Along the Mekong

We have been on the road quite a bit in the last two weeks. After our China trip, we spent four days in Singapore and met up with one of Benoit's friends who works and lives there. Then we flew to Bangkok, where we stayed two days, visiting all its shiny temples and trying to score some cheap clothes and (travel) books. Without result, Thailand isn't that cheap anymore. But the main reason for flying to Thailand was our trip to Laos. Most people enter this former French colony by its neighboring countries Vietnam or Thailand because flying into Laos is complicated and rather expensive. 

From Bangkok, we continued to Chiang Kong, the north of the country by night bus. When we arrived there early in the morning, we hopped into a little boat that crossed the Mekong river and dropped us off, only three minutes later in Huay Xai, Laos.

We had our visas arranged at the immigration post and I was a little annoyed that I, being a Belgian citizen had to pay more for that than Benoit, who's French. Only five dollars, but still...

After the visa stop,it went on to the port of Huay Xai, where we embarked on a slow boat to Luang Prabang. A very slow boat. We would be on it for two entire days before setting foot in Luang Prabang. The night would be spent in a guest house in the tiny village of Pak Being, just halfway.

When entering the port, our hearts sank. This Mekong 'cruise' was not going to be as romantic as we'd hoped for when we saw the wooden, wobbly, pimped out bamboo raft, equipped with car seats! When we were joined by 83 fellow travelers (capacity said:70) we really regretted not having bought a simple bus ticket.

But: pessimists are always wrong and surprisingly enough, we kind of enjoyed these two days of slow travel! We caught up on sleep -yes we managed to sleep on those funny car seats- we listened to music, watched some series on the iPad, read, prepared the next leg of our trip and made new friends. All while enjoying very green and unspoiled views of Laos along the Mekong.

  

Our first friend in Laos! He's the 2-year old son of the guest house owner in Pak Beng. Such a happy little man! He joined us for some beers and a game of Angry Birds...

Mountains!

Despite a frightening weather forecast, we spent 5 days in and around Yangshuo and Guilin in southern China without a drop of rain! This region is very popular with Chinese tourists and the roads leading to some of the most scenic spots are congested with loud honking buses. We managed to escape all of that by venturing into the countryside on our rented bicycles and enjoyed the karst mountains, the rice plantations and the Li River quietly by ourselves.

I edited the pictures a little bit, instagram style, hope you'll like it!

 

Shanghai

I don't really know what to write about Shanghai. Benoit absolutely wanted to see it, so that's why we stayed there two days, but I wasn't a big fan. I found it a little bit depressing. It is very modern, very commercial, there are thousands of expats. But the thing that really bothered me was the sky-or the absence of sky. It's grey all day long in summer, because of pollution. The picture just below is taken at 2 pm. No sun, no clouds, no sky and soooo hot and humid. The old part of Shanghai is quite picturesque but very commercialized. At the risk of sounding repetitive here, we did have a good time in Shanghai though, thanks to our couch surf host Jiandong. He's born and raised in this city and loves it. He took us to some good restaurants and if I have to say one positive thing about  Shanghai, I'll definitely make compliments to its food!

(Tomorrow 'greener' pictures of the south!)

Eat.Drink.Teach

Eat: I'm thinking about starting a second blog... a food blog. We took pictures of every single meal we had in China. Simply because the food was always good! Credit goes to all of our hosts, who took us to their favorite restaurants and let us discover real and tasty Chinese specialties. Personal favorites are the Peking duck and the spicy lobster we had in Shanghai. 

Drink: Chinese people love to drink beer and to 'gan bei', which means you have to gulp down your drink in one sip whenever someone at your table says 'ganbei'. 

Ning's favorite beer used to be Heineken, but that was before we met and before we went to a Belgian bar together....

Teach: We contacted a Chinese couch surfer in the south of China, who is an English teacher. On his profile, he asked people to come to his school and speak to his students, two hours per day. In exchange we would be given a room in his school. We thought this was a brilliant idea and we felt excited to volunteer. The students are adults, who intensively study English during a certain period of time, usually for five months and this  eight hours a day. They are from all over China and they all want to improve their English for job purposes. The first day of teaching started quite ok, Benoit and I were each given a class room and students came to us for half an hour one-on-on talk. 

When this was finished, the teacher/couch surfer came to us and apologized, saying that there were no rooms available in his school but that we could sleep in one of the living rooms, in a tent(?!). The dorms of the school were a bit out of the town, so when we arrived there, we discovered that the living room was actually some sort of dirty kitchen without furniture. We had to put up a tent in there, otherwise we would have been eaten by mosquitos, we had to share a tiny mattress and it was like 50 degrees in that place, no fan available! How we felt exploited by that Chinese man:-)

Obviously we complained, but the guy couldn't or didn't want to change anything about  our sleeping situation, so we booked a room in the hotel next door:-s

That night we were considering not going back to that school the next day (we signed up for 3 evenings of teaching) but we were so scared the man would give us a negative review on couch surfing, which would make it more difficult in the future to find hosts, so we decided to go back,haha. And after all, the students were incredibly sweet!

The second evening of teaching was just unbelievable. We were each given an entire class of about eight students and we had to talk two hours about 'feelings'.They gave us two bottles of beer, probably to make it easier to talk?? My students' English level was ok and we had quite funny conversations. But Benoit's students were complete beginners, they could barely count till ten. They didn't understand a single word he was saying, so he had to look for help and they brought someone in who could translate a little. But I think these two hours are still the longest of his life! :-) The next day, we decided to leave the town and that was the end of our teaching adventure!

Spicy lobster, so good! The boy with the glasses was our host Jiandong. He and his friend on the picture are both aircraft engineers. Very clever and very funny guys!

       The green liquid is a desert! It's a sweet, green bean soup. Sounds strange but it's surprisingly tasty!

       Noodle soup in the streets of Shanghai, still tricky to eat those with chop sticks:-)

         Our Chinese students; very adorable and enthusiastic!

West Lake

Our travel itinerary for China said: 5 days Beijing, then spend the rest of our 2,5 weeks in the mountains of South China. But after looking at the weather forecast over there (thunderstorms, rain, temperatures over 35 degrees), we decided to shorten the trip down south and look for drier alternatives. So we flew to Shanghai and stayed a couple of days in this eastern part of China. I will write about super modern (and ugly, in my opinion) Shanghai later, but first we went to Hangzhou. Many Chinese love this place and vacation there and we easily found out why. Unlike other places, it has a huge lake and is surrounded by mountains, which gives it a pleasant and fresh vibe. Almost like Geneva!

We couch surfed with Charlie (you'll see him in one of the pictures) and once again, we had an amazing time! Charlie just graduated from NYU and was spending the summer with his parents in Hangzhou. In September he's moving to Switzerland where he'll be studying at a very prestigious business school, so we'll meet him again!

One of the highlights of our trip to Hangzhou was our visit to the Lingyin temple. This temple is part of a big buddhist center, with several monasteries, pagodas, buddhist rock carvings and other smaller temples. Very busy when you enter it, but once you've walked away from the crowds and you've climbed some hills, you'll find yourself in more quiet parts of this religious retreat. When we were taking a rest, a monk came up to us and tried to start a conversation. A bit later, a women, apparently his English teacher, joined us. She had been encouraging him to speak to foreigners and practice his English. So we started to talk to both of them, taking advantage of this opportunity to ask the monk all our questions about Buddhism, monks, monasteries, female monks,....He replied to everything and his teacher patiently translated. After all, he had just started his classes:-)

The teacher herself was also very interesting. She explained that she was about to retire and that after her retirement, she wanted to become a buddhist nun. The monk she was teaching, was her master, helping her to prepare her future. Even though it is very hard to become a monk, becoming a nun is even more complicated. Women have to follow more rules and harder trainings because they are believed to have more emotions and more passions than men, which are hard to let go of. Well, it seems a bit unfair but in a way it makes sense.

We spent about an hour and a half with these two people and it probably sounds very cliché, but after this meeting we felt very humble and quiet, determined not to be focused so much on the materialistic side of life. (well, that's a bit easier when you're traveling, I guess)

Beijing Part 2

More pictures of Beijing, where we visited the Lama Temple, one of the biggest Tibetan buddhist temples in the world. We had THE duck, with our host Ning who took us to an excellent restaurant to try this world famous Beijing dish. We also went to the zoo, just to see pandas and we discovered the 798 Art District. An area full of art galleries, museums and coffee shops, located in a huge old factory in the middle of Beijing. It's a must see, not only because it is quiet there, but there are always many things going on; exhibitions, photo shoots, shows etc.