Yangshuo

I got on an overnight train out of Shenzhen bound for Guilin and arrived Thursday morning. Took an hour long bus to Yangshuo and walked to my room. Guilin is a famous city in China for its pretty scenery, which consist of small rivers running through karst topography. Its hard to describe so look at the picture I've posted.



I'm staying at this hotel which is really just 5 rooms, its owned by this Chinese girl who owns a cafe and a climbing company, called Karst Hotel, Karst Cafe, and Karst Climbers respectively. I'm paying about $3 USD for the room. I might be able to find one for $2.

The town is sort of big but it is a small town. All of the tourism is concentrated to one street with bars and restaurants catering towards tourists. There are a lot of tourists, and since I'm back in China now there are Chinese tourists, whereas I never saw any Thai tourists in Thailand. There are also a lot of English teaching schools here. So there are a lot of Chinese folks here for the English schools and all the tourists so they can talk to them. I met these 5 high school aged Chinese girls who approached me on the street and asked if they could talk with me. So I went and played ping pong with them. They are full of questions, and sometimes they are weird but funny, like "could you please describe your lifestyle to me?". All of these girls are from Hunnan province to the north and they live here at the school and learn English. They speak well, overcoming their shyness was the biggest hurdle.

So I've been here 3 days and gone rock climbing 3 days. Its been fun, my hands and forearms are sore again. Sunday I will rest. Today was especially fun, 2 other people (besides the guides) came along as well. It was raining off and on but we went to this cliff that angled out over us so the ground was completely dry and it was cool to be out of the rain but outdoors.

So I'm just chilling here in Yangshuo, I plan on climbing some more, a friend that I met playing ultimate in Thailand who is traveling as well will come through here in a few days and wants to do some climbing.

Shenzhen

So my business visa arrived and I hopped on the 45 minute train for Shenzhen. Lam, a girl from another class at BLCU who now works for Maersk Shipping and lives in Shenzhen, met me at the train station. She has an apartment provided by her company which is very nice. Shenzhen is an extremely rich city, the buildings are nice and big, but it seems to lack the activity of Hong Kong.

So so far I've gone for a run at a track that I found and we've gone to McDonalds. I'm feeling a little but under the weather so I've just been resting. After this I will go to a place inland called Yangshuo where they have lots of rockclimbing and I'm looking at 6 days of climbing where they say they will teach me a lot.

Travel: Hong Kong to Shenzhen

Hong Kong is expensive so don't stay long. Get on the subway and get to East Tsim Tsa Shui or the other place where the KTR line intersects it. Get on the KTR bound for the last station of Luo Hu (Chinese name). Should cost about 20-30 HKD. Takes about 45 minutes. Cross the border into Shenzhen and good luck finding a place to stay.

The other way around, go to the port of Luo Hu, its a subway stop, and go to the port section. That crosses into Hong Kong. From there the only thing to do is get on the KTR train into the city. From there your on your own.

Hong Kong

I'm in Hong Kong now. Its unusually cold for HK, but a pleasant change after Bangkok. Stuff is very expensive here, I'm paying 5 times as much for a comparable room in a guesthouse. Everything is about the same, 5 times as much as Thailand.

 

I have also gone into business in Hong Kong. I'm now Chief Consultant of Ericksen Consulting based out of Richmond, VA. I will be heading to Beijing to consult with Beijing Ultimate Frisbee on how to beat Shanghai in a tournament in June. I went to a private Visa office, and said I wanted to stay in China for 3 months, but the tourist visa is only one month. She said I could get a business Visa for 6 months if I went and got a business card with my name on it. So I did, and now I'm in the consulting business. The Visa should arrive on Thursday and then I'll go to Shenzhen where I can sleep for free since a friend of mine now lives there.

Travel: Cambodia

From Bangkok we booked Air Asia tickets to Phnom Penh for about $80 US. If you book ahead of time you will get cheaper. Air Asia doesn't fly to/from Siem Reap so we spent a lot, I think $200 on Bangkok Air flights back to Bangkok.

Flying out of Bangkok, be ready with the 500 Baht departure fee. In Phnom Penh be ready with the $20 US on arrival Visa. There is also a departure fee from Cambodia, I think $20 US as well.

Out of the airport pay about $5 or $10 for a taxi to the city. The driver will be nice and take you to some hotels to look at. About $10 for an air conditioned room with 2 beds. A tuk tuk for the killing fields and museums should be less than $10. I think.

Use the hotel to book a 7 hour bus ride to Siem Reap that leaves in the morning. I think $10 per person. Its a quick 7 hours. Also use the hotel to arrange a tuk-tuk ride from the bus station when you arrive. They will take you to a hotel, you can stay there if you want. Might be $10 to $15 for double and AC.

Use the hotel tuk tuk to go and buy an Angkor Wat ticket for the next day, which allows you to enter the day you buy it after 5pm or so, you can watch the sunset. You can enjoy enough of the temples in that one evening and the next day. If you want more you should buy a longer ticket. Consult Lonely Planet for temple info. For 3 days of a personal tuk tuk driver I think we paid $24, including ride to airport.

Cambodia

Cambodia is a pretty cool country. I like it. The people are friendly and the tourism isn't as severe as Thailand.

 

After the beach and rock climbing I flew back to Bangkok because it was only a bit more expensive than the train. I stayed at a friend of a friends house for 2 nights. These 4 young Thai people lived there and it was a NICE place. Played ultimate frisbee on Sunday and decided to go to Cambodia with the friend that found me the place to stay, this girl named Jiew who plays ultimate and is from Bangkok. So we bought expensive plane tickets and took off Thursday for Phnom Penh.

 

Phnom Penh is the capital of the country and looks like it is still in the 70s. I'm assuming thats because of the civil war and violence that occurred starting in the 70s and going on and off until the mid 90s. The Khmer Rouge was the genocidal party that led the civil war. Thats about as much as I know, the history is pretty hard to understand.

Upon arriving in Phnom Penh I was impressed by the friendliness of the taxi driver. We negotiated $5 from the airport to a hotel, he suggested a hotel so we checked it out. He offered to wait for us in case we didn't like it and take us to another one, but we got a room. $10/night for two beds, hot water and AC. We then got a tuk-tuk (motorbike with a carriage on the back for 2 people) to take us to some sights around the city. We went to the Killing Fields where they took people to kill them. They have unearthed some of these mass graves and have a monument full of skulls. Walking around the graves, which are big holes in the ground, you can see bits of clothing and sometimes bone stuck in the ground. Kind of rough. Then we went to a museum at the main prison in the city during the Khmer Rouge. It was a school converted to house prisoners before they were taken to the killing fields. There are some nasty pictures of torture and the final 14 people that they killed at the prison as the Vietnamese captured the city. There are also the mugshot pictures of everyone housed there, and there are tons of young girls and small children. So yeah.

 

The guy at the hotel was also really nice, hooked us up with bus tickets to Siam Reap, which is about 6 hours away. So the next day we took the bus to Siam Reap. The scenery along the way was interesting, just houses with farmland behind. Houses in Thailand and Cambodia are all built on top of a bunch of cement pillars about 7 feet high, providing a garage and kitchen underneath. Then its just a house on top. Since the weather is always warm, the only thing you have to keep out is rain, so it seems like houses are fairly open, except for the roof.

 

Before we left Phnom Penh the guy at the hotel offered to have a tuk tuk waiting for us in Siam Reap for free. So we accepted and as the bus pulled into the station it was mobbed by excited tuk tuk drivers holding signs with names of people or hotels. They started banging on the window and trying to get me to agree to use them, they were all smiling and it was like a game, they were pulling each other back and all this stuff. But we went straight to the guy with our name on the sign and everyone was like awww. So the guy took us to his hotel and offered a room. This time $15 for AC hot water and two beds. Jiew wanted the AC and I was like hey thats a little high and so he offered $13 because it was high season. If we had looked more we could have done better but to be honest, its nice to just simply settle down. So again we agreed to have his tuk tuk chauffer us around for 2 days. We went to the Aki Ra landmine museum. Its just this dude who is dedicated to cleaning up landmines in Cambodia, which are a huge problem. If you search google for Aki Ra landmines I think you will find it. So that place is informative, but its bad to read about all the accidents that happen. Aki Ra has landmine victims working at the museum and tons of landmines that he has disarmed. So I bought a shirt and some stuff from the gift shop and made a donation. Then we went to the temples, because after 5pm you can buy your ticket for the next day and go that day as well. We just went to one of the first temples which is on top of a hill to watch the sunset. The place was swarming with people but the temple was cool. There wasn't much of a sunset because of an overcast horizon.

 

The next day we woke up at 5 am to get to the temples before dawn. We got to one as the sun rose. That was cool. There were only two people in this one temple that was being overgrown by the jungle. I think they shot some of Tomb Raider there. So we went to some different temples, there are tons of them but if you just see the different styles then you are good. If you have more than one day you could see more. That night we were told about a free cello concert at the childrens hospital so we went there. It was this Swiss doctor who was asked by Cambodia to set up and run a childrens hospital in 1992. He had worked at one in the 70s but obviously had to leave the country due to war. So now he's got 3 hospitals open that are completely free for children and he gives a cello performance every Saturday at one to inform people. He complains that the western countries and international health organizations won't approve the necessary technology for him because it doesn't fit the country's economic profile. But he says that you can't do things like blood transfusions properly with anything less. So once again the videos he showed were fairly saddening, and he liked to point out how the west and specifically the US had a lot to do with destroying much of the country and instigating civil war leading to all this disease like tuberculosis in Cambodia. So yeah. He asked for blood donations from young people but we were leaving the next morning and even though it was probably perfectly safe I just don't know if I would feel comfortable doing it. If you want to read more: http://www.beatocello.com/

 

So now I'm back in Bangkok. My Chinese visa has one entry left on it but expires 9 March, this Thursday. I could go to China before then and get it extended, maybe that would save me money by not buying a new visa. But I would like one more weekend of pickup ultimate to say bye to the folks here. I think I will just fly to Hong Kong and get a no questions asked but valid long term Chinese visa there. And its cheaper.