Vagabonding in Southeast Asia and elsewhere, without plan or destination.

Mopping up some remaining temples and parks in Beijing. The Temple of Heaven is the most famous temple in the world, says the Chinese guide. If you didn’t know that, kindly consider yourself informed now. It’s very pretty and harmonious. For the ancient Chinese, the earth is square and heaven is round, so there are…

The Emperor didn’t want to be holed up in his little Fobidden City all the time, so he also had a summer palace north of Beijing on the shore of a fairly big lake that he had dug. The layout and architecture is pretty similar to the Forbidden City, minus the big reception halls, but…

These days, the Forbidden City is forbidden only to smokers. The big sights that everyone knows come first – three huge halls, separated by gates, and the gigantic yards with the elaborate stairs leading up to them. After that it gets down to business; lots of smaller halls, the bigger ones with thrones for the…

The Chinese Great Wall is not like a road. Roads follow convenient low paths like rivers. The Great Wall, on the other hand, unfailingly picks the most impractical and difficult points of the terrain imaginable – the highest and steepest ridges and peaks no matter how they curve. I wouldn’t want to have to carry…

Embarked on a five-hour odyssey to get my onward travel booked. If all goes well, I’ll be on a train to Lhasa on Friday. Tibet requires two special permits, which take five days to process. All aspects of the tour must be submitted and approved by the authorities. I am greatly looking forward to Tibet.…

Spent the morning and early afternoon walking around Pingyao, since this is probably my last chance to enjoy a beautiful old town in China and its cuisine. Taiyuan is a few hours north of Pingyao by bus. It’s an unremarkable modern town, but much enlivened by plants an little parks. Ailing trees line its main…

Enjoying the signs here. Near rests the lodging, the foot cures the massage, Lei Lutei’s residence is built 180 years from now, Mr. Qu gets married if every tourist is interesting in this, in order to be fit of requirement of the plenty tourist, tell you tong xing gong escort service mind glass… It’s warm…

The bus from Yuncheng to Pingyao dropped me off right on the six-lane freeway. The driver pointed at the nearest exit and off he went. Apparently this is common practice, some people with motorcycles are waiting a short walk later. One leads me through a barbed wire fence, and he takes me downtown, first across…

Yuncheng is a modern city but decidedly not shiny an unkempt. Many buildings downtown are totally hidden behind billboards. I stay in the LP-recommended hotel, but it’s dank and not too clean, and very noisy at night. Yuncheng does have some lively side streets with markets, good street food here. It seems that no Westeners…

The main attraction in Xi’an are the terracotta warriors. Qin Shi Huang, the first Chinese emperor who unified the whole of China under his rule two thousand years ago, appears to have had tastes that ran into the extravagant, so he had a huge mausoleum built for himself (yet unexcavated), plus an army of 7000…

Lijiang wakes up at 9:00, and is very peaceful before that. Shops are shuttered, and people squat at the little canals and brush their teeth. Pink rose bushes are everywhere. Tried a “Naxi Pizza” for breakfast, but it was an inedible thick pancake soaked in grease. When I checked out, Mama Naxi gave me a…

Tiger Leaping Gorge is a very deep and long canyon two hours north of Lijiang. Most people there do a two- to four-day trek, but I made it a day trip to the most scenic spot. As I write this, I am sitting on the Daydreaming Rock down at the foaming Yangzi river at the…

Had lots of rain at night, and a short shower in the morning too. There is a hill that cleanly divides the old and new town of Lijiang, with the very tall Looking At The Past Pavilion pagoda on top. The panorama from its top over both towns and the mountains in the background is…

So which is nicer, Dali or Lijiang? My vote goes to Lijiang. Dali has wider boulevards, beautiful gate pagodas, and the lake. Lijiang is a maze of narrow alleys lines with old and low buildings, many small canals with little bridges all over the place, often lined with ancient dark wooden houses with little plank…

A short bus ride brings me to Caicun, a village at the large Erhai Lake close to Dali. From the bus stop, I join a trek of over a hundred old women with large straw hats, wicker baskets, and the occasional plastic bowl with fish, through the narrow streets of Caicun, along the lake, to…

The bunk beds in “hard sleeper” are comfortable and – surprise – long enough for me. The train arrives in Kunming at 7:00. It’s another boring modern city, although fresher than Huaihua; I take one look at it and decide to move on. Twenty minutes later I am in an express bus to Dali. As…

The day starts with a cold drizzle. Took the bus to Huaihua and walked about town for two hours. It’s typically Chinese, both modern and run down, with heavy traffic and no soul. They had cleared a huge area south of the train station for new construction. I got on the train to Kunming 30…

I was planning a day excursion to Denang, a small peaceful village two hours north. But I was the only passenger at the bus stop, and they kept cancelling buses. The weather had always been overcast in the morning with a hazy sun in the afternoons, but today it was cold and miserable. Further away…

More wandering in Fenghuang. Down at the steps along the riverfront, women sit side by side, washing clothes and washing vegetables in the murky blue-green water. There are even fewer tourists here today, although I actually met two Germans today. Restaurants have headless unplucked pheasants, and drying fish and flattened pig faces (really!) hanging out…

Actually I wasn’t interested in Huaihua, it was just too late to continue. My destination was Fenghuang, and today I took a bus there. It’s only 40km as the crane flies, but takes two and a half hours because the road is almost never straight and goes through one gut-wrenching curve or switchback to the…

In the morning, the fog is so dense that I can’t see more than 10 meters. I take the bus to Longshen, then another to Sanjiang. Both towns are modern and unremarkable. The road is scenic between along a river valley, but many of the occasional small rice terraces look neglected and overgrown, and the…

This Windows XP computer, too, is so slow, buggy, virus-infested, and generally unusable that it takes me forever to post to my blog. If this is what nonprofessionals have to deal with, it's a miracle that Windows users aren't jumping off high buildings all the time. What a disaster.… Read the rest

More walking among rice terraces. They have pretty much carved up most of the mountains around Ping’an. Most rice paddies are less than a meter wide. Like the fields, the path follows the contours of the mountain, and is mostly paved with slippery stones. Fog rolls over the hills all the time, sometimes I can’t…

Took another local bus to Longsheng. Quite crowded. The first nine kilometers went through Guilin’s urban sprawl, no less ugly than downtown Guilin, just highrise concrete boxes that hide the peaks behind them. The scenery improves after Guilin, first rolling hills and soon the road winds its way up to 630m, then back down to…

Took a local bus to Guilin, the other end of the usual Li River cruises. This town is totally different from Yangshuo – lots of traffic, asphalt, concrete, modern Chinese architecture that is supposed to impress but only manages to depress with its mindless rows of bland office buildings. They have narrow green strips along…

In the morning, I went out on a bicycle and with a guide, David Wong, the manager of the Hongfu Palace Hotel. He speaks English well. It took a while to find a bicycle that was large enough for me. David used an electric scooter because he was afraid that I’d outrun him, and in…

Addendum to Monday’s entry: at night I went to the Impressions Liu Sanjie, which is an enormous ballet of 600 actors that uses an entire lake and the mountains behind it. They use floats with little palaces on them that look like snowflakes, long floating platforms spanning the lake, lots of boats, long colored ribbons,…

Took a local bus to Yang Di where I had reserved a private boat on the Li River. The boat is made from bamboo and the bamboo is made from plastic. The scenery on the Li River is magical. It’s slightly hazy, and we glide on theriver between the huge overgrown stone pillars, forming a…

The bus from Guangzhou to Yangshuo takes eight hours, but there is so much to see that it’s never boring. All the long-distance buses are reasonably modern and comfortable, and unlike other buses I have used in Asia, quiet (both the engine and due to the absence of soap operas on the TV set). It…

Using the express train to Guangzhou (a.k.a. Canton) is easy. Bags are x-rayed, visa are checked, and exit and entry cards are needed, but everything is much faster than the same procedures in Macau. At the station, the candy store sells palm-sized chocolate coins, but only ancient Chinese motifs and Dutch 2-Euro coins. The train…