Happy New Year!

Over the past week we've watched the Chinese New Year decorations going up - blossom trees decorated with red envelopes, shops and homes decorated with dragons, firecrackers and red lanterns. People have been walking around with armfulls of flowers, and Hong Kong worked itself into a shopping frenzy and there are firecrackers aplenty. It is all very festive.

Hong Kong was a nice step back into Britishness - they drive on the left side of the road and they say 'mind the gap' in an English accent on the metro. It is clean, modern, shiney, and full of public service announcements about avian flu. We hung out with both our Mums who came over especially to see us, and we drank lots of gin and tonics. Hong Kong is also full of wildlife, with hawks and flamingoes mixing it up with the skyscrapers.

Of course our first couple of days were spent finding a doctor for Nicholas who was sick as a dog with a nasty (non avian) flu, picked up in China. The lovely doctor gave him so many drugs it was like something out of a Hunter S Thompson article for a while there, with Nicholas mumbling incoherently about rooms full of huge bats, but all was soon back to normal again.

We got to Guanzhou from Hong Kong on Saturday and went for a wander around the streets. The streets had that panicked Christmas Eve feel to them - last minute buying as the shops rolled down their doors one by one for the holiday. There was more going on the next day when we went for a walk to a nearby park and found it crowded with thousands of people enjoying the warm weather. The park was decorated with New Year things, including a 100m long dragon made entirely of china plates.

They say this is a bad weekend to be in China as everything closes and the trains are full, and Guangzhou train station, which the Lonely Planet describes as a seething mass of humanity at the best of times was jam packed with people and luggage. Ticket sale staff were stressed, children were impatient. But we got our tickets ok, and are now in Nanning, staying in a place called 'High Class Hotel', which we couln't resist. It's ok, too - our room has a brand new computer and internet, which you can't complain about. Our train arrived at 4.30am and deposited us, with the other passengers into the darkness. Some guy in a uniform wandered around poking anyone who lay down to sleep on the benches, but we were lucky to find a light, so read the Guardian Weekly, kindly provided by Soph's Mum, and still riveting, even if it was a couple of weeks old - we're a bit news-starved at the moment.

Down the Yangzi in a festering hulk

No sugar coating on this one - apart from a stretch of spectacular majesty in the 3 gorges area, the Yangsi is a sewer. A depressing sewer which is now becoming blocked as the 3 Gorges Dam starts to come online.

'China is blessed with a precious resource' the shameless propaganda DVD they showed us said as the camera zoomed in on a large block of concrete. The DVD mentioned how wonderful the Yangzi was as a river, and how much better it would be as a lagoon.

You could call it mist if you like, and there is probably an element of that hanging about in the charming stuff blocking our view of both river banks, but we guess there's also a fair bit of smoke involved.

Not being able to see the banks, our attention was drawn to the river itself which is notoriously silty, and suspiciously free of birds or fishermen.

Of course, it could be that our perceptions of the Yangzi were tainted somewhat by the fact that our 2nd class cabin came complete with heavy odour, unwashed bedlinen, flooding bathroom and a rat. Unlike the Chinese trains, these boats are not swept fanatically. In fact, you're lucky if they even empty the garbage. That's private enterprise for you. And unlike the trains, there's nothing to eat, at least the kitchen seemed to close every time we got hungry, anyway.

Enought whinging, and onto the interesting bits... As you drift down river, white signs on the banks indicate where the water will rise to. The initial stages of the dam have already been finished, and the current water level is 140m - it will then rise to 153m and again to 170m. In expectation of this, ghost cities are a major feature of the 2 day, 3 night trip - either old cities below the floodline which are being torn down, or shiney new ones looming above, waiting for the lights to be switched on. These are to house over a million people who have been living below the future high water line. They're quite eerie, looming through the murky air as they do - no lights, no neon signs, no glass in the windows. Elsewhere people are busy pulling down other towns and cities, breaking up stone and concrete and carting off anything useful.

We visited Wushan in which both demolition and construction are happening at the same time. From a distance it looks empty - brand new tower blocks with blank windows hovering above a huge demolition site. But once up the hill, the streets were bustling. We stopped in at a hairdressers for a quick shampoo and head massage, then walked down the street and stopped to watch some people making popcorn in a heated pressure vessel which exploded violently into the sack they had ready. Everywhere people said hello (sometimes then ducking their heads so we couldn't tell where it had come from, but usually with big smiles).

Things got a little livelier later that day as we moved through a part of the river which seemed to have some life to it, and into the Three Gorges themselves. Centuries of poetry has been written about nature's grandure, mists etc, inspired by this area, and with good reason.

Then, late on the last night we reached the lock system which now takes boats through the dam. We started around 10pm and were finally through the 4 locks by about 2am. One or two more locks will be built which will make the difference in water level from top to bottom over 100m by 2009 (and I can tell you, seeing the doors close behind you, and imagining the 20m of water being held back there is a bit scarey, even if they are the biggest doors you've ever seen).

We found a satellite picture at http://perljam.net/google-satellite-maps/id/2195/China//Shanghai/Three_Gorges_Dam
From what we can gather, we went through the skinny sliver of water near the northern bank - so there was a lot more of it that we didn't see.

Pilgrimage in business shoes

Well, here we are in Sichuan province, thoroughly enjoying the food and the scenery (when we can see it through the pollution).

We caught a train from Beijing to Chengdu with Jim from Alaska who we met originally in Ulan Bator, and the trip was absolutely hysterical. As with the Russian trains, we had preconceived ideas about what to expect on a Chinese hard sleeper - vinyl mattresses with no sheets and carriages full of smoke, but again, it was nothing like we'd been led to believe. The sheets were clean, the carriage was non smoking and the carriage attendants were fanatical about sweeping. And another thing, which let us know we were in China, not Russia - there was decent food. Every couple of hours a woman would wheel a trolley of freshly cooked food past us - 15 yuan for enough to feed two people. And it was noisy - Chinese people know how to have fun. At one point there was a group of young guys next to us screaming and giggling at the top of their lungs, another group was shouting over a game of cards, a couple of teens wrestled, a guy was shouting his sales pitch for a little plastic toy as he walked up and down the carriage, people were walking back and forth with instant noodles in their underwear, and over the top of it all, a Chinese Whitney Houston equivalent bellowed out of the speakers.

We arrived in Chengdu, then the next day we headed for the buddist mountain, Emei Shan. This is a world heritage site which is fairly unusual for having both cultural and environmental significance, hence the need for signs saying things like 'Protect the double heritage, cherish Emei Mountain', and also 'Nationally recognised clean mountain' and 'Nationally recognised civilised scenic tour area'.

We started in thick forests of bamboo, pine and such greenery late on our first day, and made it to a small hotel where we asked for 3 layers of bed covers and slept in all our clothes, there being no heating there. On the second day we continued past numerous monasteries and the landscape changed as we climbed. At certain points we would pass an area accessible by bus, and busy with Chinese tourists taking photos of waterfalls, and monkeys and sometimes taking photos of us, which was a bit disconcerting.

Late in the day it started to snow, and the previously numerous snack bars and monasteries were now few and far between. Whether it was the altitude or just tiredness, it was getting harder and harder to continue up the steps. But eventually we reached the monastery, bargained with a monk for a heated room WITH electric blankets - luxury. Reluctantly they also cooked some food for us, although the soup tasted a bit like floral soap powder.

Next day the snow had stopped, but the stairs were icy, and the Chinese tourists we passed had now put crampons on their business shoes. Either that or they'd decided to ski down the steps, laughing their heads off. near the top, the trees were made of ice, it seemed, and all was frosty and white. A juge golden buddah sat among the radio transmitters and building sites.

sour fish soup synopsis

I'm not sure if this is a problem limited to us personally, but we can't open trainspotterspotter. Butwe'll keep adding entries anyway, in the hope that it will reappear. We would email the nice people at blogspot for assistance, only all the text on their site comes up in Chinese here, so we can't read how to do it...

Not to worry, there's plenty to keep us occupied here. Today we hired bikes and went for a cycle around some of central Beijing. Just to indulge in a bit of transport talk for a moment, the roads are wide and the cycle lanes (often shared by pedestrians, but then the footpaths are sometimes shared by cars) are wide (at least 4m, and one seemed to be about 5 lanes wide), and there are still plenty of people getting around on bikes, so there's a critical mass against the cars... for now... but the cars are not at all patient, and things may not stay this way for long. There are trolley buses, and even brand new bendy buses, so our London cycling experiences were very useful in this count. The metro is excellent, people are polite, and a trip only costs 3 yuan - that's about 21p!!!!!

Roll up now for the 2008 Olympics!

The last couple of days have been a holiday here, it seems, and people are out in force, iceskating (and icecycling) on the frozen lakes and canals, playing hacky sack and practicing tap dancing in the park, and generally taking in the sunny weather.

A highlight for us has been the food - it is soooo tasty, and cheap, and it is soooo good to see some fresh vegetables again after the rather meat and dumpling-heavy cuisine of eastern Europe, Russia and Mongolia. We're in heaven. On the street you can buy roasted sweetcorn and sweet potato, and hand made honeycomb and skewers of tiny toffee apples.

On Saturday we vistited the Forbidden City - a massive complex of Ming and Qing era buildings which was very impressive, and which had an excellent garden of ancient trees. We wouldn't recommend the Roger Moore-narrated audioguide though, firstly because it doesn't actually have much information, but also because of his very annoying pronunciation of the word 'balustrade'.

We walked home via the ritzy Wanfujing shopping street - full of department stores and fashion shops. In an English Language bookshop we found last week's copy of The Economist magazine, which we always like, and noticed it had a couple of interesting stories on pages 26 and 27. One was about the (highly embarrassing) Sydney race riots (what the hell's that all about!!) and the other was about a recent protest in southern China during which police opened fire on the crowd. Turning to the relevant page, though, we found it had been ripped out. Suspicious, but not really believing it was intentional, we checked a few more copies, and found the page had been ripped out of all of them. Obviously the Chinese government is as disturbed by the Sydney riots as we are.