The Amazing Race (around China)

[Excerpt taken from an e-mail written to 3 of my girlfriends from work on Friday, 5 June 2009]

Dear girls,

Sorry it's taken me so long to say this but better late than never... thanks for catching up over dinner at Mocha Jo's back in early May. Had a really fun time over good food and even better company!

Since that time, I spent about 5 days back in Malaysia catching up with relatives and my husband's old school mates. Malaysia is always one big gastronomic tour because the variety of food available is simply astounding! Also, coffee shops don't close till about 3am every morning and they re-open at about 5am so there is always food at practically any hour you crave for anything.

After Malaysia, we flew to China and our first stop was Hainan island down south. We only had 3 days in Hainan but it is basically marketed as the Hawaii of Asia. Most of the tourists there are local Chinese from the north who head down south for some tropical sun, surf and sand. There is now a large and emerging tourist market catering for Korean, Japanese and Russian tourists on Hainan island. We drank a lot of coconut juice and ate the two specialities of Hainan island - wengchang chicken (chicken fed on a diet of wild rice and peanuts served with rice cooked in the chicken's juices) and dongshan mutton (black wooled sheep from the mountain regions of hainan that were fed with orchids and camellias so their meat is very sweet and the dish is cooked in coconut milk - quite delicious and i don't usually eat lamb/mutton because i think sheep are too cute to eat... i know, my husband still laughs at that one!). The local beers in China are also good and cheap - some are even cheaper than water!

We then caught a train which is broken into two and then loaded onto a ferry! Nothing is impossible for the Chinese! This is how we crossed the South China Sea from Hainan island to the Chinese mainland! It was amazing to experience and watch. We met some nice businessmen on our sleeper train who were very kind to shout us yum cha when we arrived at a city called Guangzhou on the mainland. Incidentally, Guangzhou is the city where yum cha was birthed way before the Hong Kong people embraced and claimed yum cha as their own. The highlight of my time in Guangzhou was a visit to the tea market - I learnt so much about tea and will enter a blog entry about tea when I get the chance!

After Guangzhou, we flew up north to Beijing, the capital city. Unfortunately, the Chinese government has blogspot blocked in Beijing (I am not sure about the rest of the country) and even sites like youtube have been blocked for almost a year now! This is the sort of thing you get when controlled by a central communist government. All emails are monitored too by the way.

We're staying with a friend and enjoying the comforts of her apartment in Beijing at the moment. We've gotten to know Beijing really well having had so much time here and I know almost all the subway stations now (and there are heaps and heaps and heaps of them!)! We're actually already a week behind in our itinerary primarily because we have been trying to get all the 7 visas we need for Central Asia and Mongolia. It has not been easy and dealing with soviet style bureaucracy has been a very steep learning curve for us. At least we have also learnt a lot about culture and the mind sets of these former soviet and communist states. At Kazakhstan's embassy, we had to wait 3 days outside the embassy to finally reach the counter to get our visa applications processed! Once I got to the counter, the steely Russian ice queen at the counter would not process my application because one document had my Chinese name spelt as AL LI instead of of AI LI (ie. just one letter wrong). The worst thing is, this document was produced by the Kazakh Department of Foreign Affairs and she had just printed it out from their system - it wasn't even my mistake but theirs! So this gives you an idea of what we had to deal with. And this is just one embassy.... the others also had their own set of hiccups. The only smooth one was the Uzbekistan one which issued us visas in 1 hour - a real miracle! But, we have now learnt that a skirmish has broken out in Uzbekistan and its border with Kyrgyzstan is now closed! Hopefully, by next month the border will re-open as that is when we plan to head over.

But, we have also been assured that everything is in God's control and timing and travelling makes you trust God so much more. So many other things have fallen into place because we have had to stay longer in Beijing. We also waited outside the Kazakh embassy for 3 days and met another couple - a guy from Spain and a girl from Argentina who were just in front of us in the queue. We became friends through the whole experience, so much so that they have invited us to their wedding in May next year in Spain! We probably won't be able to make it but we definitely know that everything happens for a reason especially when we wake up each morning and pray for God to guide our day and order our plans for the day ahead. It is really reassuring to know we're not in this alone!

Our experience of China itself has been wonderful. Tian'anmen Square, the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace, the Great Wall, the Olympic Park, Bei Hai Park (it has beautiful lotus flowers and ducks in the lake and beautiful weeping willows by its banks... very pretty!) etc. have all exceeded our expectations in grandiosity. You begin to realise just how amazing and rich the Chinese civilisation and its history truly is. Beijing is ultra modern now due to the Olympics last year. Wangfujing is a big shopping district in the heart of the city and it looks like Little America in China with Louis Vuitton/Gucci/Prada/Starbucks, Haagen Das/Baskin Robbins here, there and everywhere. They still replay snippets from the Olympics on the little screens on almost every subway line. Obviously, they are still very proud of the whole event. It is charming that the Chinese have not built the new Beijing on top of the old like many other cities in the world. They have managed to preserve many of the hutong courtyards and alleyways around the city.

I must start packing for my early flight to Ulanbaatar (capital of Mongolia) tomorrow now. I am excited about the next leg of our journey and have been asked by a magazine editor i met in Malaysia to submit an article of my experience in Mongolia as she may be interested in buying it. It will be nice to do some some 'work' again that is of a fun nature!

Love,
Steph