27 Nov - 30 Nov 2012 Guiyang

East Asia
Guìzhōu Province
Baoshan Beilu 176
20th Floor, Jiaxinhuating Bldg.
Crapemyrtle Hotel +868516764268
Sizeable, well-kept double room (no. 216) on the 20th floor, with wifi, private bathroom, comfy bed and panoramic views of the city, for a heavily discounted CNY 140.- or US$ 22.50 per night. Indifferent staff, no English.
Beer: 518-ml bottles of cold Snow Beer Premium Light (3.3 % alcohol) for only CNY 3.50 from any of the small mom-and-pop stores round the corner.


Click below for an interactive satellite view of the Crapemyrtle Hotel in Guiyang, which we would recommend, and for directions:
N 26° 35.39' E 106° 42.98'
Note the random 0 - 500 m misalignment between Goggle's maps and satellite views of the motherland, courtesy of the paranoid Chinese Communist Party.



 
Enduring more than a week without sunshine, seeing with our own eyes the heavy air pollution (which resembles nuclear winter) in Guiyang, a rapidly growing 5-million-people city, and reading on the internet the official Chinese statement at the U.N. climate talks in the Qatari capital of Doha, which confirms that China’s carbon emissions won’t peak by the year 2020 CE: "We are still in the process of industrialisation and we are also confronted with the enormous task of poverty eradication. In order to improve the living standards, certainly we need to develop our economy. So the emissions will need to grow for a period of time..." - almost 1.5 billion people in this overpopulated country plus a lot of monkeys, pigs, dogs, cats, sheep, goats and rats; their farting alone makes global warming inevitable.

“One hundred and fifty years ago, the monster began, this country had become a place of industry. Factories grew on the landscape like weeds. Trees fell, fields were up-ended, rivers blackened. The sky choked on smoke and ash, and the people did, too, spending their days coughing and itching, their eyes turned forever toward the ground. Villages grew into town, towns into cities...”

Going on a day trip to heavily sanitised, commercialised and disneyfied Qīngyán Ancient Town (city bus no. 1 for CNY 1.- from our hotel to Guiyang’s Hebin Park bus stop and hereafter city bus no. 210 for CNY 3.- to Qīngyán, c. 30 km, 1 hour), a former Ming-era military outpost, dating back to 1378 CE, with more than 30 monasteries, temples, caves, courtyards and palaces, and, being the only long-nosed barbarians amongst all those civilised people, becoming immediately the number-one attraction to the prying eyes of friendly hoards of domestic tourists (i) who incessantly wanted to take dozens of souvenir photos together with us foreign devils, (ii) who unrestrainedly pulled on Matt’s underarm hair in order to test its genuineness, and (iii) who nosily bombarded us with hundreds of private questions, luckily always in Mandarin, Cantonese or in some other Chinese dialect.
Watching, for the first time in Red China, a fantastic lion-dance performance, a 3,000 -year-old Chinese tradition that symbolises prosperity, luck and happiness, performed at a store opening in downtown Guiyang, and learning that lion dance had been labelled as “bourgeois and decadent” and subsequently banned by the communist regime during the Cultural Revolution.
“As I gazed at Mao’s face wearing what was intended as a benign expression but was in fact a smirk of self-satisfaction, I wondered how one single person could have caused the extent of misery that was prevailing in China. There must be something lacking in our own character, I thought, that had made it possible for his evil genius to dominate."


Catching Guiyang’s double-decker city bus no. 2 (CNY 1.- per person) to Guiyang’s main train station, taking the (overnight) a/c fast train no. K394 (796 km, 12 hours, CNY 197.- or US$ 31.60 per person for comfy “hard sleeper/lower berth”; sharing the compartment with shouting, spitting, snoring, smoking and copulating mature mainlanders; listening all day to their phlegm clearing aka "Chinese singing") from Guiyang to Guilin, famous for Guangxi’s otherworldly karst topography, and thereafter catching from Guilin’s bus station a public bus to touristy Yangshou (c. 70 km, 1 ½ hours, CNY 20.- or US$ 3.20 per person) and connecting immediately with a local bus to ATM-free, low-key Xingping (c. 25 km, 1 hours, CNY 7.- or US$ 1.10 per person), a traditional Chinese one-horse town situated at the confluence of Li River and Dayuan River and surrounded by stunning karst mountains and a mind-boggling scenery. 


2012 Map Konni & Matt


Facing China
© Konni & Matt


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24 Nov - 27 Nov 2012 Guiyang






East Asia
Guìzhōu Province
Sichuan Alley 26
Adequate double room with private bathroom (clean Asian squat toilet), wifi only in the lobby, for CNY 140.- or US$ 22.50 per night. Very (foreigner-)friendly and co-operative English speaking young staff.
Beer: 500-ml bottles of cold Snow Beer (c. 3.3 % alc./vol.) for a fair CNY 4.- or US$ 0.65 from the hostel.


Click below for an interactive satellite view of the Guiyang Backpacker Youth Hostel in Guiyang, which we would recommend, and for directions:
Note the random 0 - 500 m misalignment between Goggle's maps and satellite views of the motherland, courtesy of the paranoid Chinese Communist Party.

   



Attempting to fathom the contradictions of contemporary Red China (e.g. many extremely poor people vs. the potty-mouthed nouveau riche; white-tiled socialist-era workers’ housing vs. stylish and luxurious apartments; dirty but lively wet markets vs. glitzy but empty international-brand boutiques; rusty Chinese tricycles vs. shiny German luxury cars; aggressively begging cripples vs. well-groomed members of the Communist Party) in totally non-touristy Guiyang, a rather nondescript megacity populated by 23 different minorities (the most populous of which is the Miao people, in addition to the ethnic Han), whilst ticking off the city's “must-see" sights: (i) one of the nation’s largest Mao statues at Renmin Square, (ii) the Ming-dynasty Cuiwei Gongyuan near the triple-roofed 1528 CE Jiaxiu  Tower, also called First Scholar's Tower, situated on Fuyu Bridge over the heavily polluted Nanming River, and (iii) another Ming-dynasty specialty, the restored Wenchang Pavilion with its fake city walls.



 Hibernating during a week-long spell of abnormally cold weather (Aldous Huxley: “Your true traveler finds boredom rather agreeable than painful; it is the symbol of his liberty, his excessive freedom; he accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure...”) and warming up with the help of (i) many strong hot grogs made from excellent Chinese sorghum/rice/corn hooch aka baijiu (with 37 - 52 % alc./vol.; our favourite booze: the hangover-free Beijing Red Star aka Hongxing brand for only CNY 8.- per 0.5-litre bottle), (ii) delicious pescetarian/vegetarian (“…wŏmen bù chī gŏuròu…”) hotpot meals for all-inclusive CNY 35.- or US$ 5.60 at the many old-school hole-in-the-wall diners (with cigarette buts on the floor, plastic-film covered tables and a wok fired over a flame of rocket-launch proportions) in our rugged down-town neighbourhood and (iii) the almost life-saving discovery that the powerful Changhong air-conditioning in our room (“Made in China”) could be used as a room heater up to the comfortable temperature of 32° C.
Click below for more blog posts about delicious Chinese food
17 Sep - 23 Sep 2012 Kinmen
31 Aug - 05 Sep 2012 Xian
23 Aug - 28 Aug 2012 Pingyao
20 Aug - 23 Aug 2012 Datong
03 Jul - 31 Jul 2012 Beijing

Click below for a summary of this year's travels
2012 Map Konni & Matt


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Destination:

19 Nov - 23 Nov 2012 Kunming






East Asia
People’s Republic of China aka Red China
Yunnan Province
Kunming Cuihu Nanlu
Huanggong Dongjie
Yiqiutian No. 7
Lost Garden Guest House +868715111127 lostgardenguesthouse@gmail.com
New and clean twin room with shared bathroom for CNY 120.- or US$ 19.30 per night. Wifi only in the restaurant, not in the room. Indifferent but reasonably friendly staff.
Beer: 600-ml bottles of cold Tsingtao Beer (4.0 % alc./vol.) for a stiff CNY 15.- or US$ 2.40 from the guesthouse’s overpriced restaurant. Alternative: 580-ml bottles of cold Harbin Beer (3.3. % alc./vol.) for a fair CNY 4.- or US$ 0.65 from any of the small mom-and-pop stores round the corner.
Click below for an interactive satellite view of the Lost Garden Guest House in Kunming, which we would recommend, and for directions:
N 25° 02.97' E 102° 42.27'
Note the random 0 - 500 m misalignment between Google’s maps and satellite views of the motherland, courtesy of the paranoid Chinese Communist Party.


 
Exploring Kunming’s modern and vibrant city centre with its few remaining genuine historic sights (one Confucius Temple, two Tang-Dynasty Pagodas and three old shop houses at the Flower & Bird Market), reminiscing about the foregone days, more than ten years ago, when our inquisitive number-one-daughter Ulrike studied here at the Kunming University for Science and Technology aka Ligong Daxue, and feeling almost physically how Red China’s present-day uberpolitical air, thickened by top-down patriotism and artificial nationalism, refuses to enter our libertarian lungs.





 Strolling around the greened, well-maintained streets and squares in our rather posh neighbourhood near Kunming’s 17th-century CE Green Lake Park aka Cui Hu Park and busying ourselves (i) watching performances of pieces from Chinese operas, (ii) listening to folk music and (iii) celebrating together with thousands of local people the visa-free annual return of the city’s mascots, the Siberian red-beaked sea gulls (Larus ridibundus).



Joining the many friendly Buddhist pilgrims and applauding the architectural harmonies of the 14th-century CE Yuantong Temple (admission: CNY 6.- per person), situated on the southern slope of Yuantong Hill and the largest Buddhist temple in Kunming.





Catching Kunming’s city bus no. 2 (CNY 1.- per person) to Kunming’s well-organised railway station, taking the a/c (overnight) fast train no. K672 (638 km, 11 ¼ hours, CNY 162.- or US$ 26.- per person for comfy “hard sleeper/lower berths”) from sunny Kunming, the “City of Eternal Spring”, to rainy Guiyang, the capital city of Red China’s poorest province, and thereafter Guiyang’s city bus no 1 (CNY 1.- per person) straight to our lively backpacker hostel in downtown.


Click below for more blog posts about birdwatching, one way or the other
27 Nov - 31 Dec 2013 Kaohsiung
20 Aug - 23 Aug 2012 Datong
25 Jul - 29 Jul 2011 Chukai
31 May - 07 Jun 2011 Srinagar
07 Jun - 15 Jul 2008 Chagos

Click below for a summary of this year's travels
2012 Map Konni & Matt

Visit the Konni & Matt Online Albums and order high-res travel photos
Konni & Matt Travel Photos
Recommended books - click below for your Amazon order from the United States:
For Amazon schnaeppchens from Germany, please click here
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Destination:
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