Grand Finale

My trip got to an abrupt end when I was back in Macau, after my 2 months in China. From Jiuzhaigou I flew to Shenzhen, then crossed the border to Hong Kong and got a boat again to Macau.

On my second day in Macau, when I was deciding where to go next - maybe India, maybe Malaysia and then India... - I got an email from my dad saying something like:

"I tried to call you. Call me as soon as you can..."

I felt there was something wrong. I called him and he gave me some devastating news. Alice, my 3 years old lovely niece, had been diagnosed with Leukaemia. She was in the hospital, about to start the treatment.

A traveller lives with a different mindset. Strange, unexpected things happen all the time, and one gets used to it, embraces it! The traveller in me made me calm and focused when I learnwd about Alice. I had to go back, to be with my family, to help them however I could. So I booked a flight from Hong Kong that night. The uncle and brother in me was so confused that he didn't know what he was feeling, nor what he was supposed to feel (a strange feeling that followed me all the way to Porto). I wasn't even sad that I had to finish the trip, all I knew I was feeling was serenity and a feeling that I had to keep it together in order to be able to help my family back at home.

So I calmly, quietly got a boat to Hong Kong, and then a flight to Porto.

A new travel was in front of me, in front of my family and, specially, in front of Alice. This was hard! Very hard! But she bravely went through it, showing us how brave one can be!

Now, exactly 7 months after this strange event in Macau, probably the strangest in my life, Alice finished her treatment with success!

Now I really feel a closure in my trip! When I look back I can't even describe how big all of this was! How beautiful, how bigger than life this was! So... now it is time to start making plans for whatever will come next... Who knows some more travels soon...

Ah... Definitely some more travels!

Looking for ferrets at 4am in a hutong somwhere in Beijing... somewhere...

Jiuzhaigou

After Chengdu there was one last place before leaving China. It was the Nacional park of Jiuzhaigou, a gigantic valley with mountains as high as 4500m and with water flowing from those mountains through the valley, forming some of the most spectacular waterfalls and lakes I have ever seen. This has been one of the most out-of-this-world place I have ever been! We met some more people who did the one-day hike with me and Zeev. We saw lakes of all possible colours, deep blue, green, red, yellow, some of them very very clear, with dead trees inside that you could see perfectly from above. Well... I will let the pictures to talk for themselves.

Perfect reflection... looks like a fractal when seen sideways.

Chengdu - Pandas and Hotpots

This was June 2013. After the epic journey through the Yunnan there was one last province, the mighty Sichuan! My references of Sichuan were the common earthquakes (including one with a magnitude of 7 a month or so before I was there), pandas and the spicy food (particularly the hot-pot with its Sichuan peppers).

My first destination was Chengdu, the capital of this province. After an 8 hour bus ride from Shangri-La back to Kunming and then a train ride of almost 20 hours to Chengdu. I read the whole "Into the Wild" book during this journey. I have it in my memory as a very pleasant trip!

Chengdu has around 7 million people. It is a large, but very laid back city. People move at a slow pace, and in the parks and gardens lots of people spend their time practising tai-chi, playing instruments and singing on some improvised karaokes with some laptops, microphones and really bad loudspeakers. The centre has some tall and flashy buildings, which makes it feel like a large city (which it is).

A pogoda on a Chengdu Park

A lady doing tai-chi

I met Zeev, my Israeli friend for the 4rth or 5th time during our staying in China. During my trip in the Yunnan he decided to stay in Yangshuo doing a rock-climbing course. We both were there, officially, for the food, but in reality (for as hard it is for me to admit as it can be) we were there to see the pandas! The last few living pandas live mostly in Sichuan in natural reserves. The Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding is a facilty/park where scientists research pandas and where they are bred! Apparently they rarely breed in captivity, and since they can rarely be found in the wild nowadays, facilities like these are extremely important for their survival.

Both me and Zeev were very excited with the idea of seeing live pandas in front of us... and weirdly enough, that excitement was completely fulfilled! It is indeed amazing to see a panda! Giant Pandas move more like humans than monkeys do! Pandas look like a guy on a panda suit! Red Pandas are quite cute, but less impressive than the Giant Pandas!

A Giant Panda eating bamboo...that's what they do...

A sleepy red panda on a tree.

And then came the food! I was warned that the spiciness of the food is epic here in this part of the world. I also knew that the Sichuan pepper creates a strange numbness in the mouth and lips. And to top that, every single toilet wall in the hostels had painful descriptions of the agonising experience of the day after having a hotpot! I actually had tried that before in the West, but nothing prepared me for how spectacular a true hotpot can be! Imagine a cauldron of boiling hot, spicy, magma-like broth with peppers floating on, imagine 30 degrees outside (higher inside of the restaurants, because of the flames under these pots). Now anything can be thrown inside this cauldron: pieces of meat, vegetables, pieces of tripe, lungs, anything edible. You choose what you want to throw into that active vulcano, let it be there for some time and... well.. eat it... then pray! It is hot and spicy! And it does numb your mouth! The heat is bearable, but it creates some weird effect in your mind! You actually get a little bit high with it! That was a truly remarkable experience! I had this hot-pot with Zeev, but after a few minutes some young locals that barely spoke a work of English helped us how to dip and eat the different ingredients while laughing and our red faces. They offered us cigarettes (as usually the Chinese that you randomly meet, and somehow bond, very often do).

After the hot-pot, with our minds flying a bit higher than normally, we joined this group of young guys and girls and went for a Karaoke night! Karaoke might be the worst situation that I can imagine myself in! But still, the highness from the hot-pot and the alcohol that these guys insisted in paying us all night, just made it fun! I sang Beatles, Frank Sinatra (of course), and I can't remember what else...

On another night I met a few other travellers from different countries that lived in Shanghai. There was going to be some friendly match between the NBA champion team and some local team. One of the guys in the hostel knew another guy who was part of the press staff that followed the NBA team. We met him in a club, where some locals paid all our drinks (just because we were foreigners), and at a certain point he asked us to, please, take him to some proper Chinese restaurant. All the NBA players and the people that went with them kept on having their fried chicken and burgers all the time. We had a fantastic beef noodle soup, something that he had so many times in the US, but this one was different from everything he had before... welcome to the monumental Chinese culinary, my friend!

Luckily there was no earthquake while I was there! Chengdu will stay in my mind precisely for the two other things I knew about... I would never think that I would admit that I loved to see a real panda in front of me, and I loved, adored, the food!

Shangri La

This was the last destination of my trip in Yunnan. Shangri La, what a great name! A name covered in mystery, the name of the town where James Hilton 'Lost Paradise' takes place. The actual name of then town is Zhongdian in Chinese, or Gyalthang in Tibetan, but apparently it was recently renamed to Shangri La to attract more tourism, given the mistique of the name. Hard to know if this is true or not. Nonetheless, this was another highlight of the trip.

Shangri La is really near Tibet, and might be the place that is as Tibetan as it can be outside Tibet, at least in the Yunnan tourists/travellers trail. It is rally high, at 3200m, on a high plateau. For miles and miles right before getting there the terrain seemed flat, with no noticeable ups and downs. I could feel the altitude the whole staying here, with short breath on every step, specially walking up stairs. The old town is really beautiful, although a bit touristy (typical in this region), but it has some beautiful houses, squares where people dance some typical coreographies at sunset, Tibetan temples, shops selling Yunnanese and Tibetan products and restaurants serving Tibetan food. One of the temples has one of those gigantic tibetan praying wheels that we successfully made it rotate, with the help of tens of other Chinese tourists. In many places one can see the typical Tibetan flags with inscriptions on it. The whole setting made this place completely different from everything I've seen in China.

The best was going to come on the second night. We heard about a Tibetan Buddhist monastery close to the town where 700 monks live and in which apparently it is possible to stay the night. We also heard that it is possible to get there without paying the ticket if we hitchhiked on a local person's car into the area of the monastery, and so we did. We passed the checkpoint without paying and reached the monastery an hour before sunset. From outside it was breathtaking! A big group of houses on a hill with the larger monastery buildings on top. Golden roofs, red, white and yellow walls gave the buildings this earthy feeling. In front of it there is a small lake and in the mountains around one can see the Tibetan (?  Ceremonial things?).

Once we got to the main door we were asked to show the ticket, that we didn't buy. We tried to convince then to let us in, but didn't budge. But one of them saw that one of the girls on our group had a trumpet with her (she was travelling with it) and asked her to play. She played a Jazzy tune, they smiled and let us in for free.

Once inside we walked around in the yards around the main buildings and asked the monks if we could stay the night there. It was not... We walked into one of the buildings where monks were praying while singing an hypnotic chant, but at the same time some of them talked to others, laughed and made jokes. We all compared it with the western religions, in which the formality is much higher! It would be unthinkable to talk and laugh at the same time other people pray in a church, synagogue or mosque, for example. We could not take pictures inside the temple... The walls are covered with very colourful Buddhist mythology scenes (some violent and almost pornographic), the columns that support the colourful ceiling are huge and red and the massive statues of Buddha and other characters are impressive... Imagine that the foot of Buddha is as big as me. A really magical experience, helped by the fact it was past the visiting time, so there were no other tourists, and by the light of sunset on the first day and sunrise on the second.

Part of the group that hitchhiked on another car met a local that offered us bed, dinner and breakfast at his place for 70 yuan. We accepted. It was not exactly a guesthouse, it was more like a big family house where other people could spend the night. They cooked us a Tibetan dinner: yak's fat, yak's cheese' yak's butter, tea with yak's milk, Tibetan bread and vfpoegetables. Everything delicious, except the fat, which is weird for our palate. In the next morning we woke up early to see the sunrise from the lake and had the breakfast: tea with yak's milk, 'tsampa' (roast barley flour that one mixes with the yak's milk), etc. We had a last view of the temple in the morning and then head back to the hostel in town. This day the group disassembled, as everyone was going into separate directions.

I understand how some westerners feel the spiritual call when they visit places like this and decide to immerse them in this religion and culture... It is more than a hippie extravagance... if this place is this magical I can imagine how Tibet must be! Unfortunately it is not easy, nor cheap, for a foreigner to go there, and a place like this is the closest I can experience to it in this trip.

Tiger Leaping Gorge

This, dear reader, was one absolute highlight of the trip so far... 

The Tiger Leaping Gorge is the second deepest gorge in the world, second only to one in Tibet. It is also an epic mountain trek in Yunnan, apparently not for the faint of heart and with fantastic vistas. This is all I knew before heading there.

The mountains around the gorge

The plan was to head in the evening to the start of the 16 km trail and stay there one night at Jane's Guesthouse, hit the trail as early as possible with a smaller bag containing only the essential for one night, until the Halfway Guesthouse, where we would spend the night. The idea was to break the trek into two days, to avoid the high temperatures predicted by the weather forecast after noon. The next day we would then walk to the Tiger Leaping Stone and then take a bus back to Jane's Guesthouse to pick up our larger bags and get another bus to Shangri La. The plan was followed with success, but it was way more epic than anyone could foresee.

After the night at Jane's Guesthouse we started the trekking. First through farms and fields and then finally we started to walk up the mountain. In front of us stood the majestic Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, 5600m and the Haba Mountain, 5400m, the ones we could see in the horizon from Lijiang, and we were definitely walking towards it. It has very steep faces and pointy peaks, with a light grey bare top with snow in some parts.

Jade Dragon Snow Mountain in the morning

On our way to the gorge we passed by a small village

The mountains still from far away

After a few hundred of metres up we finally realised the geography of the gorge... There was a river, Jinsha River, with brown coloured fast water flowing between the mountain we were on, Haba Mountain, and the mighty Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, which plunged almost vertically from its 5600 peak all the way to the river.

The gorge

Jinsha River

Finally we reached the Halfway Guesthouse after an exhausting 5 hours walk up the mountain, in which the worst part were the infamous '28 bends', a section of the path that goes up very steeply in a zig-zag, 28 turns. It was harsh... Same type of harshness as in the most difficult parts of Huangshan one month before. During the walk I had some enlightening conversations with my Chinese friend about aspects of the Chinese culture that I either hadn't grasped so far or only partially understood. Family, marriage, language and general mindset. This will deserve a post on its own! The farther into the Gorge we talked the more spectacular the mountain looked! 

The wall of mountains on the other side of the river

Eerie shades on the mountain during the afternoon

Snow on the top of the mountain (down where we were it was around 30 degrees C)

The Halfway Guesthouse was a beautiful wooden building with a courtyard and a couple of balconies facing the gorge. Both sides of the river were steep and high, which means that from our side we could see the other side as an almost vertical wall, thousands of metres high, right in front of us. Almost everyone doing the trek stops here for the night, so the place was full of travellers, some of them we've seen and met before in Kunming and Lijiang (a very recurrent fenomenon in Yunnan). We all had a communal dinner and drank beer in one of the balconies, with that out-of-this-world view. The group inflated again.

Our view from the Halfway Guesthouse

One of the buildings of the guesthouse

The balcony where we had dinner

Next day we walked all the way until the Tiger Leaping Stone viewpoint. It was an extenuating walk down from the high point where we were all the way down to the river, where a massive rock stood. Then we had to go up again. A 45 minutes agonising climbing of stone-carved stairs and ladders. At the end everyone was completely exhausted. After a shower and a meal in the Guesthouse on this side of the trek we got a bus back to Jane's Guesthouse. Apparently during the night there was a landslide that partially destroyed the road. We were taken until the landslide, where there were already machines cleaning it, then we had to cross it by foot and on the other side we had the bus that would take us first to Jane's Guesthouse, where we picked up our bags, and then to Shangri La.

A wooden bridge next to the Tiger Leaping Stone

Tiger Leaping Stone, next to the rapids

Passing the landslide

That night in the gorge I had a dream where the gigantic mountain-wall in front of us, that almost reached the sky, mixed with the walls at the guesthouse in Macau, which almost reached the ceiling. I realised that in the gorge I had a weird feeling of almost being indoors, given the wall-like structures all around, and in the same way I felt that I was almost outdoors in the guesthouse in Macau, also because of the walls. Strange feeling that I will never forget.