my way back to town which involved a truly enormous claustrophobic line to get on the bus back down the mountain and then another to get back to town.

Back in town I wandered around the ancient town one more time and bought some dried tea to take home. It was a huge production involving everyone in the shop and a little kid running to get his mom who spoke English. The lady in the shop ended up giving me a rose cake for free which was nice. Yunnan specializes in a lot of foods one of which is flower cakes, little warm cakes with a flower infused filling.

I walked around the snack market which had a lot of interesting local foods. I tried a “milk fan” which is essentially fried milk on a stick. They take the milk and separate it out through a very complex process until it is semi-solid and then fry it. It was very interesting, it tasted like yoghurt or cheese but was chewy and crunchy.

Back at my hotel the owner had made homemade mushroom soup for dinner, which Yunnan also specializes in. It was very yummy. I was also very surprised because there was a French person staying at my hotel and the owner of the hotel asked me to go translate what he wanted to say to the French person and I was able to translate a whole interaction. My Chinese is so so so basic I was very surprised I was able to sort of do that.

At dinner we were able to actually hold somewhat of a conversation this time which was nice. I really do want to get to know and talk to people here but the language barrier has been so intense its been hard to have anything more than very basic communications.

One thing that I am starting to admire about China is how fiercely independent and for lack of a better word, self-sufficient, it is. I feel like a lot of the rest of the world has been impacted a lot by globalization and homogenization. You can go almost anywhere in the world and hear the same popular music playing, see the same exact brands of shops, and see the same 5 chain restaurants and use the same apps and speak English and be understood. But that is absolutely not the case in China. There are a few global brands like KFC and Starbucks that have managed to establish themselves here but it is rare. Other than that, China does absolutely everything on its own terms and you really can’t get around just relying on English. China does just about everything without relying on outside influences and in many cases are way ahead of the curve compared to the rest of the world. China forces you to make a genuine effort to engage in their culture rather than adapting itself to suit foreigners, which I think is kind of cool and I haven’t seen that really anywhere else I’ve traveled.

There is of course a flip side to that. A big part of the reason China has their own version of everything is partially to avoid undue influence from the west and partly because the Chinese government has a very specific narrative it wants to push and so anything alternative to that is simply not allowed. There is no access to a lot of information online, media is heavily censored, and it is very very difficult for foreigners to get a visa to enter China. This results in a lot of people truly just not being aware of some alternative perspectives and ways of thinking and its hard for intercultural exchange to happen. Not saying it doesn’t happen, there are lots of students and teachers who go abroad or come from abroad and plenty of intergenerational immigrant families. But I can definitely see how one could go their whole life here without being exposed to a lot of people who are different from them and then you get situations of discrimination, racism, and even ethnic cleansing like what is happening in Xinjiang and no one talks about it or is aware of it. Protesting is illegal here.

Not saying the US is any better, we have a lot of problems as well and certainly don’t have clean hands either. There is a lot of censorship and discrimination and racism in the US as well. I don’t know where I’m going with this other than there is a lot of rhetoric in both the US and China that tends to demonize the other country and it sounds naïve but when you get down to it and are able to have an actual conversation with someone and have that person to person cultural exchange, we have a lot in common. The US and China both have a lot of very serious issues but its also not fair to conflate people with their governments, especially when they as individuals can do very little to impact what their government does. I guess it just reiterates for me how important education and cultural exchange are.

Anyway I don’t know where I was going with any of that word vomit, but I am currently en route to my final stop in China (but not of this trip): Xi’an. Will try to update before I leave in about 3 days.

#lijiang #yunnan #china #travel #solo travel #asia #blue moon bay #jade dragon snow mountain #black dragon pool park

[aventurasdeunatortuga]

Tiger Leaping Gorge

Okay I am almost caught up from the last week. Long post ahead but lets face it all my posts are long. Post 3 of 3.

So the last three days were spent doing something that was either very adventuresome or very stupid. Probably mostly stupid. Hiking Tiger Leaping Gorge alone without a guide.

Tiger Leaping Gorge is one of the deepest gorges in the world. It is located in Tibet, about 2 hours from Lijiang. It is a very popular destination in China. Irene hiked it when she studied abroad in China back in 2014, so that’s how I found out about it. It’s called Tiger Leaping Gorge because there is a legend about a hunter who was pursuing a tiger in this gorge and at a narrow point in the gorge with rushing river rapids the tiger escaped by leaping across the gorge.

I was initially planning to go with a group. But since its the off season and since there are almost zero foreigners traveling in China right now there weren’t any tours offered other than private tours, which would have cost me nearly $1,000. So I did a lot of research, mainly using articles from 2019 before the border closed, and thought I could manage it on my own. Which was my first stupid or adventurous decision.

The trek itself is about 20 miles total and generally takes between 2-3 days. There are several inns along the way to stop at over the night. I used a map from 2019 to plan my way and it looked doable.

I took a bus from Lijiang, and arrived at the gorge without a hitch. However, despite the family sitting next to me on the bus translating everything the driver was saying with their phones and trying to help me, I got off the bus at the wrong stop. I got off at the tourist viewpoint which is at the most narrow, lowest part of the canyon directly next to the rushing rapids, where the tiger allegedly made its escape. You have to hike down a ways from the road to get down to the river. Not gonna lie it was truly impressive, the river was absolutely ferocious. I’d never seen rapids like that before. But then I realized that the place I was supposed to start the hike was actually 3 miles in the other direction.

So I hiked back up to the road and tried to figure out what to do. There were tourist buses but they were all for tour groups making stops at the viewpoint, I couldn’t really ask them for a ride. So I thought, its 3 miles, I can handle that. That was the next stupid decision.

One of the lessons I learn the hard way over and over again is “no, actually, you can’t walk that”.

So I walked for about an hour. The road was pretty precarious. It was a highway with a cliff on one side and a dropoff into the canyon on the other side. I never felt like I was in danger, but it was certainly a sight to see. At one point I walked by a policeman and I thought he was going to tell me I couldn’t walk there but he just looked the other way. I met a few people selling things along the side of the road and they all laughed and laughed as I walked by, which, understandable.

After about an hour I still had a mile to go. A car pulled over and the guy told me he could give me a ride the rest of the way, I accepted, also not the smartest choice but it worked out fine. This makes the third time I’ve hitchhiked; I did it before in Mexico and Turkey as well.

He brought me to the ticket office of the park, which I had thought was the entrance to the hike. It turns out in a brilliant stroke of stupidity that the place where the car had picked me up was in fact the entrance to the hike and I hadn’t realized it. There was an enormous sign and an arrow literally painted onto the cliff that I hadn’t noticed. I only realized when I asked at the ticket office where the entrance of the hike was.

So I turned around and walked back the exact way I had come for about 45 minutes along the highway. At one point some kids chased after me going “hello! hello!”.

After about 3 hours total, I finally made it to the entrance of the hike. The map said it would take me about 5 hours to hike 12 kilometers. Which in hindsight was laughable. It took closer to 7 hours. At that point it was 1pm and it was going to get dark at 8pm. I started walking and it was gorgeous but man it was difficult. It was all uphill. I saw absolutely no one, local or hiker, for about 3.5 hours. It was all farms and mountains. It was a bit unnerving being the only person there, but at least I was sure I was going the right way. There were red arrows painted on the ground every few feet which was reassuring.

After a while, I was at the point where I had calculated that I had 25,000 steps to take still and was counting all of my steps individually because I was so tired. Then I saw a lady waving at me. She asked if I wanted to ride a horse part of the way, in my obvious exhaustion I agreed but in hindsight I should have been more prepared and asked for more details about what this would entail. It was 100% my fault. I spent about 40 minutes on the horse going up the steepest part of the trail called the 28 Bends, which, self-explanatory name. The trail was very difficult, I felt bad being on the horse while the lady was walking behind me, I had thought she would be on a horse as well. She also insisted on carrying my backpack even though I kept saying I could carry it.

We made it up, and then she informed me that I was halfway there. When we had been negotiating a price earlier I had thought she had said 40 yuan, I had 200 yuan in cash so I had agreed. Everyone in China also uses a digital payment system called Alipay and another called Weixin Pay. I have Alipay because for Weixin Pay I couldn’t figure out how to set it up without a Chinese bank account. So we’re at the top of this mountain and this lady informs me that I had misunderstood and the price was actually 400, not 40 yuan. Which, I mean, considering the difficulty of the trail was a fair price but I hadn’t expected it. I showed her my cash and asked if I could pay her digitally, she said yes. She only had weixin pay though, and alipay and weixin pay don’t work together. So we were stuck. I didnt have any way to pay her. We sat there for probably 45 minutes trying to figure out what to do. It was 100% my fault for not understanding and not being more prepared. I hadn’t come across this issue the whole time I had been in China, everyone I’d met before accepted Alipay and I’d never had anything cost more than 200 yuan cash. I tried everything, even tried setting up a weixin pay account but i couldn’t do it without a chinese bank account. Then she told me the price had increased to 600 yuan. I was like I’m not sure what to do here. I called Irene desperately and somehow miraculously had service and she was miraculously able to send the lady money from 3,000km away. I will be forever grateful for friends like her saving my skin.

The lady then told me to be careful and rode away. It was 5:30pm then somehow, and there was still 2 hours left until the inn I was staying at. I also had had to use the bathroom for about 2 hours at that point and between the precarious horse ride up the steep mountain and the fiasco with the lady, hadn’t had a chance. Also 0/10 would not recommend riding a horse while having to pee. I was literally on the edge of a cliff with not even a path into the bushes, but there was at least not a single person around. I hid behind a tree and did what I had to do way too uncomfortably close to the edge of the cliff, thinking “well its already been a wild day, this may as well happen”.

Then I calculated that there were 13,300 steps left until my hotel. I didnt see a single person that entire time. My brain wasn’t capable of doing anything at that point other than putting one foot in front of the other and counting. Finally, in the pouring rain just before dark I made it 7 hours and 13.5 miles total after starting the hike, to my hotel for the night. I have done more physically difficult things in my life, but never for such an extended amount of time and never completely alone and with such uncertainty. The whole way I was thinking through all the decisions I had made today and regretting every single one of them. The views were spectacular though.

I made it to my room completely out of cash at that point and collapsed on the bed. I made it to dinner at the hotel and then came across the same exact issue I had encountered earlier with money. No one accepted Alipay connected to international credit cards, only alipay connected to Chinese credit cards, weixin pay or cash. After being in China for 3 weeks I had never encountered this problem before, everyone accepted Alipay and I had very very rarely had to use cash, people prefer not to use cash most times. So I couldn’t pay for my meal. Irene saved me again, and ended up doing so three more times over the course of this trek. I have learned yet another lesson the hard way, always bring more than enough cash and have a payment backup plan, especially in rural areas, and I am very grateful to have a friend like her to save me from my own stupidity.

I spent the evening trying to figure out a way to set up weixin pay and found an extremely complex way to do it which involved an hour long phone call with my parents and then at the end of the whole process was informed it would take 3 business days to verify my identity and activate my account, which was useless. I could only laugh at the absurdity of the situation and go to sleep.

The next day I felt more at ease because there were other hikers. Apparently what people do nowadays which is way smarter, is to take a car from the beginning of the trail to the first hotel because there is apparently a back road. They stay at the hotel for the night, send a car with their bags ahead to the end of the trail through the back roads and along the highway, then they walk the second leg of the trail with no bags. This would have been the ideal way to do it, but alas, here I was without money and with my heavy bag already at the top of the mountain. Oh well. Today was only a 10k hike to the end of the trail, and there were other hikers which made it a lot less unnerving.

I even met two foreigners, I hadn’t met any foreigners in quite a while. They were teachers in Shanghai, one from New York and the other from London. They’d been living in China since 2018. They were very surprised I was traveling around and wasn’t living in China, they said China really isn’t set up for people to just travel around. Its very difficult if you don’t have a Chinese bank account or speak Chinese, and theres almost no up to date information out there since the border reopened in January 2023. I was like…yup..tell me about it….

They talked about what it was like to go through covid in Shanghai, which other than Wuhan, was the most heavily impacted place in China. They had the strictest lockdown in the world. They literally could not leave their apartments for any reason for a total of 86 days straight. Some people were even literally sealed inside their apartments. They had to rely on food rations from the government being delivered and they weren’t always consistent. Lockdown was rough for everyone but this was another level.

Anyway, I got to talk to them for a while but then they moved along. Then I met another guy who was hiking alone. He spoke to me enthusiastically in Chinese and didn’t seem to be impeded by the fact that I could not understand anything he was saying. I think what I gathered after a while was that he thought since we were both hiking alone we should take photos of each other. He had me take photos of him and then he took photos of me, insisting that I hold his hiking poles. He did this a few times in increasingly precarious photo locations and then I was like ok this has gone too far. We kept walking for a while, almost an hour, and I was kind of ready for him to stop talking to me. I started walking really really slow to try and get him to go ahead but he kept stopping and waiting for me and telling me to hurry up. I can never tell when people are being friendly or being creepy. I always feel uncomfortable with people talking to me so its hard to trust my gut. There was also the language barrier and cultural differences to consider. I think he thought he was being friendly and looking out for me as women traveling and hiking alone is an oddity, not to mention being a foreigner.

After over an hour I think he finally got the hint so he said ‘bye bye’ and went ahead. I met one more group of hikers along the way, a group of 4 friends who greeted me by going “Hello! Fuck! Hi!” which was pretty funny actually. Lots of people yell hello at me on the street when I go by which I think they find funny because they always laugh afterwards and I never know how to respond. This was a new one though. This group talked to me for a little bit and then went ahead.

The path was extremely precarious at this point, but the views were absolutely breathtaking. It was an incredible hike. Finally, after 6 hours because of how slow I walk, I made it to the hotel at the end of the trail. 2 days, 20+ miles, 12+ hours of hiking, and many stupid decisions later I had made it one way or another. There were many times throughout I thought that I truly couldn’t do this and I should give up, but giving up wasn’t really an option, I had to push myself to keep going, and I eventually one way or another made it.

The only room the hotel had was an 8 bed dorm which I shared with a group of bikers who were thoroughly confused by me but were very polite and respectful. They all went out of the room and talked animatedly amongst themselves for a while after I went in the room and looked things up on a translator. I only understood 哪国人 (foreigner) 一个人 (alone) 为什么(why) and 中文 (Chinese). Then they asked me using the translator if I spoke Chinese, where I was from, and after much furious whispering, ‘how do you communicate with people here’. I just laughed and said “不知道，我用我的手机。” I don’t know. I use my phone. They thought everything about me was quite befuddling.

The next day the bikers checked in on me to make sure I knew how to get to my next stop, which was nice of them. I was able to get a bus directly from the hotel back to Lijiang, it ended up taking the entire day because there was only one bus but it was pretty seamless. I very much enjoyed the scenery of the wilderness but am very glad to be back in town where there are atms and people accept my bank card and I more or less know how to get around.

There were a lot of poor decisions made the last few days, but thanks to the kindness of friends and strangers it all worked out. I would do things differently knowing what I know now, but I am glad I did this in the end. It was an amazing experience.

I’ll be back in Lijiang for the next few days, before heading to my next stop. I’m writing this post now in a beautiful park by a lake in Lijiang while eating spicy noodles. I’ll try to update again before I leave to avoid a backlog again.

#china #travel #solo travel #asia #yunnan #tiger leaping gorge #trekking #travel mishaps

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Lijiang Part 1

I’m catching up on the last week so bear with me. Post 2 of 3.

On Monday I arrived in Lijiang. Lijiang is in the province of Yunnan in southwest China, very close to the Himalayas and sections of which include Tibet.

The climate here is such a relief after the heat and humidity of my last few stops. It is consistently 70 degrees and cloudy, occasional rain, and no humidity. It is amazing. The winters here are very intense but the summer weather here is some of the best in China.

Culturally, Yunnan is very different from other areas of China. China has hundreds of different ethnic groups, the Han group is the most culturally dominant and has historically tried to make all of China more culturally homogeneous, but more remote areas have managed to maintain their own culture. The local ethnic group here is called the Naxi.

I learned that the Naxi are the only living culture to still use a hieroglyphic language! There are only 10 fluent readers of this language left, but most of the city signs here in Lijiang are written in Mandarin, English, and Naxi hieroglyphs which is pretty cool. It’s different from Mandarin which is one of the very few logographic languages currently in use, meaning instead of an alphabet they use symbols to represent sounds or ideas. The symbols can be related to the idea but usually aren’t. Naxi uses picture hieroglyphs to represent ideas and the pictures directly correlate to the idea. So it’s similar but also very different. The linguistic nerd in me found that very fascinating.

I spent Monday and Tuesday getting acclimated to Lijiang. The culture in Yunnan is extremely informal and laid back. When I got to my hotel it was very interesting, the owner wasn’t there and there was a group of teenagers and twenty somethings who I guess worked at the hotel or maybe are just friends with the owner. Still unclear about that. But no one had any idea I was coming or spoke English. So we communicated via text messages and they told me to join them for lunch. Which involved a lot of poorly translated texts back and forth and awkward giggling from the teenagers. That lasted for a little over an hour. Then they showed me to my room, which was decorated 100% covered in cutesy stickers and fluffy pink things and had rainbow mood lighting but no soap, towels, or toilet paper. I asked if I should pay for the room and they were like ‘oh you can do that later’ i also asked if i needed a key and they were like no its fine. Then they went to go hunt wild mushrooms and told me to come back for dinner to eat the mushrooms, and through a bad translation on google translate came out as ‘come to dinner there will be lots of wild bacteria’. They gave me several cartons of milk which Yunnan is famous for along with mushrooms and then went on their way.

We did in fact have dinner later and enjoyed wild mushrooms and other very very spicy homemade Naxi dishes which Yunnan is famous for. We all sat in a crowded circle around a tiny table and it was all very homey and welcoming despite us not really being able to talk to each other.

The next day I explored Lijiang Ancient Town. It’s been around since the 1300s and was a hub of trade along the Silk Road. Nowadays it is very touristy and crowded, but nothing compared to Fenghuang. At least it was rainy and cool outside. The Ancient Town was very beautiful and I got lost exploring it for several hours.

I had one mishap where I tried to go to a museum. Most of the information available online that I can find about China is from 2019 or earlier, so when the border closed, so a lot of it is now outdated. I took a Didi (Chinese version of uber) to the museum but then realized it was way farther outside of town than I had thought. After I got dropped off I realized that the museum while open was abandoned and overgrown with wildlife, there wasn’t anyone around and there was just cornfields for miles. There was an enthusiastic dog that followed me around the whole time which was comforting. I somehow managed to get a Didi back to town thankfully, I was worried I wouldn’t be able to get one and my phone signal was pretty bad.

I ended the day by eating Lijiang’s famous rice noodles in the Ancient Town , which involves getting a truly enormous bowl of broth, cold rice noodles in a separate bowl, and a tray of dozens of ingredients. You then add things to the broth. Kind of like hot pot. It was very good but very huge. The rain really picked up on my walk back so I hid out in what can only loosely be called a bookstore. They had lots of books but they were all on shelves at the top of the wall where no one could reach them and seemed like they were just there for show. I accidentally ordered a mocha and drank it while the rain poured down. It was nice but I never drink coffee so it was definitely hard to sleep that night.

Tiger Leaping Gorge was my next stop for the next few days, this post is already too long so I’ll add that wild ride to a separate post. I was there for 3 days and now am back in Lijiang for 3 more days until I leave for my next stop.

#travel #solo travel #asia #china #yunnan #lijiang #naxi

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Zhijiang

Well so I’m a bit behind on things and there have been some minor mishaps, so I’ll update you on the last week over the course of three posts. Here’s part 1.

On Sunday I was supposed to go from Fenghuang to Lijiang, which involved taking a bus to the train station, taking a train two towns over, and getting a cab to the airport to catch my flight. Needless to say that did not happen.

I underestimated how long the bus ride to the train station was and got on the wrong bus initially which made it all take longer. I got to the train station 1 minute before my train was meant to leave and missed it. At that point my flight was going to leave in 2 hours and I was 90 minutes away by car. I tried to get a cab but no one was willing to take me that far.

I sat on a bench for a while in defeat and then picked myself up and dusted myself off to figure things out. I went to the ticket office at the train station to try to get a new train ticket, the train station employee was super helpful and even though he had no English and my Chinese is rudimentary at best he didn’t give up and kept on trying to help me until we figured out a solution. He found me a train ticket to another destination that wasn’t as close to the airport but the train was leaving immediately and maybe I could figure out a cab from there. I was very grateful for him, I don’t blame people for taking one look at me and saying sorry I can’t help because it really isn’t fair of me to expect them to help me when I don’t speak their language and communicating with mobile translators is very difficult and clunky and time consuming. So I’m very grateful to people who take the time and have the patience to help silly old me.

I made it on the train, and got to the neighboring town of Huaihua. Which was still one town away from where the airport was. At that point my flight was in 90 minutes and I was about an hour away from the airport in optimal conditions. The train station was enormous and when I told the cab driver I was going to the airport he laughed and laughed.

That’s when the real fun started.

He drove me for a couple of minutes, when I asked him how much it would be to go to the airport, and he did finger guns which is definitely not a unit of currency. Then he pulled over on the side of the road and asked which airport I was going to.

I kept repeating again and again which airport I was going to and showing him on the map and showing him the address in Chinese but he was for whatever reason just not understanding at all. Maybe I was pronouncing it wrong or had the wrong Chinese characters written down or I don’t know. Chinese tones always get me, there are 5 different ways to pronounce every vowel sound which completely changes the meaning of the word (shí means is, shì means 10, etc. so pronouncing something wrong totally changes your meaning). We were pulled over for nearly 10 minutes until we figured it out.

Then he drove for about 5 more minutes and decided it was time for a lunch break. So he pulled over and went in a restaurant and ordered food. I mean, he did ask me to join and if I wanted anything. I think I made him mad with my frantic 不要不要！我要去在机场现在！(No! No! I want to go to the airport now!) so he got his order to go and drove off. My flight was at this point leaving in 45 minutes and we were 35 minutes away.

Then we saw the construction workers. The freeway was closed for construction. So we turned around and took a detour. The driver just kept on asking me again and again “为什么你不回说汉语吗” (why don’t you speak Chinese), which I mean, fair question.

We made it to the airport 8 minutes after my flight had left, which, given all the mitigating factors, was actually very impressive.

So there I was in this tiny airport in the town of Zhijiang, which I had never heard of before today. I was the only person in the airport besides the employees and they told me there were no more flights today and asked what my plans were. There was literally nothing around for miles besides cornfields.

So I just started crying and saying I don’t know.

The Zhijiang airport staff are actual angels and they huddled together and whispered amongst themselves for a solid ten minutes and then told me to come with them. It took 4 staff members, many phone calls, and nearly an hour of going back and forth with phone translators but they were able to figure out how to get me on a flight the next day, a hotel for the night, and a ride to and from the hotel to the airport. I am so so grateful to them, they definitely could have just left me there to figure it out myself. They didn’t even work for the airline, they were just airport staff.

So I got to the hotel in downtown Zhijiang. It goes to show just how huge of a country China is that Zhijiang is considered a very small town no one really knows about and yet it was definitely at least the size of Portland if not bigger. The airport staff had managed to score me a room at one of the nicest hotels in town for about $35. It was definitely one of the fanciest hotels I have ever stayed in. Complete with automatic curtains, one of the biggest tvs I have ever seen, and a Japanese heated smart toilet. It was also overlooking an enormous river and waterfront promenade type area.

I enjoyed the hotel for a while, watched TV, and ate convenience store snacks. Then in the evening the waterfront area started coming to life so I went out to explore. The river was so wide and calm, I’d never seen such a still, clear river before. There were people swimming back and forth across it. I dipped my feet in for a while and people watched. When the sun went down the city lit up. Like literally.

Apparently in Zhijiang every night there is a coordinated light show all along the entire riverfront, all the buildings synchronize their lights to light up along with it accompanied by classical music. It lasts for about 4 hours and even included a fog machine at one point. The path and the stairs and the bridge were all lit up in rainbow lights while people took their evening walks. Kids were swimming in the river and playing with bubbles and old ladies were doing zumba and tai chi. It was very idyllic and beautiful. The waterfront area itself reminded me so much of Portland with the river and the bridges but it was so much livelier and full of life. It was really cool.

The next morning I made it to Lijiang without a hitch. Even though this stopover in Zhijiang was unexpected I ended up really enjoying it and was glad for the experience. I’ll update soon with more about Lijiang.

#china #travel #solo travel #asia #hunan #zhijiang #travel mishaps

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Fenghuang

The past 3ish days have been spent in the city of Fenghuang 凤凰, literally, Phoenix Town, in Hunan province.

This town was established sometime in the 1700s and was generally a sleepy river town until recent years. The famous Chinese author Shen Congwen is from here and he wrote a famous novel called Border Towns set in this town in the 1920s about a Romeo and Juliet -esque romance. Shen Congwen is now considered to be one of the greatest Chinese modern authors, but during his life he was targeted by the Communist government because his novels were too “apolitical”. He was socially ostracized to the point where he attempted suicide. He later was “reeducated” and became a scholar of traditional culture working at a museum, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize for his novels in 1988 but died before the result was announced.

This town is famous nowadays for its architecture and for being the setting of this novel. It is an extremely popular tourist destination in Hunan province but relatively unknown within the rest of China and abroad. I only found out about it from a TikTok comparing it to the town in the Japanese animated film, Spirited Away, and thought it was pretty.

The old town here remains pretty much exactly as it did during the 1700s, which is pretty rare. It is built pretty much right up against the Tuojiang River with houses partially built on stilts overlooking the river. Its also known for the local indigenous Miao (also known abroad as Hmong) and Tujia culture. Nowadays it is a very touristy town. Each night the entire ancient town is lit with an enormous amount of lights and the river itself becomes the stage for a 3.5 hour continuous reenactment of Shen Congwen’s novel, complete with actors on floating stages reenacting key parts of the novel and light shows depicted on the walls, on the cliffs, and in the sky. The main characters of the novel, Cuicui (a 13 year old girl) and her grandfather run the local ferry in the book, so tourists can pay to ride around on a replica of this ferry to visit the various scenes being reenacted throughout the river. I did that on Thursday night and it was pretty cool even though I didn’t understand what was going on. I later found an English version of the novel online and read it and now it makes more sense.

Its also very popular here to rent traditional Miao/Hmong and Tujia clothing for the day and hire a professional photographer to go around and take photos with you. It is very picturesque here so it makes sense, I was just not prepared for the sheer quantity of people doing this. It was very hard to not end up in people’s photos.

Its also interesting that it is so trendy to dress up and do photoshoots wearing traditional ethnic clothing when only a few decades ago it was considered very shameful to be a part of the Miao/Hmong ethnic group. They were often referred to by offensive names such as ‘rude’ or ‘dirty’ people. Shen Congwen himself was part Miao but hid that fact until near his death. There are hundreds of ethnic groups in China, while the Han group is the largest and most culturally dominant, and even now ethnic minorities such as the Uyghurs in Xinjiang (western China) are persecuted and forced into ‘reeducation’ camps, but that is kind of a taboo topic in China. Its just interesting that both Shen Congwen and indigenous cultures are so celebrated here when historically they have been treated so poorly, and I wonder how much of it is genuine admiration and how much of it is just for the “fun” of it. I mean it is nice that culture is being celebrated but I wonder how authentic and genuine it all is, It all seems a bit Disney-fied to be honest.

Anyway, this town is beautiful but very hot and extremely touristy. I think I am the only foreigner I’ve seen the entire time I’ve been here, so its always a big production every time I try to buy something or go in a shop. Everyone has been really nice but I just feel bad inconveniencing people with my broken Chinese when everywhere is so crowded and busy.

I went around a few times really early in the morning and again while it was raining out and there was almost no one out so it was really nice to walk around then. Although it is truly beautiful here; most of the time I’ve been here I’ve been in my hotel room because between the tiny streets, the overwhelmingly enormous crowds, and the nearly 100 degree heat and humidity its all been a bit too much for me.

I’m leaving tomorrow and it will be my most complicated transportation feat yet because I have to take public transport to the train station, go to a different city, and from there get to the airport and fly across the country, all before 11am. Wish me luck. I’ll be in Lijiang, in the mountains near the Himalayas in southwest China. I’ll be there for a fairly long stint, nearly 2 weeks, and hopefully it won’t be as hot there.

Until next time,

#travel #solo travel #asia #china #hunan #fenghuang #shen conweng

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Zhangjiajie

I’ve spent the last 4ish days in the rural area of Zhangjiajie, in the mountains of Hunan province in south central China.

I flew in from Beijing on Saturday to Zhangjiajie and then it was an hour drive to the town of Yangjiajie. This town is mainly farmland, lots of roosters crowing, and is very warm and humid. I came here to see Zhangjiajie National Forest, which is famous for its over 3,000 sandstone pillars which are on average about 660 feet tall. They were formed about 350 million years ago due to softer rock around the pillars eroding and falling away. I have truly never seen anything like it, I cannot adequately describe how huge these things were or how amazing it was to see.

The owner of the small hotel I’m staying at, Carol, gave me an extensive run down on how to do a self-guided tour of the park; which I was glad I did instead of doing an official tour. My hotel was only about 300 meters from the park entrance, so I could walk there myself. The park itself despite being very intimidating in its sheer size and the fact that most of it is hundreds of meters in the air, was pretty easy to get around in. There is a system of cable cars to get up the mountain, and a series of buses, bridges, and hiking trails to get around the park from there.

China only very recently opened its borders for the first time in over 3 years, and it is notoriously difficult to get a Chinese visa. While in the bigger cities like Beijing there were definitely more foreigners and expats, and people in general were more used to foreigners, I’ve definitely been noticing a difference in Hunan. I think I have seen less than a dozen foreigners total in the time I’ve been here. I get a lot of stares and kids pointing at me going “哪国人！” （foreigner) I even had a family ask to take my picture with their kid because I was the first foreigner she had seen. Its understandable, not a lot of outsiders have really been traveling through here lately. It is honestly pretty refreshing to travel and be around mainly locals and not the crowd of college aged drunk backpackers that tend to frequent a lot of touristy places around the world.

Don’t get me wrong, people have been so incredibly helpful and accommodating and welcoming the entire time I’ve been here. Every single time I have gotten turned around someone has asked if they could help me. People have been so patient with my broken Chinese. And there is definitely a lot of privilege being a white English speaker that has made getting around a lot easier. I have just definitely been feeling very much like an outsider and it gets a bit wearing to have so many stares every time I do anything and even though its not the same at all it has definitely been very eye opening for what a lot of people experience daily that I haven’t experienced to this extent before.

Anyway. I spent most of Sunday exploring the park. It was really incredible. I just could not comprehend the scale of how big the pillars were. It was quite literally breathtaking and jaw dropping. More than once I stopped dead in my tracks because I just could not believe my eyes. At one point we crossed a natural bridge that had formed between two of the pillars. There were also lots of monkeys and at one point there was a gigantic sculpture to someone in the Communist party with a ton of Communist memorabilia around it, idk what that was all about but it was huge. It was super duper hot and humid but being up high in the mountains helped a lot. Once I got back down to the bottom though I realized I’d gotten sunburned despite it being cloudy. I always forget thats a thing. When I made it back to my hotel I was more sweat than person by that point.

Carol’s mom cooks meals for the hotel, so I ate very well the whole time I was in Zhangjiajie. On Saturday night they were hosting a school group from a nearby university, 20 students, a professor named Jin, and his family. I got to talk with the professor for a while. Apparently he had lived in Germany and Switzerland for over a decade while getting his degrees. He asked me a lot of questions about the US election and he honestly knew more about it than I did. He said people in China pay close attention to this because really the results impact the entire world, which is unfortunately true.

On Monday Carol had again given me extensive instructions for a self guided tour of Tianmen Mountain. This was a bit more complicated. First it involved an hour long car ride to Zhangjiajie, then taking a series of buses to get to the bottom of the mountain and a cable car to get halfway up the mountain. Tianmen Mountain （天门山）translates to Heaven’s Door Mountain. It is called this because of an incredible door like natural arch halfway up the mountain that looks like it is leading to the sky. After taking the cable car halfway up the mountain, I hiked up the famous 999 steps to 天门, Heaven’s Gate. It truly looked like we were climbing stairs directly into the sky.

Once at the top of the staircase, we entered a cave into which was astoundingly built a gigantic escalator which took us up the rest of the way to the top of the mountain. I cannot even imagine how all of this was built.

From there, we were a good 4,500 feet up in the air. I could not comprehend how high up we were. And there was a Burger King and a Bubble Tea restaurant at the top somehow. I had some lunch and them took the long winding path along the cliffside. The path was quite literally hanging off the cliff with a sheer drop of 4,500 feet below. I walked along here for about 3 kilometers, one section of the path was even a glass walk which was honestly terrifying. There were lots of little kids with their families doing the hike as well, and they were absolutely not convinced that the glass was strong enough to hold them, which was completely understandable.

I’ve noticed a lot of people visiting places like this in very fancy clothing, even little kids will wear their best dresses or traditional outfits, because people take a lot of pictures and want to look good in the pictures, even though it is very hot and humid and there is a lot of physical activity.

After hiking I arrived to 天门山死, Tianmenshan Temple. Which, again, was incredible that such a huge temple was built so high up. From there I took something similar to a skilift to take me back to the start of the mountain path, and from there took a cablecar all the way back to town. I was told that this last cablecar was one of the longest cablecars in the world, and it certainly seemed like it. It brought us from 4,500 at the top of the mountain all the way back to the ground in the middle of town 30 minutes later. It was really cool. The line to get in it was pretty intense though. The park tries to limit traffic by only selling 3,000 tickets per hour, which is considered very few tickets given the size of the park, but the problem arises when everyone leaves the park at the same time at the end of the day. This resulted in a very enormous line to get down.

From there I took a shared car to get to my hotel. A lot of people live in very rural areas in the provinces and its tough to make the trek into the city from there so whenever someone drives from the city to town or vice versa they try to fill up the car with people. People generally chip in for gas so its like a rural version of uber without the app. People just roll their window down if they see someone standing on the street or walking down the road and ask if they want a lift.

My window in my room had a gap where it wouldn’t shut all the way so it was letting mosquitoes in. I had managed to block it the last two nights and it wasn’t bad at all but because a rainstorm was incoming there were way more bugs tonight than before. I’m talking thirty to forty mosquitos and other giant bugs I don’t know what they were and don’t really want to know. They’d all gotten through the blocked window and were everywhere which was horrible, so I managed to switch rooms for the rest of my stay.

On Monday it was rainy in the morning and while I could have gone back to Zhangjiajie National Park to see more of it, its an enormous park, I didn’t have it in me and ended up spending the whole day sleeping. My big outing of the day was going with Carol to the grocery store to get snacks. On Tuesday I went to the train station to head to my next stop, Fenghuang, which is also in Hunan province and was only about a 2 hour train ride away.

I’ll update about Fenghuang soon, I’ll be here for about 3 more days.

#travel #asia #china #solo travel #zhangjiajie #hunan #yangjiajie #tianmen mountain

[aventurasdeunatortuga]

Beijing

The past week or so has been spent in Beijing with my best friend from college, Irene. Irene has been living in Beijing since 2019 and teaches English at a high school here. I’ve really enjoyed getting to see her neck of the woods and have been so grateful to have her as a guide because China, especially Beijing, is very overwhelming.

I’ve been to Beijing before, in 2018, but it was just for a day and a half and things have changed a lot since then. Beijing is definitely comparable at least in my experience to Mexico City. It is absolutely enormous and a beast to get around in, but there is so much to see and do and every neighborhood is so interesting and different. After being here a week I’ve barely scratched the surface, but I’ll go through by day.

Day 1, Sunday

We spent most of the day traveling from Macau to Beijing and getting ourselves situated. I was very nervous about flying into Mainland China as they are quite strict at border control and only very recently reopened the border to foreigners. Things only recently opened back up about 3 months ago. I made it through without a problem though and we made our way to the place I’m renting for the week. China does not allow foreigners to stay with residents without going through a long and arduous registration process, so I’m staying in an apartment about 25 minutes away from Irene, which is considered very close by Beijing standards.

Absolutely everything in China is done via apps and QR codes. Everything from riding the bus to ordering food in a restaurant to getting a taxi to paying your water bill; it is all done via apps that are mainly in Chinese. Thank goodness for Irene helping me get all the right apps set up showing me the ropes. After a week here I’ve finally figured out how to do most things by myself. It is certainly very convenient, you don’t need to talk to anyone or even carry around a wallet in most places.

In the evening we did a food tour with Lost Plate tours, it was really cool because they took us around to a lot of off the beaten track restaurants you’d never be able to find on your own and we tried some really amazing dishes.

All of the restaurants were in the Wudaoying Hutong, one of the historic neighborhoods in central Beijing. In total we visited 4 restaurants.

We tried 炸酱面 (zhajiangmian) hand pulled noodles with savory plum sauce and fresh vegetables (my personal favorite), 烤肉(kao rou) old school Mongolian style barbecue cooked with hot briquettes right on your table with a flat grill top. The style originated with soldiers building cook-fires literally inside their helmets, laying their shields on top, and cooking on that. We also had 门钉肉饼 (men ding rou bing) gigantic pork buns, fried on both sides and 春饼 (chun bing) spring pancakes with a variety of fillings. We rode on rickshaws around the hutong to get in between the different restaurants, it was so much fun. By the time we finished at a brewery after the fourth restaurant, we were absolutely stuffed, and made our way back for the night. Beijing is in a heat wave right now, with temperatures ranging from 95-104 degrees every day for the past 2.5 weeks, but in the evening in the hutongs it finally cooled down a bit and it was really lovely to walk around and see the neighborhood.

Day 2, Monday

Today was a lot more laid back. Irene had to work today, that meant that I stayed in my apartment in the air conditioning to rest and recover from the last crazy few days. I ventured out a bit in the afternoon to a nearby mall to find food. Malls in Asia are no joke, they are like small cities with every single kind of store you can think of. In the evening Irene and I walked back to that same mall and ate at a Mexican restaurant, then we walked a bit and explored the Chaoyang area I’m staying in. Even this one small area is enormous, we’ve been averaging about 20,000 steps a day even without doing all that much today. We saw the local river, the Liangma River, and visited another mall. It was very beautiful.

Day 3, Tuesday

Today was another rest day, I did not leave my room until 5pm today. It’s hard feeling like I’m missing out on things when I take rest days; but I’m in China for about 3 more weeks, and know that if I don’t take these rest days I will burn out from exhaustion very quickly. Especially with our trend of walking 8+ miles every day in 90+ degree weather.

In the evening we met up with a former student of Irene’s, Vicki, for Beijing style hot-pot. If you’re not familiar with hot pot it is exactly as it sounds, you’re given a hot pot of broth or hot water and tons of ingredients that you can add in as you choose to cook in the pot and take out as they become ready to eat. Beijing style is a little different because instead of being heated from underneath on a hot plate or stove; a very tall burning hot cylinder is with hot briquettes is placed directly inside the pot, with a little chimney at the top for the smoke to escape. It’s hard to describe, so see the video above to see what it’s like. We ate so much food and were absolutely stuffed.

Later we walked to the Central Business District (known as CBD in Beijing 😆). There were tons of skyscrapers and interesting buildings, its where all the major Chinese corporations have their headquarters. We took photos at a famous building known as the “Pants” building because it looks literally like a pair of pants.

Day 4, Wednesday

Today was my last partial rest day for a while. Irene got off work early today so in the afternoon I met up with her and we went to 798, which is the former industrial area turned trendy artists’ neighborhood. There were a lot of abandoned factories here that have been turned into artists’ residences, studios, and galleries and is near Beijing’s major art colleges. There was a lot of public art that was cool to see. We ate at a giant shaved ice place and ordered way too much food. Who knew ice was so filling 😂

Later I got to visit Irene’s apartment, and then she packed a bag to come stay the night at my place as we had an early start tomorrow. We ordered dim sum delivery and watched dramas which in my book is an excellent evening.

Day 5, Thursday

Today was spent visiting Irene’s school. Back when I was teaching university level English in Mexico City, Irene was able to visit me and spend the day at my school so it was really cool to do it the other way around today.

Irene’s school is absolutely enormous. It is a K-12 private boarding school on the outskirts of Beijing. It reminded me a lot of a US college campus. Most of the students except for the young students and students who come from other provinces live on campus during the week and go home on the weekends. Most of these students plan on attending college abroad at prestigious universities in places like the UK, the US, Canada, and Australia after graduating. They get English instruction from a very young age and are thus very fluent by the time they graduate.

Irene teaches grade 10-12 English, with between 8-20 students per class. I was amazed by how self-sufficient and responsible the majority of the students were (compared to my absolutely feral first graders back home). They were doing a study of the story The Most Dangerous Game and then created characters to role play in a DnD campaign based on the story; which I thought was really cool. Irene’s prep period was right before the lunch break, so we had a full 2.5 hours for lunch. We ate Xinjiang cuisine at a mall nearby the school, Xinjiang is in northwestern China bordering Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Afghanistan so the cuisine was a unique mix of Middle Eastern and Chinese food; it was really really good. We didn’t realize we were eating there on the Eid holiday though and the restaurant was packed.

Later after teaching 3 classes Irene introduced me to a student of hers that wants to be an elementary school teacher after graduating. I hope I didn’t scare her off too much from the field. It was really cool but weird to talk with someone that age who is considering colleges and careers; I’m 29 and still feel like a kid most of the time, but thinking back to being 16/17 and thinking about how much I’ve learned and grown and experienced since then was very eye opening. Irene and I gave her a lot of advice about college etc. and we remembered being 21 and having all these anxieties about graduating and finding a job and all that and wow it is crazy how time flies and we are able to actually give advice about that stuff, it feels like just yesterday we were stressing about the exact same things she is stressing about.

In the evening we went to one of Irene’s favorite restaurants, The Taco Bar. Way back in 2013 Irene studied abroad in Beijing and was missing the easy access to Mexican cuisine we have in the US (specifically burritos) and went on a legendary search we now refer to as The Burrito Quest where she searched out and tried every single Mexican restaurant in Beijing, which is harder than it sounds. The Taco Bar didn’t have burritos, but it was hands down the winner of best Mexican restaurant in Beijing according to Irene. She has been coming here since 2013 even when their original location closed down, to their new location, and through the pandemic. We had an enormous amount of food and again ended the day extremely stuffed.

We had planned on this being our goodbye dinner, but we had discovered that Irene’s apartment had had a power cut. Rather than spend the night in darkness in 103 degree heat she decided to stay at my place again. But this meant embarking on an odyssey across Beijing to her apartment to get her stuff since she is traveling again this weekend; and then going back to my place for the air conditioning; this journey on Beijing public transport at rush hour during a heat wave was a major feat.

After 19,000 steps and a 2.5 hour trek we finally collapsed back at my place to sleep.

Day 6 Friday

Early in the morning I said goodbye to Irene as she headed off to work, she is traveling this weekend so she was going to the airport straight from work. I’ll really miss traveling with her, although I love solo travel, the best way to travel I think is with a close friend.

Today was my sightseeing day. I’ve been to Beijing before and have seen The Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, and the Great Wall before; and given the heat had no desire to confront the crowds there again.

So on Irene’s recommendation today I visited the Summer Palace. It is an enormous complex where the emperor would visit in the summer months in northern Beijing. It is much smaller than the main palace at the Forbidden City in central Beijing, but even so it was enormous. The emperor had it constructed when the capital of China was moved to Beijing in the 1300’s and many elements of the palace were modeled after areas in other places in China that the emperor liked.

There was a shopping street modeled after a town in southern China that I’m visiting later on in this trip. It is famous for being built on the water and it was my favorite area in the palace. There was an enormous manmade lake that was built to be Beijing’s emergency water supply and modeled after a famous lake in Kunming and was used to train naval officers. It was truly enormous. The land excavated from building the lake was used to create a 200ft tall hill upon which the palace itself was constructed. There were also literally thousands of smaller structures built throughout the massive forest grounds. I sat next to an old man on a bench for about 40 minutes while I ate a snack and did some people watching. Everyone else was moving so much and there were so many people but me and that old man were just vibing.

Most of the palace was looted by the British in the late 1800s, but the buildings themselves and natural structures were in amazing condition and it was really cool to see, albeit the heat.

Then I headed over to Nanluoguxiang hutong, another historic neighborhood in central Beijing. This is considered to be rather touristy, most of the original buildings were destroyed in renovations of the city, but were reconstructed to look like traditional neighborhoods in Imperial China, called hutongs. It is a very beautiful area, with streams and lots of people walking about. I visited here in 2018 and it was my favorite area of Beijing to just walk around in. I had some lunch and explored for a while and did some shopping.

My final stop of the day was Baiyunguan, the White Cloud Temple in southern Beijing. It is one of the oldest Taoist temples in China and is nearby a famous Taoist College. By this point in the day I was pretty exhausted from the 103 degree heat and having spent about 6 hours on public transportation and walking in crowded tourist sites. It was incredible to walk into the temple from the loud crowded street and immediately felt how calm and quiet it was. It was literally completely silent except for the wind and the birds.

I walked around the temple for a while. Taoism is one of several traditional Chinese religions, which work in synch with each other. Many Chinese people practice elements of Taoism, Confucianism, Buddhism, and animism. Taoism is all about finding balance and peace in the natural world. The temples themselves are actually called 观 (guan) which translates to look at or observe. This comes from the Taoist belief that understanding comes from looking at or observing the natural world, so the temples are places to look and observe. There were lots of very beautiful areas, some statues of deities people offered incense to, and lots of displays of art and calligraphy. It was very peaceful and a nice way to end the day.

I made my way back and collapsed for the rest of the day.

That’s it for Beijing, I’m amazed if you made it all the way through this very long post. It was great to spend time here. I am writing this post on a plane ride to my next stop, Zhangjiajie in Hunan province in south central China. Stay tuned!

#china #beijing #travel #asia

[aventurasdeunatortuga]

Macau + Hong Kong

Greetings from China!

I will be spending the next month or so traveling around China! I have been here before way back in 2018, but I was only able to spend a week here back then. China has only very recently reopened its borders post-COVID, and my friend Irene has been living and working here since 2019, we haven’t seen each other for 3.5 years so I’ve was so excited to have the chance to come here!

I’ve already been here for almost a week, so I’m very behind on posting. On Tuesday of last week I packed up my classroom for the year and moved everything over to my new school. I have been teaching at my former school for the last 7 years; but this year was definitely the hardest of my career (even including the year spent teaching on Zoom) for a lot of reasons so long story short I quit my job and now have a new job next year teaching 4th grade at a school down the road from my old school. This all happened very suddenly so Tuesday my Dad and I spent the entire day packing and moving 7 years worth of classroom stuff; then after that I packed up my bags and headed to the airport.

After almost a day of travel I landed in Macau on Thursday afternoon. Macau is not technically part of Mainland China, it is sort of its own autonomous region. They have their own flag and currency and everything but they are still considered owned by China. I met Irene at the airport there and we got settled in.

Macau used to be a Portuguese colony, and you can definitely see all the Portuguese influences. All the signs are in Cantonese and Portuguese, and Macau itself looks like a lot of places in Spain. I’ve been trying to teach myself some basic Mandarin and between that and my Spanish could sort of kind of figure out what was going on. Macau is also kind of considered the Las Vegas of China, there are tons of very lavish casinos all over the place.

Our first day we visited a beach and drank from coconuts, then we headed over to the casino area to look at all the ridiculously fancy buildings. They had very realistic replicas of Paris, London, LA, and Venice. We went inside the Venetian which was so incredibly fancy. They had replicas of the canals and gondolas and everything, similar to the Venetian in Las Vegas. We went and got Portuguese Eggs Tarts at the Venetian; which Macau is famous for. Then we walked around for a while.

We stumbled upon a gigantic manmade wetland with an enormous lotus garden. The lotuses were taller than a person, and we were wandered about there for a while with a busker playing in the distance; it was very magical.

Macau is in southern China, very close to Hong Kong, so it is very hot and humid. It was over 90% humidity most of our time there, so we were constantly drenched in sweat.

Our second day we did a day trip to Hong Kong; which is also a technically a territory of China but is more independent. They also have their own separate currency and used to be a British colony; so it was very distinctive from Macau and from Mainland China. I’d been to Hong Kong before back in 2017 while on a long layover to The Philippines, but it is such a cool city and I was glad to go back. Hong Kong is only about 30 miles away from Macau, and they recently constructed a sea bridge over the ocean connecting the two cities, it is the longest sea bridge in the world. We took a bus across the bridge to get there.

Hong Kong is the most vertical city in the world. It doesn’t have the tallest buildings, but it has more buildings taller than 30 stories than anywhere else in the world. It is very compact and with so many people living there people take advantage of every inch of vertical space. We visited a famous photo spot at an enormous apartment building called ‘The Monster Building’ which really demonstrates just how crowded Hong Kong is. We took some photos there and had a matcha break in a thankfully air conditioned cafe before heading over to a dim sum place.

Hong Kong is famous for its dim sum. Dim sum is basically a variety of smaller dishes like steamed buns and dumplings that are steamed in bamboo baskets. We ordered 6 different dishes and were so stuffed we spent an hour in a mall afterward to come out of our food coma.

After that we went and visited the waterfront and saw the impressive city skyline and a monument to Hong Kong’s national flower, the Bauhinia, which is on their flag. Then we went and caught the ferry back to Macau in a torrential downpour.

Later that night we went and had dinner at a Portuguese wine bar with one of her former coworkers and his wife. We tried port and had a fancy cheese board.

On our third day we explored the historic city center, which was very very Portuguese. We saw the ruins of St. Paul’s cathedral, which was destroyed in a fire, and the old fort which had a great view of the city. We had a delicious dim sum break, visited a temple, explored the main city square, visited an enormous Japanese grocery store, and spent the rest of the evening resting, enjoying our haul from the Japanese store, and watching dramas.

Sunday morning we made our way to Beijing. I was very nervous about getting in to Mainland China, given how strict they are about everything, even more so post-Covid, but it was very seamless and we got in just fine.

I’ll post more about Beijing later this week, as this post is already far too long. I will be here in Beijing with Irene for about a week before I go off to travel on my own. I’ve been very glad to have Irene showing me the ropes these first few days, China is very overwhelming given just how enormous everything is and the language barrier. I’ve also been very glad to spend time with her after not having seen her for over 3 years. After this very stressful school year; its been very rejuvenating to spend time with her exploring and traveling.

Until next time!

#travel #china #macau #hong kong #asia

[aventurasdeunatortuga]

Guatemala Days 18-21

Lívingston and Río Dulce

Coming up on the end of this trip. It’s been a weird couple of days.

I’ve spent the last 5 days in Lívingston, Guatemala on the Belizean border. Lívingston is a very interesting community with a really fascinating history.

It is populated by a mix of indigenous Q’eqchi’ Maya and Garifuna. It is the only Garifuna community in Guatemala.

The Garifuna are a group of Afro-Indigenous people descended from two shipwrecked slave ships which crashed on the island of St. Vincent in the Caribbean in the mid 19th century. The Africans aboard those ships managed to escape being enslaved and mixed with the indigenous Arawak and Caribe peoples of the island as well as recently freed enslaved people from elsewhere in the Caribbean, as slavery in the British colonies was outlawed in 1833 (I think that’s the right year?).

Anyway, this unique time and place and intersection of cultures allowed a really unique combination of a variety of Africans that were never enslaved and thus maintained their cultures and local indigenous cultures. They called themselves the Garifuna people.

In 1845 I think? The British government became wary of the Garifuna because they were not submitting to British rule and inciting revolts. They evicted them from St. Vincent and they developed communities all over the Central American Caribbean coast. Mainly in Honduras and Belize, with Lívingston being the only Guatemalan Garifuna community. There is also a thriving Garifuna community in New York City.

All this to say that Lívingston has a really interesting and unique culture. It is also really isolated and hard to get to, which I think has helped them to preserve their culture. It isn’t on an island, but it is surrounded by canyons and thick jungle, so the only way to get to it is by a 2 hour boat ride on the Río Dulce, which eventually leads out to the ocean. You can take a boat from Lívingston to Belize as well.

I’ve been sick the whole time I was in Lívingston unfortunately with a stomach bug, which meant I couldn’t really eat much, but I still enjoyed my time there. I was also feeling overall kind of down and exhausted so I spent most of the time sleeping.

I went to a restaurant called Las Tres Garifunas where I met a guy named George who told me more about Garifuna history and language. Garifuna is one of 24 languages spoken in Guatemala (22 distinct Mayan languages, Garifuna, and Spanish).

I took a day trip along the Río Dulce, which reminds me so much of the Amazon River. We went to Siete Altares which is a hike literally through the middle of a river bed where there at least 7 waterfalls and dozens more smaller ones. It was really beautiful but the trail was really hazardous, I only fell once though!

We also went to Playa Blanca, the only white sand beach in Guatemala. Due to all the volcanoes most of the beaches have black sand. We spent a couple hours there relaxing which was nice.

On my last day I spent a very long time on the dock watching the egrets and pelicans and hung out in a cafe for a very long time just people watching. In the evening I went to a bar and tried gifiti, a Garifuna liquor made with rum fermented in a jar with herbs. They also had Garifuna drumming and dancing which was cool to see. You can definitely see the mix of African influences with Ladino Guatemalan music and indigenous Guatemalan style.

Overall despite not feeling my best it was a nice quiet final week in Guatemala and I’m glad I came to Lívingston.

Today I spent a bazillion hours in a boat and a hot bus to get back to Guatemala City, and am currently sitting in my hotel eating uber eats fried chicken, watching Rush Hour 3, and awaiting my 3am wake up call. I’ve also got an exciting 12 hour layover in Texas tomorrow so that’ll be fun.

I’ve had a great time in Guatemala these past few weeks. I have learned so so much and I’m really glad I came. My goal was to learn as much as I could because my school I work at has been receiving more and more recent immigrants from Guatemala and I wanted to be able to connect with them more. I’m also glad to be back to traveling internationally after these past few pandemic years.

Until next time!

#guatemala #central america #travel #río dulce #lívingston #garifuna #solo travel

[aventurasdeunatortuga]

Guatemala Day 14-17

Flores / Tikal

The past few days were spent in the town of Flores in northeastern Guatemala, in the state of Petén. The climate is very different from Antigua and Atitlan, as we are no longer in the mountains. It is very hot and humid here. Flores is on an island in the middle of a lake and it takes about 20 minutes to walk around the entire island.

I stayed in a backpacker hostel and while it was a very nice backpacker hostel I think I’m at a point where I’ve had enough of them. The constant drunk people, dirty laundry everywhere, and no personal space plus the extreme heat got to me. The drunk girl peeing all over her bunkbed in the dorm I was in was the final straw and I switched to a private room for my last night.

While I am technically backpacking myself I’ve gotten really sick of being around backpackers the last few days. They’re not all bad, but so many of them are really entitled and disrespectful to locals. They spend a lot of time loudly speaking English or German or Dutch and leaving garbage everywhere in various states of undress and their main concern being where the next party is and where the alcohol is. A lot of restaurants cater their menu to these crowds and to be honest I found myself hearing more Dutch than Spanish the last few days and going to two different restaurants to find only American and Dutch food on the menu. It seems like another form of colonialism where white people come in expecting locals to cater to them and their culture. I know I’m part of that just being a white American traveling and I try really hard to be respectful and not expect people to cater to me but it’s a much larger, more complex issue than that.

Sorry for the cranky old rant but I was so honestly embarrassed to be around fellow tourists the past few days. The multiple people putting their bare feet by my head while taking transportation and witnessing people wandering into restaurants shirtless, barefoot, and yelling in English made me so grumpy. Like do you behave like that in your home country?

Anyway the reason most people come to Flores is to visit the Mayan ruins of Tikal. Tikal was built by the Itzá Maya (the same who built Chichén Itzá) and was at one point the capital of the Mayan civilization. They were also related to the group that built Palenque in Mexico. It consists of 5 main pyramids which were all used to bury royalty. There were countless other structures as well which have yet to be excavated as well as multiple manmade lakebeds which have since dried up.

We climbed 2 of the 5 pyramids and watched the sunset from the top of another structure. Tikal is in the middle of very dense rainforest. We saw lots of coatis, spider monkeys, wild turkeys, and toucans and heard lots of roaring howler monkeys. I swear they sound just like jaguars.

We were lucky with the weather because it had rained earlier in the day and cooled things off significantly and while we kept hearing thunder it didn’t actually rain while we were there. Tropical thunderstorms can be very intense.

It was dark when we climbed down from the last structure and our guide was able to get the site police to come pick us up in his pickup truck and we rode in the back out of the jungle instead of walking 40 minutes in the dark.

My last day in Flores I didn’t do much due to how sick of being around people I was. I did spontaneously go on a boat ride around the lake which was pretty but also weird because I was the only one there and then it started downpouring.

Currently I am in the town of Lívingston on the Belizean border. It took over 12 hours to get here because of how isolated of a community it is. First I took a four hour bus to the head of Rio Dulce, a large river that reminds me a lot of the Amazon. Then I waited 4.5 hours for a boat since Lívingston is surrounded by dense jungle and is only accessible by boat. Then I road in a boat for 2 hours and finally arrived just before the thunderstorm hit.

On the boat I met an older Mayan man named Gabriel and we talked for a while. He asked how he could visit the US and I didn’t even know where to begin with how complicated that would be. Rich white countries are allowed to visit wherever they want at any time and have the economic privilege to do so due to imperialism but it is next to impossible for folks from countries that have been taken advantage of to do the same. Gabriel and I talked for a while, he sells handcrafts and gives tours of the area. He also shared his coconut bread with me. He offered to take me on a tour tomorrow and while he seemed really nice my stranger danger radar was going off at the thought of going on a boat by myself as a solo traveler with someone I met in passing.

I always doubt myself with decisions like that. I want to be spontaneous and not be distrustful of others or hiding in my room all the time but I also feel very hyperaware all the time of how I’m a young woman travelling by herself in a place I don’t know and I never know when I’m just being paranoid or being smart. It’s exhausting.

Anyway right now I’m staring into a bowl of pasta I don’t if I’ll be able to eat because of a stomachache and watching the lightning storm on the river. I’ll be sleeping in a hut the next few days but it’s a pretty nice hut.

Overall I think I’m getting close to wanting to go home. I’m noticing myself getting easily exhausted and frustrated and not looking forward to things, which usually tends to happen at the end of a long trip. I’m hoping I can enjoy the next few days here regardless because I really am grateful for the opportunity to be here and to travel.

#guatemala #travel #solo travel #central america #travel rants #flores #tikal #lívingston

[aventurasdeunatortuga]

Guatemala Days 12-13

Chichicastenango

Writing this a day late to catch up from the power outage.

Yesterday we went on the wild ride that is Guatemalan public transportation. We took the bus which is called a chicken bus and it is literally a refurbished American school bus. They reminded me a lot of the jeepneys in The Philippines. I bet there is an interesting story somewhere there.

We had to take three chicken buses through the windy mountain roads to get to Chichicastenango. The roads in Guatemala aren’t really maintained by the government and the terrain is very intense so even things that are not very far away take several hours to get to. This is part of the reason why there are so many different languages and cultures within Guatemala.

We had to hang on pretty tight as we took the sharp corners and got some air time when we went over bumps. But at least this time we didn’t have to drive across a small river like we did on our way to Panajachel (a bridge had collapsed so the road was just rerouted through the river).

When we finally got to Chichicastenango we went to the market. Chichicastenango’s market is the largest market in Central America and happens every Thursday and Sunday. It reminded me a lot of the bazaars in Istanbul. Very windy and maze like, you go in one way and get spit out two hours later somewhere completely different.

In the middle of the market is the Iglesia de Santo Tomás, which is another Mayan -Catholic church. We witnessed some Mayan ceremonies happening on the steps with people lighting incense on an alter and leaving flowers. The Mayan - Catholic churches were generally built on top of Mayan temples that were destroyed by the Catholic church, but leading up to them are generally 20 steps symbolic of the Mayan calendar and oriented a specific way to face towards landmarks like volcanoes or toward certain astrological constellations.

Chichicastenango is located in the region of El Quiché, which is where a large part of the Guatemalan Civil War happened from the 1980’s-1990’s. From what I understand this was between the indigenous peoples and poor working class of Guatemala against wealthy landowners trying to buy up indigenous land and mistreat workers on fincas (similar to plantations). The indigenous peoples organized themselves and resisted but the landowners were supported by the army, the government, and foreign businesses (namely the US government and the United Fruit Company). The government at the time was supported by the US after the CIA ousted the former president, and the US funded a number of armed militias to enforce their interests as well.

Countless indigenous people were disappeared, tortured, and massacred. To this day people don’t really talk about what happened out of fear for their own safety, many indigenous people still live at risk and face discrimination and violence; resulting in a lot of the immigration we see today.

For more information I’d recommend looking up The Banana Wars. I’m reading Rigoberta Menchú’s autobiography now which is really sobering and eye opening. She is a Guatemalan indigenous rights activist.

Anyway we spent several hours at the market and then made our way back to Panajachel.

Today we visited San Juan La Laguna again in the morning and visited another indigenous women’s weaving co-op called Casa Flor Ixcaco which does some amazing work in the community. If you’re interested in supporting them they have an online shop as well.

We did some shopping there and then tried to get back to Panajachel in time for our bus to Guatemala City, but we got delayed at the boat dock for over 45 minutes because the boat couldn’t depart unless it was full apparently. When we finally got back we rushed and made our bus in time.

The bus made an unexpected stop in Antigua and we got to have lunch in a cool rooftop café there which was a really nice, unexpected break. Then we got back on the bus to Guatemala City.

Guatemala City reminds me a lot of Mexico City in that it is humongous, loud, polluted, and absolutely crazy. We’re just staying the night here and have been warned many times not to go out of the hotel because there is a lot of crime in this city. I’ve heard that about a lot of places and it usually tends to be exaggeration but we’re gonna play it safe. This seems like the kind of city where you should have a good idea what you’re doing (i.e. not walking around totally lost).

In the morning Emily is flying back home and I’ll be continuing my solo journey for the next week,

#guatemala #chichicastenango #san juan la laguna #guatemala city #central america #travel #el quiché

[aventurasdeunatortuga]

Guatemala Days 7-11

Lake Atitlan

The last 4 days have been spent at Lake Atitlan in the town of Panajachel. On Saturday Emily arrived to Antigua and to our surprise we got upgraded to a deluxe suite which was very fancy.

The next morning we took a shuttle to Panajachel, one of at least 11 towns on the shore of Lake Atitlan. Lake Atitlan is an enormous lake formed from a volcanic crater that is thousands of meters deep. There are at least 3 separate languages spoken by the indigenous people in the surrounding area, that’s how big around the lake is.

On Monday we explored the Atitlan Nature Reserve which was really cool. We hiked to the lakeshore, went across suspension bridges through the jungle, and saw spider monkeys and coatís (a central american variety of raccoons which only live in high altitude jungles).

On Tuesday we did a tour of three different towns along the lake. We got to the different towns by boat. First we went to San Juan La Laguna which had a lot of fair trade textile co-ops. This has helped combat a lot of social problems such as poverty and lack of education access, and has helped elevate indigenous women of the area. Several families team together to weave and form the co-op and whatever the co-op sells the profits are divided equally amongst themselves. A requirement for entering the co-op is enrolling children in school. We visited one of these co-ops and learned more about the weaving process which is incredibly complex. It take between 3 weeks to 3 months to weave a single garment. Unfortunately a lot of factory made copycat products are sold on the street for less than a 10th of what it costs to produce handmade products.

After San Juan La Laguna we stopped in San Pedro La Laguna for a drink. This town has a lot of expats and unfortunately has lost a lot of its ties to their indigenous culture. It’s now known as a party town (San Pedro La Locura is the nickname).

Finally we went to Santiago Atitlan, the largest of the lakeside towns. Even though it was only 15 minutes away by boat from San Pedro they spoke a completely different Mayan language (there are 22 Mayan languages spoken in Guatemala and most are completely unrelated to each other linguistically).

In Santigao Atitlan we visited some religious sites. They practice synchronism between Catholicism and traditional Mayan practices. We visited a church where both Mayan ceremonies and Catholic Mass are practiced, often at the same time. It was very similar to a church I visited in Chiapas, Mexico in the town of San Juan Chamula which also practiced Mayan-Catholic synchronism.

We also visited the shrine to the local deity Maximón. The deity is believed to inhabit a wooden statue and the shrine location rotates to different homes every year. It is tended to by the family living in the home and a shaman. The statue is over 500 years old.

On Wednesday we got a day pass to a local resort for $20 and we got to use their pool, beach, and got lunch. It was very luxurious. We walked back to our hotel from the resort and barely missed a huge thunderstorm. It started maybe 10 minutes after we got back. The lightning caused a power outage in Panajachel which lasted nearly 30 hours. We had to navigate by flashlight and eventually candlelight once the flashlight died. It was very spooky but also kind of nice to be disconnected from everything.

I’ll post again tomorrow to tell about today’s trip to Chichicastenango. Until then,

#panajachel #guatemala #central america #lake atitlan #santiago atitlan #san juan la laguna #san pedro la laguna #travel

[aventurasdeunatortuga]

Guatemala Days 4-6

Antigua

The last few days have been spent exploring the city of Antigua. Overall it is a very small, quiet, Spanish colonial city. The air is cool from the mountains and there are volcanoes surrounding it.

Antigua used to be the capital city of Guatemala from when the Spaniards arrived at the end of the 15th century until 1773. There was a huge earthquake that destroyed most of the city and the major buildings (mainly churches) were destroyed. The city was abandoned by the government and the capital city was moved to Guatemala City. You can still see ruins of the buildings destroyed in the earthquake.

Since then, Antigua has been plagued by earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, which have resulted in the city remaining on the small side. It has since however become the tourism capital of Guatemala. Most tourists tend to avoid Guatemala City.

Other than walking around town there isn’t all that much to do here. There aren’t any museums and the 1 or 2 museumy type places are being remodeled/under construction.

Mostly I’ve been walking around eating at different restaurants. It’s been hard to find typical Guatemalan food, most restaurants are American, Mexican, French, Spanish, Argentinian, or Chinese. I’ve been visiting a lot of cafes and coffeeshops.

On Friday I did a self guided walking tour to visit the local mountain and then walked back down to the town and visited all of the old church ruins. The most famous of these is the Arco de Santa Catalina, a archway over the road that allowed cloistered nuns to cross the street without being seen by the public.

It’s a very peaceful town, despite being very touristic there aren’t much by way of crowds or noise or traffic. I like this town but I think I am ready to move on.

Emily is arriving later today, and we’ll be heading to Lake Atitlan.

#antigua #guatemala #solo travel #central america #travel

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Guatemala Days 2-3

Phew I’m tired

Yesterday I left Antigua with OX Expeditions to go hike Pacaya Volcano, one of several active volcanoes around Antigua.

Yesterday we drove up to the trailhead and hiked about 3K to the base camp. I was completely unprepared for how much the elevation was going to affect me and how out of shape I am.

After hiking probably less than 500 ft I was completely winded. We were also carrying big backpacks with all our equipment in it which I thought was the issue, but even after someone helped me with my backpack I still could barely walk.

You’d think I would’ve learned this after Peru, but altitude sickness really is no joke.

I ended up paying one of the guides to carry my backpack the rest of the way up to camp because I didn’t think I could make it.

When we finally made it to camp, we were engulfed by clouds. It was very weird. We camped there for the night.

At 3:45 this morning we woke up and began our climb to the volcano summit. From sea level to the base camp it was an elevation gain of more or less 2,000 feet. The summit of the volcano was a little over 8,000 ft., to give you an idea of how intense a climb it was.

We didn’t have to carry any gear at least, but it was still definitely one of the most physically difficult things I’ve ever done in my life. We hiked for about 2.5 hours through sharp, unstable, volcanic rocks and deep volcanic ash that was like walking through sand or snow. And it was straight up.

The rest of the people in the group were very physically fit (2 personal trainers from Florida and a family of hikers from Denmark) so I lagged pretty significantly behind everyone else. I had to stop and catch my breath probably every 2-3 steps and my legs felt like they were made of cement.

One of our guides, Willie, was so extremely patient with me and climbed behind me the entire time and caught me a few times when I started slipping. There were also multiple occasions where he literally dragged me up a particularly steep section.

I was almost 40 minutes slower than everyone else but I made it up to the top!

At the top we watched the sunrise and looked into the volcanic crater. There were no lava flows today but there was sulfur and steam everywhere and the ground was steaming hot. It was really really amazing.

We were also very lucky with the weather because frequently there are so many clouds you can barely see a few feet in front of you but we were able to see for miles.

The summit was very windy so we climbed down a little ways and had breakfast, then began our descent. It took us about 2 hours to get back to the trailhead and it was so much easier than going up. The only hard part was trying to slide down through steep ash and sharp rocks without falling completely down the volcano.

It was definitely more of a 2.5 hour controlled fall than a hike. Like those penguins that slide down glaciers or something.

When we got back to Antigua it was only 10am but I’d been up for 7 hours already and was so tired. I had some food and konked out for the rest of the day.

I think I’m either dehydrated or have some lingering altitude sickness from the sudden changes in elevation, my hands have been numb and tingling all day. When we were in Peru the altitude was more than twice this but we had trained for months by hiking a lot and we gave ourselves a week to adjust to the altitude before attempting any hiking. Also Peruvians have coca leaves which are an amazing natural remedy for altitude sickness.

I was totally unprepared for the altitude here, so I think that’s why it’s affecting me so much.

That’s what I get for only planning this trip a few weeks ago, but that’s all part of the adventure I guess.

The next two days I’ll spend exploring Antigua some more. It’s a lovely little city, very typical Spanish colonial. Emily will be flying down in a few days to spend a week or so with me before I continue the rest of this trip solo.

Hasta luego,

#guatemala #volcan pacaya #pacaya volcano #antigua #solo travel

[aventurasdeunatortuga]

Greeting from Guatemala!

After a nearly 3 year hiatus on international travel due to COVID, I am finally back traveling!

I will be in Guatemala for the next 3 weeks. Currently I am in the city of Antigua, I just arrived here yesterday. So far I’ve mainly just been orienting myself and getting used to traveling again.

I will give more info about Antigua in a few days, currently I am about to depart on a camping trip to the Pacaya volcano. I’ll be hiking the volcano today and tomorrow, and will post again when I get back.

Until then, enjoy this view from the airplane yesterday!

#guatemala #solo travel