NO TIME!

This internet cafe is closing at its almost 11pm here. I'm in Phnom Penh, Cambodia and tomorrow is my last day. I'm going to take a bus at noon with Starr and Raquel to Siem Reap. That's right near Angkor Wat, where we'll rent bikes and explore the area for a day. Admission is expensive (relatively), about $20 for a day. I love Cambodia and if I didn't love traveling with Starr and Raquel, then the decision to stay in Phnom Penh for a week would be an easy one. I skipped Ho Chi Minh City in order to catch up with them, and I don't regret it because they both said it sucked. Not 'sucked' exactly, but they agreed that I'm not missing anything.

Ummm... I'll post again soon. Hopefully. I had an American-style donut today (made with Costco ingredients) and while it was pricey by Cambodian standards (49 cents) it was FUCKING DELICIOUS. Oh man I'm gonna put so much weight on when I get back home. I miss everything. Dunkin' Donuts coffee. Dunkaroos. Berkshire Brewing Company's beer. Biggy Iggy Ice Cream Sandwiches. Reese's Pieces. I'll make a complete list and post it.

Oh yeah, Phnom Penh has virtually no western chains, so we haven't seen a McDonald's or a KFC or anything like that here. I read that Myanmar has no banks, so I guess I'm learning how to do with less and less as I go further and further into Asia.

Also, thank God I carry toilet paper with me in my backpack. That's all I'm gonna say.

Bearded bunny bringing beer, biking bodaciously

I haven't been able to post in the past few days because, for some reason, I have been unable to get into www.blogger.com from any of the terminals I've been at. Thank Shiva I was able to find this cafe and get in.

So, I WAS traveling around with Starr for about 4 weeks before we split up. She went on to Ho Chi Minh City to meet her friend Raquel and I took my time getting down the coast. She just sent me an email saying she's bored so the two of them are going to cross the border without me, and I can just catch up in a day. Thanks guys. Thanks a million.

So, I posted some pictures of me and this fuck Juan eating cobra. Here's the story, hacked out of an email I wrote to Daniela and my dad.

After Starr left for HCMC, I was so bored and lonely. I didn't think traveling alone would suck, but it was and it was only my first day away from her. I woke up early on the 22nd, Starr left, and I couldn't get back to sleep. So I had some tea and then saw the corpse of Ho Chi Minh. The tomb was freezing cold and it was crawling with guards. I still don't understand why, but one of them grabbed me by the arm right near his body, and pulled me slightly out of line, but only slightly. Then he let go. So I looked around and then confusedly just stepped back into line. I don't understand what that was all about. The guys in front of me got yelled at TWICE for talking. It's pretty strict in the tomb, a tomb by the way that Ho Chi Minh never wanted. His will was apparently very clear about being cremated. That sucks.

After I got attacked by a guard I walked through the museum dedicated to his life and his 'excellent morality.' It all seemed like interesting crap to see, but I was bored for just about all of it, so I wandered back to the lake near my hotel at 1pm. A few Vietnamese people tried to talk to me while I was sitting on a bench. Some old guy slapped both of his knees in front of me and gave me a thumbs up. Some woman wouldn't stop staring at me and when I waved at her, she blushed and covered her face in her hands. Then, some Vietnamese kid (he must have been 22 or so) started to chat with me. At that point I was wondering if the rest of my trip was going to be like this and I was thinking about abandoning it and just coming home. So this guy caught me at the moment I needed him the most. So he was like, 'what are you doing man?' and I started lying because every Vietnamese person asks me the same questions and I've found out my answers don't make a slight bit of difference in where the conversation goes. So I told him I was Canadian, and some other stuff, and that I was looking at the lake. 'Staring at the lake is fucking boring. Let's go drink Vietnamese tea.' I didn't really trust the guy but I figured fuck it, I'm whining that traveling alone is boring and lonely and then when someone wants to hang out and I have an opportunity to do something crazy, I turn it down??? Come on! So I went with him. He and a bunch of other taxi drivers were sitting in a park, drinking tea out of a cooler and smoking, so I had a cigarette with them and chatted about nothing important. Then he asked me if I had eaten anything weird. 'Nope.' 'How about cobra?' 'No cobra yet.' 'Well I have my bike here, i can show you a few cool things and then we can go by a cobra farm and try some.' I was unclear at that point if he was a tour guide and wanted money or something, so he said that he's studying English (his was quite good) and that the conversation was enough for him-to practice I mean. If at the end I wanted to kick him a few dollars for the use of his brother's bike, then that was cool too. Awesome! So we were off on an adventure and it was only my first day of being on my own! Hooray! I was making friends and soon I was gonna eat cobra!

He took me to some tiny rat-infested pond with a giant B5-2 standing tail-up in the middle of it. He was like, 'this is the plane John McCain was flying when we shot him down.' Awesome! Click. click. click. click. It was in my guidebook too but I wouldn't have been able to find it on my own. After some photos, he took me to a bridge that Gustav Eiffel designed when France still controlled the whole area. Click. click. click. The bridge was pretty stupid and ugly but it was on the way to the cobra farm. Now, I'm gonna tell this story and I want to end on a good note, so first I'll tell you all that this whole thing was a scam. When the bill came, it was for 2.55 million dong. More than $150. He said he had only been there one time before, with his English teacher from Boston (I was surprised but I couldnt ACT surprised because I had told him I was from Toronto) and they were in a big party so it didn't seem that expensive at the time, plus his teacher sprung for the meal so he didn't even see a bill (I don't believe any of it for a second. When we arrived it seemed like he knew everyone there and he knew exactly how to drive us there despite it being quite a ways outside of the city). So I got pissed, especially after he was like, 'all I have is 200,000 dong.' I only had 150,000 on me, so I was like, well I need to go to an ATM then. He drove me back to the main road and dropped me at a few different ATMs (the restaurant let us go and didn't even make him leave his cell phone or anything so they CLEARLY knew each other) and I kept acting like I was taking out money out but I just kept cancelling the transaction so I returned to him and said, 'bad news guy. my card doens't work.' 'Well, where have you been taking money out?' 'Near my hotel.' 'OK, let's go there then.' I figured this was genius because I was getting back to my hotel where I knew my way around (I hadn't a clue where we were) and then if things went really bad (they did) I could just give him whatever I thought was fair and walk away.

I knew I had to give him something but how much? The place we went to was nice. Don't picture like a shanty town with a cobra pit somewhere that you can pick your snake from and they serve it to you. I never saw any cages or anything and the building was a nice two-story restaurant with classy looking woodwork and fancy table settings. Also, before we left the restaurant I asked to see a menu and it said 100 grams of snake was $10, or 150,000 dong or so. So I figured about half would be ok. So I took out 1.2 million (70 bucks maybe) and gave him that. He wanted more, we argued, blah blah blah, I left. He kept trying to get me back on the bike so we could return to the restaurant together but that wasn't happening.

Now, I don't have a clue how much that cobra should have been, so I don't know if he was being honest and I fucked him over and left him with a giant bill he couldn't pay (only I really didn't since I paid my half anyway) but 70 bucks for what it was was OK I guess. I'm trying to only think about how cool eating it was and not about the scam part. I couldn't stop thinking about the money and realized I was letting it ruin what was a pretty awesome day.

OK, so the COBRA!!!!! We arrived at the farm, but like I said it wasn't really a farm. The owner, a woman, came out to greet us and was carrying a burlap sack full of what appeared to be a really thick coiled rope. She starts to open it up and I just jumped the fuck back. She pulls out this giant cobra, a few feet in length. She handles it for me so I can get a few pictures (click. click. click. click) and then shakes it to piss it off so its ear-flap things spread out. It looks FEROCIOUS. Especially being so close. I take another picture and she puts it back in it's bag. Her and her husband (or whoever) seem not to be afraid of it coiling up near their arms. They never let it just move around, they were constantly repositioning themselves and constantly moving it around as well, but even if it's head got up near their hand and brushed it, they seemed cool with it.

So Juan (the Vietnamese kid who is showing me around) starts to show me all the bottles of cobra liquor and crap. He handles a jar of cobra penises preserved in alcohol (for sexual prowess) and jars of alcohol with whole cobras inside, etc; We went upstairs and they began by serving us a bottle of cobra penis and ginseng in rice wine (they all kept saying rice wine but rice moonshine would be a more appropriate description... it tasted more like vodka or tequila than wine). Anyway, so we have a few glasses of penis and then they bring up our snake. It's a few feet long and they uncoil it, and holding it perfectly straight the owner takes out her knife and inserts it below the head and cuts it open length-wise, letting its heart fall out and dangle and beat in front of us. The blood is all collected into a jar with a funnel below the snake. The heart keeps beating and the snake's blood trickles down and all you can hear is my camera. After that, they add some alcohol to the blood and swish it around for us to drink.The penises and whatever else in the jars can be kept, but the blood always has to be consumed right after the snake is killed. So we both do a shot of cobra blood while the woman cuts out its heart and serves it to me on a platter. It keeps beating the whole time I drink with Juan. Then they take the snake back downstairs and prepare our meal, which consists of dishes with almost every part of the snake added. We had cobra spring rolls, sticky rice with its meat cooked in, soup with its entire spine coiled up in it, etc; They were tasty too. Cobra has a consistency like tough beef but the taste is closer to chicken, only not like chicken... I don't know how to describe the taste and I'm only saying that it tasted like chicken because that's what everyone says about strange meat flavors. It did taste more like chicken than pork, fish, or beef though. Like I said, it was tasty. So we ate all the dishes, had some more blood, some more cobra penis liquor, and then i ate the still-beating heart. That was obviously the high point of the meal and it was perfectly timed relative to the rest of the meal. I didn't eat it to begin with, even though it was the first part removed, but only after we had a few dishes did I eat it. How are you gonna top the eating of a still-beating heart? You can't. So it has to come mid-meal. Perfect. I put it into my shotglass, still beating, then poured some of it's own blood over it, and took the whole thing like a shot, without chewing.

After that she brought the bill and I've already said how it quickly turned into a fubar situation. Even if I had paid the whole $150 I would still be really glad that I went.

So now I'm in Nha Trang and I don't know what to do.

Another update before I leave Hanoi

The journey so far. We left Japan on the 26th of January and arrived in Tianjin harbor (Tanggu) on the 28th. We spent the next 4 days in Beijing, then took an overnight train to Xi'an. We left Xi'an on the 4th. We were in Shanghai for three full days and left for Nanjing on the 8th. After two disastrous days in Nanjing, we returned to Shanghai to catch a train south. We arrived in Nanning at 1am on the 13th and only stayed long enough to get our Vietnamese Visas. We crossed the border on the 14th and arrived in Ha Noi on the same day. We've been in the area since then, seeing Sa Pa up in the mountains and spending 3 days on Ha Long Bay.

Starr left this morning on her flight and I leave on a bus tonight at 7:15pm. I tried to book a ticket on a hard sleeper yesterday but they were sold out. My Lonely Planet says that train tickets are rarely actually sold out and if I went around to the different resellers I should be able to find what I want. I didn't want to waste another day searching for train tickets though, so I bought something called an open bus ticket. My starting point is Ha Noi and my destination is Ho Chi Minh City, but this ticket allows me to get off and reboard the bus at any point along its route. So possible stops for me are Hue, Danang, Hoi An, Mui Ne, and Nha Trang but I haven't really made up my mind yet. The bus ticket was $31, so this is also probably the cheapest way for me to head south. The buses themselves are new and they all have comfy seats and air conditioning, but I know this is going to be a rough ride. When I arrive in HCMC I will have traveled for about 30 hours or so on the bus, so I expect to not have slept much and be sore. I guess that's everything that I need to write about. Wish me luck.

Update 02.21.2007

I'm back in Hanoi and Starr is watching movies/taking a nap upstairs. We spent 3 days and 2 nights sailing around Ha Long Bay and 2 days with 3 nights hiking in Sa Pa since I last updated. We got into Hanoi today at 4am and Starr is leaving tomorrow morning on a flight to Ho Chi Minh City/Saigon. I'll take a bus in the same direction but I'm stopping in Hoi An and Mui Ne on the way, giving us a few days' break from each other.

The Ha Long trip was nice and I'm sure a lot of you have already flipped through a few of the photos I uploaded to Flickr. We originally booked tours to both Ha Long Bay and Sa Pa through the first hotel that we stayed at in Hanoi, the Funky Monkey (not to be confused with the Funky Monkey gay bar by the way), but the prices that we agreed to pay, $82 for Sa Pa and $74 for Ha Long Bay, turned out to be outrageous. We didn't pay a deposit on either of the trips, so we just made up a lame excuse about needing to get to Saigon (it turns out that our friend is flying in TOMORROW and not on the 23rd like we told you, sorry!) and tried to cancel the trip with them. The contract that we signed CLEARLY said in the event of a cancellation we would still need to pay 100% of the cost of the trip, but we acted like this was new information and argued the guy down to $10 a piece. Even with an additional $10 tacked onto the cost of the trip through our current hotel, the Golden Drum, it was much cheaper. We wound up spending (cancellation fee aside) $38 on Ha Long Bay and $70 on Sa Pa.

We were picked up at our hotel on the 16th by a tour bus. The trip to Ha Long City took about 4 hours and it probably took another hour to get on our boat. We were served lunch on the ship and met these two English-speaking Canadian women, Colleen and Jo. Colleen is an English teacher in a high school in Canada and takes every 6th year off to travel. They were both pretty cool I guess. There were 16 people on the boat including the four of us, 2 Korean girls, a Chinese married couple, 4 French nursing students, and 4 more Canadians that were only staying for one night so they left us on the second day.

The first day was spent sailing around Ha Long Bay and we landed on some small uninhabited island to explore its caves. There was a Japanese tour group inside so I chatted up some woman and she was FLOORED that I could speak Japanese as well as I can. She did not see that coming. It felt awesome.

We slept on the boat that night and it wasn't until Starr woke me up in the middle of the night in a panic that I realized there was a huge rat in the room with us somewhere, gnawing on something. For the next half an hour or so we both laid, wide awake, in our bed listening to footsteps, squeaking, and chewing. I dozed off but Starr woke me back up when she heard something jumping around. I would like to state that had Starr never pointed any of this out, I never would have noticed because it was Tet that night and the crew of the boat was getting drunk and running around, making a bunch of noise for most of the night. The next day we had breakfast on the boat, landed on Cat Ba Island (the only inhabited island in Ha Long Bay), hiked over the island's tallest mountain, checked into a hotel, went swimming (neither of us had our cameras), were served dinner, and basically went to bed. On the last day we took a motor boat ride through some more caves, had lunch back in Ha Long City and then took another 4 hour bus ride back to Hanoi.

The Sa Pa trip started on the same day that we returned from Ha Long Bay. We were again picked up at our hotel, but this time driven to the train station. We took an overnight sleeper train to Lao Cai station close to the border with China. We boarded the train at 10 and arrived at 6ish the next day. We took a nice bus ride through the mountains to Sa Pa, checked into our hotel, had breakfast, and then spent a few hours hiking. The next day was spent on a much longer hike and everything you need to know about that is in the pictures.

We stopped at a little trading post thing on the second day and our tour guide, Lan ang or Nan ang (I couldn't quite catch what she said), chopped the bark off of some sugar cane and served it to us. It's pretty good. Very watery and moist on the inside and tastes just how you would imagine, like sugar water. You chew the pulp up, drink whatever comes out of it, and then just spit the rest out somewhere. We saw the Black Hmong kids chewing it everywhere we went.

Our tour group for Sa Pa consisted of a geeky know-it-all former IT British guy, Peter, who said, among other things that annoyed me, 'Yeah you guys really fucked [the Native Americans] over,' and 'they live in reservations now? I guess that's just a nice word for concentration camp.' I'm not arguing with what he said, I just think a British guy should know better than to criticize our politics or foreign policy. And he should have said 'WE really fucked [the Native Americans] over' since I believe native peoples were getting fucked over long before we gave up their accents or citizenship. There were also these three lovely French people on our tour. Chantal, Philip, and Bris.

Oh yeah, and the last thing I'll write is that I almost got my ass kicked by about 20 Vietnamese taxi drivers. This one goofy guy, smiling ear-to-ear (which infuriated me for some reason), kept staring at Starr and me. This happens all the time, but this guy for some reason would NOT stop and it was something about him that made me hate him instantly. So, being the faux tough guy that I am, I started to stare back at him with daggers where my pupils should be. He didn't care and it even instigated him a bit. The only thing that ended our staring contest was when he went over to a few friends of his (there were about 20 other drivers all standing around with nothing to do), said SOMETHING, and then they all glanced over in turns and laughed together. So when that first guy again started to look me in the eyes I blew him a kiss and intensified my icy stare. His smile immediately dropped away and he looked shocked. Simply shocked. It wasn't an ambiguous gesture and he fully understood the 'fuck you' meaning behind it. He then turned to his buddies and they began milling around. I suddenly realized how badly I had fucked up. I didn't stop staring and gave off the same 'I'm so mother-fucking tough that I DARE you to start something' look, hoping that they wouldn't call my bluff. And they didn't either. They all began walking towards the path that led up to where we were sitting, but then they all went past it and around the corner. Damn. I don't know what I would have done if they all had come over to me and started something. But it doesn't matter. I look badass enough that I scared away 20 Vietnamese guys on their own turf. I had better come back to earth before I return to the US or I'm likely to get my face kicked in.

I love Ha Noi

We've arrived in Viet Nam! We caught our train from Nanning at 8am on the 14th and spent all of Valentine's Day traveling in trains, xe om, and pedicabs. The ride to Pingxiang (right near the border) took about 4 hours, but then we had to get out and walk to the actual border crossing. Everything went smoothly on the Chinese side, so we walked maybe another half a kilometer to the Vietnamese border to get ourselves through customs. It was fine but the guy who checked our passports almost didn't let me into the country. My passport is an old school one and instead of the picture being printed directly on the page, it was glued in and laminated over. Well, I've since my passport has been swimming in Costa Rica, through the washing machine, and sat on countless times, its beginning to look like crap. The seal on the front of the passport has completely been worn away so that you can't even tell which country issued it. The real problem however, is that the corner of the first page is a little ripped and it just happens that its torn right on the edge of my picture. I'll be honest, it DOES look like I cut open some guy's passport and slipped my photo in. So this Vietnamese guy had a problem with it and after rejecting all my other ID, quizzed me on who I am before finally letting in the country. This isn't really so funny, but the woman who was working with him, the English speaker on duty, kept asking me incomprehensible questions, angrily, after they discovered the tear.

'This your paaporta?'

'Yep'

'Why it get tear?'

'I don't know, its old. I took it into a river in Costa Rica which didn't help.'

'hmmm... trang ig norba doob idefficon?'

'...'

'skippy doo whippa bum!?!? idefficon!?'

'I'll be honest, I have absolutely no idea what you're asking me'

(the man and woman look at each other, annoyed)

'Trang noor doob idefficon!?'

'idefficon??? you're asking me 'idefficon???''

(she nods)

'Oh man...'

So we got into Vietnam, and it turns out there isn't shit on the Vietnamese side of the border. We found one sketchy guy who wanted to give us a lift to Hanoi, but we've discovered that the only people who seem really interested in helping us out are the ones who really want to fuck us. So we blew passed him, and since these people only talk to me and ignore Starr, I had to tell him 100 times to 'fuck off,' but politely. When there didn't seem to be any other options, we went back to the guy to negotiate a price to Lang Son (our Chinese Lonely Planet said that there were trains to Hanoi from there), instead of Hanoi which he wanted 5 or 600 yuan to get us to. He told us 100,000 dong but there was another cab driver close by, a legitimate one, who said 70,000, so he quickly came down to 60. We got in and he drove us, no fucking joke, to the side of the road in the middle of (what looked like) nowhere to some guy in a minibus going to Hanoi. He nods to the guy, and the other driver hops out, opens up our door and tries to load our shit into his minibus. Our driver in his broken English is like, 'he take you to hanoi, good price, ok.' We asked how much and he said 200,000 (although I don't know if he meant 200 total, or 200 for each of us), and while we weren't quite sure what the exchange rate was at the time (that's about 12 bucks by the way) we were pretty sure we were getting robbed. So I kept closing the door on the other driver and getting really fucking angry with the guy (our guide says you should never do this, even in this situation) . No, NO! We paid you to take us to LANG SON, not SCARY GUY. You understand what I say??? Take us to the TRAIN STATION!' He replied 'No Train! No train station!' which later became 'No trains, its new year, no trains!' which later turned into him angrily driving us off in some new direction with his buddy following close behind. He pulled into a town, Lang Son presumably, and then pulled into some parking lot where his buddy pulled in behind so we could start arguing all over again. I just started laughing at that point because this guy was such a fuck, and then when I tried to hand him 60,000 to be done with it, he refused it saying he said meant 60 EACH. I put the money on the ground and told him he could do whatever the fuck he wanted with it. Then Starr and I walked away and got a beer to calm down. She got directions to the train station (1 km away) from these nice ladies who didn't speak a word of English. We hoofed it to the station and caught a train at 1:50 towards Hanoi. By the way, the trains here are really slow and uncomfortable, but it was still an enjoyable 6 hour ride. We got into Hanoi at 7:30 and I love it. I love it so much I would totally live here (Shanghai and Osaka are also future options). The city is dominated by bicycles and small-engined motorcycles and you can hitch a ride on one for practically nothing. In fact, it was raining last night and the guy who runs our hotel came and picked us up on one. He paid another guy standing close by to take me and he took Starr. We just hopped on the back with our packs and then they flew off, true Vietnamese bad-asses. My guy didn't even bother to remove the lit cigarette from his lip while negotiating the ridiculous traffic in the rain. He had a mesh hat on with a camoflauge front and looked like the Vietnamese version of a bow-hunting redneck from Kentucky (sorry Kentucky). We checked in and got dinner in the old city, close to where we're staying. Dinner was delicious (Vietnamese food kicks ass) and cost us like $2. That's only because we ate at a mid-range place according to our Lonely Planet: Southeast Asia.

Anyway, other people want to use this computer so I'm signing off. We booked a 3-day and 2-night junk tour of Halong Bay over the Chinese New Year (Tet in Vietnam) so we have that to look forward to on... Sunday maybe?

Nanning - 'Your Portal to Vietnam!'

Its 3am on the 13th. Starr and I just knocked out a 32-hour train ride from Shanghai to Nanning. I kind of feel like we're sprinting out of China (which is a bad thing) to meet her friend in southern Vietnam by the 22nd or 23rd. I wanted to stop in Guilin and Yangshuo on the way down, but she's nervous about getting a visa in time so we abandoned that leg of the trip. On the positive side, its finally warm.

The train ride was ok but Starr is sick. Wicked sick. She sounds like crap right now to be perfectly honest, but we're both drinking 6 or 7 cups of green tea daily and she found some Robitussin (sp?) in Shanghai. She was playing with this little kid on the train, where she would draw a picture of something and he would name it in Chinese. It was cute but I don't think either of us retained anything he taught us. Plus, as we're about to leave China for Vietnam, it doesn't matter.

Our hotel in Nanning is fucking sweet. Its a 2-star hotel. Not that the hostels were bad (with the exception of the Beijing one, which had some pretty rancid bathrooms) but we're clearly coming up in the world. We have a computer and internet access in our room, a TV with an English station, a clean bathroom, western-style toilet, towels, and free little soaps and shampoo. The hostel in Beijing didn't even have toilet paper in the bathroom (actually pretty standard in China it seems). And how much would you pay for all this awesomeness? Only 98 yuan my friend, or less than 6 and a half bucks each. This place is about 4 hours from the Vietnamese border too, which means that after we get our visas, we're practically already there. In fact everything in this room is in English, Chinese, and Vietnamese.

Nanjing was a good place to stop but it still marked a low-point in the trip. I really really really really really really really wanted to see the museum about the Japanese occupation, but as its the 70th year anniversary or something like that, it was closed for renovations. I was so disappointed. In addition to that, the staff at the hostel was terrible. It was only one girl in particular, but the rest of them were friends with her, so they're all guilty by association. The one girl we would up liking couldn't speak English so she just smiled a lot and never charged us for the internet. She was pretty cool. We couldn't get any trains here from Nanjing so we were forced to backtrack to Shanghai to book tickets. That pissed up off too. We would up pounding beers in our hotel room on the last night instead of going out. It was necessary.

Also, when I left Japan my roommate David gave me Buddha's Little Finger by Pelevin. I recommend it. Currently reading The Brothers Karamazov which was a gift from D. Thanks again.

Some pictures --- still in Shanghai

Still in Shanghai and will be for another two days. Atually today we're headed to Suzhou (pron. soo-jow) to see the gardens built on silk money. I wouldn't normally be down to see gardens all day but at least one is supposed to consist of optical illusions and another one is listed in '1001 Things To See Before You Die.' The following day we'll see more of Shanghai before leaving that night on a train to Nanjing. I really want to see the museum on the Japanese war atrocities and a few other things of historial significance.

Until we looked into it yesterday, we were planning the next leg of our trip through Hong Kong. I know that it's part of China now so I imagined it would be easy to visit. Wrong. We both have single-entry visas and while you don't need a visa to see Hong Kong, you do need either a new one to re-enter China or a multiple-entry visa. So, since Hong Kong is expensive and is going to be a pain the in ass to see, we're skipping it. Instead we're going from Nanjing to Guilin to boat down the Li River. After we kill a day or two doing that, we're going to Nanning close to the Vietnamese border to get our next visas. We have to be in Hanoi by the 20th (ish) to pick up a friend of Starr's who is going to travel with us to Thailand. From Thailand, Starr and her will decide what to do next, but my mind is made up to continue on to Myanmar, India, Pakistan and the Middle East.

Yesterday we went to the Shanghai Museum for some art and history, before getting lunch at the Steak King. So fucking good and it cost us $3 each. After that we walked through the old city, which was very Beijing-hutongish, and we both bought some touristy crap. I got a map of Shanghai in 1936 and some old sepia-tone photographs of the city at the same time. Starr got this metallic turtle locket thing. We made our way through some other parts of the city, just walking around until we got coffee on the roof of a Starbucks in People's Square (the second picture is from the roof). We'll see the gardens today and try to take in an acrobatics performance tonight.

Again, I miss you all and I'll see you when I'm broke.

Shanghai - Feb 5, 2007 9:26pm

Starr and I took another overnight train, hard sleeper, this time from Xi'an to Shanghai. We arrived today at 10:30am and checked into our hotel near Caoyuan Lu. It was a fairly slow day, walking up and down the Bund and checking out the architeture in the foreign concessions.

We agreed that Shanghai looks like a poor man's Japan. We have been appreciating how clean most of the city is and, unlike Beijing, most people aren't constantly coughing up phlegm and spitting it into the street and all over the sidewalks. The sound that will always remind me of Beijing is 'Aaaaccccckkkkhhhhhhh!' Everyone was constantly doing it and I'm not even exaggerating.

I had a love affair in Japan with nikuman, which are little dumplings filled with seasoned meat. I always got them from convenience stores and they came in three varities: pizza, curry, and meat. They almost always ran about 100 or 105 yen and I thought they were one of the best bargains in Japan. Chinese ones kick the ever-loving shit out of the Japanese ones. Now, granted, I got the cheap convenience store variety in Japan, but the ones here are unbelieveable. I don't know the Chinese name for them, but picture some kind of meat, pork or beef usually, rolled up with lots of veggies and seasonings, and then steamed inside of a dough shell. Starr and I ate vegetarian ones tonight that were the tastiest thing we've eaten so far in China (not really though). They were 0.8 yuan, or 10 cents US, and they had tofu, mushrooms and a bunch of green veggies inside. The people who were cooking them wanted to know, like everyone in China, which country we came from but other than that it was perfect. The place itself was even down an alley and there was only a kitchen exposed to the street with three Chinese guys making them as fast as they could inside. I had one filled with meat and fat in Beijing that was almost as good. Actually, better, but it had the unfair advantage of being about 50% pure fat inside. I bit into it and the fat burst out of it all over my hand. It quickly congealed and for the next 30 minutes (until I could find a bathroom) my hand was covered in hardened white animal fat. It was tasty and only 13 cents too.

We've both become fed up with the 'WHERE YOU FROM!?' question that we've both started to give jackass answers. Samoa, Japan, China, Canada, and Kokomo came up. I can't remember if I've already mentioned it or not, but someone asked me that question in Beijing and I said really angrily, 'GREENFIELD!' They asked the follow up question, 'WHERE THAT?' so I said even louder and more irritated: 'Near TURNERS!'

Xi'an - Saturday, 02.03.2007

Today Starr and I were woken up early by this French-speaking Swiss girl who wanted to go on the Panda tour that our hostel offers. Starr had told me earlier that she wanted to do it, but the tour requires at least 4 people, so I thought I was safe. We told the desk if anyone else asked about it, send them up to our room, 411, and we'd hire a tour guide. I was shocked that this girl and her robotic boyfriend were up for it, but Starr was so excited that I couldn't say no. And what I did instead, was be a real asshole the whole day and refuse to talk to anyone. I think I made the right choice.

The zoo/panda rehabilitation center was kind of a dump. Granted, Starr was able to get her hand and face licked by a panda, but I felt sad for the animals like anyone who has ever visited a zoo has felt. The golden eagles were cool because one of them got confused and tried to fly through the chain-link fence, WHACK, before returning to his perch. After he landed, a vulture in the next cage over started laughing its ass off and then all the eagles got mad and started flapping their wings and cawing back at it. I imagine thats a scene thats been repeated often and I was glad that I was there for it.

After the zoo we got lunch at this Chinese restaurant, which in itself isn't worth mentioning, but after a huge lunch on an empty stomach I fell asleep in the car and snored so loudly that I woke myself up. Everyone else in the car was laughing at me but they all can eat my ass.

After that we walked around the city for a minute or two and then booked our tickets to Shanghai at the train station. We get to most places by taking the public bus, which is a reasonably priced 1 yuan (13 cents) to any point in the city. It takes about half an hour to get anywhere though as this city, one you probably have never heard of, had more than 2 million people in it even 1,000 years ago.

We got back to our hostel, rested for a minute, and then walked around the Muslim quarter nearby. I bought this awesome fung-fu shirt (don't picture a Bruce Lee t-shirt, but a black linen shirt with silk lining and those cool looking Chinese straps down the front with a tight collar), and we wandered down some of the darkest and scariest alleyways in China looking for the Grand Mosque. Didn't find it by the way.

Now, I'm trying once again to upload my pictures from China and as long as no one stops my Flickr thing they should go online tonight.

Miss you all.

Xi'an 02.02.2007 9:37pm

Starr and I took the 9:03pm train from Beijing to Xi'an last night. We sprung for the hard sleeper since the train took about 14 hours to get here. We shared our six-person sleeper with some British guy, a Chinese guy who spoke no English, a young girl who was dropped off by her aunt, and a really enthusiastic Chinese guy who exchanged email addresses with Starr and the British guy before he left.

We arrived at 8:30 this morning, checked into the hotel that we booked online, and made our way out to the Terra Cotta Soldiers-spending an OUTRAGEOUS 65 yuan (8 bucks maybe?) to get in to the excavation site. They were cool and everything but I'm simply annoyed at the dial-up connection that every Chinese hostel seems to have. I guess you all back home should just expect that you won't really see my photos until I get home or to some place that has broadband. I'm about to experiment and try to upload all my photos at once, hoping that no one fucks with my stuff.

Tomorrow we'll check out the Muslim quarter and the city walls (maybe) before heading off towards Chengdu for the pandas and giant Buddha. We'll hit Nanjing, Shanghai and Hong Kong (fucking re-entry permit) before going to Vietnam. Miss you all.