Daryl & Heather Overland

For those unaware, China has strict filtering of websites that they consider dangerous to the regime (all the really anti-China websites, like, say, BBC News), and something like 10% of the web is unavailable in China. Up until today, that has, oddly, included our blog, which we have been unable to access for the last two weeks. So, before it gets banned again, because I mention, say, Falun Gong (oops!), I thought I'd give a quicky on what we've been up to.

The trans-Siberian was pretty cool. Six days straight on a train would probably have been a lot more boring if both Heather and I hadn't had the flu. We were just happy for the rest, really, and our cabin was pretty comfy. We pretty much just hung out, reading and watching Russia slowly pass by. A highlight was Lake Baikal, which was beautiful, and the two-minute stop at the lakeside where it was a mad dash to try and buy some of the excellent smoked fish on sale there; trying to get past the carriage attendant (who had obviously done this a few times) was the hardest part, but I just managed to grab some fish by leaning out of the train door as the train drove out of the station, and throwing some money at the seller. It took nearly a whole day just to get over the border between Russia and China, bureaucracy being a bit on the anal side on both sides of the border, especially those mistrustful Russians (and the wheel-base of the train had to be changed because Russian and China use different width tracks). Fortunately all of our paperwork was fine, and we didn't have any further problems with the cops.

Next up was Harbin, in Manchuria, North China. We mostly went there for the ice and snow festival, which was pretty amazing, especially the colossal snow sculptures. The city itself was pretty hectic, and virtually no one spoke any English (and our Chinese is about as good as our Russian, Finnish, Estonian, etc.), which made life interesting. The place had an awful stench of pollution, and the roads and footpaths were covered with an extremely slippery mix of slush and oil, which I found entertaining, but Heather wasn't as impressed. The temperature was a toasty -10 to -20 degrees.

We loved Beijing. Although it has some very modern parts, there is still enough of the old style city (little hidden alleys with lots of old houses and shops) that it's not hard to get away from the constantly honking traffic. We stayed in an odd hostel that was four floors underground. Nice and quiet, though. The obvious highlights were the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, the Summer Palace (although on a freezing day in winter it doesn't quite give the right impression), the giant Buddha at the Lama Temple and Mao's tomb (only one more - Ho Chi Minh- and I've got the full set, unless Castro dies in the meantime). Less obvious highlights was getting a haircut off a guy down a dingy little alley, with the most painfully rough yet somehow invigorating shampoo I've ever had, and fried eggplant in brown sauce; delicious!

From Beijing we headed south to a little walled city called Pingyao, which has the twin attraction that many of the old buildings have been preserved as museums, and parts are pretty touristy, yet many of the locals go about their bicycle-led existence as if we weren't even there. It's mega-low season at the moment, so we were practically the only tourists in the whole city, which was nice, but any hopes we had of the weather improving as we got further south were quashed in a huge dump of snow and freezing weather. We popped outside the old city walls for a bit, which was fun, because there was nothing at all touristy about it, and it we seemed to be quite a novelty for a lot of the locals, although the novelty for us was the big-stage karaoke set up on the street that ran for the whole day.

When we went to buy train tickets from Pingyao to Xi'an, there weren't any sleepers available, so we rather foolishly agreed to buy 'standard' tickets, which were incredibly cheap (around $5 Australian each for a 12 hour train ride) for a reason. The reason was that there is no cap on the number of tickets sold, meaning that by the time the train arrived at Pingyao to pick us up, all of the seats were taken, all of the luggage space was taken, all of the aisle space was taken and all of the doorways onto the train were full of people. We just managed to squeeze on, and then spent the next two hours trying to get from the doorway of the train into the corridor of the train. We then spent the next four hours standing squashed in from all sides, with more and more people squeezing on, constant smoking (non-smoking signs seem more advisory than mandatory in China) and, insanely, the constant back and forth of the the food-trolley lady. At some points the trolley had to be lifted, and rock-star-like, passed over peoples heads to a space on the floor some way past. The last six hours were a little more bearable, as we were able to take turns on a single seat (which I managed to nab after passing a guy his bicycle (over the heads of a few other people), which he had stored there). Suffice to say it was a totally horrible experience, but rather entertaining at the same time.

We are now in a nice hostel in Xi'an, and tomorrow were are heading out to see the terracotta warriors, one of the main reasons we wanted to come to China in the first place.

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