Chicken feet, dog bite, cockroaches: welcome to China!

When we arrived at the railway station in Emei we tried to buy tickets for one of the many over-night trains from Emei to Panzhihua. We should have known it before, there were of course no sleeper tickets left because of the Golden Week. Not even the hard seat option was available. After some discussions we swallowed the bitter pill - soft or hard sleepers were still not available for the day after - and decided to stay one more night in Emei and take available hard seats for the next evening.

Finding accommodation in Emei wasn't easy either. We had just checked in a small hotel opposite of the railway station when the police showed up and checked our passports (you get registered automatically when you check into a hotel in China) . The police order was that we had to go to the big hotel just next door and ask if they had an available room for us. Only if they didn't have any available rooms, we could have stayed in the small hotel. They mentioned reasons like safety issues in the small hotel etc. So Holger went to the reception of the big hotel and asked for a triple room. Nothing available. He came back and we thought it would be alright. But the police came back and Sarah was escorted in the police car to the bigger hotel (20 m walking distance). Not surprising, suddenly the bigger hotel had a room for us: the police presence took effect. So we moved from one hotel to the other one.

The next surprise came a few hours later. While Sarah and I were relaxing in the hotel, Holger went for a walk. Somebody knocked at the door. It was Holger with a bleeding hand and leg. He got bitten by a dog while he was trying to take a picture of a banana tree! We were prepared for vicious dogs in Central Asia (all of us got vaccinated back home) but not really elsewhere. Even with vaccination against rabies you have to undergo treatment when you get bitten. Sarah and Holger made a long Emei city tour and went from one to the next hospital until they found one that knew how to treat dog bites and had the remedy. Holger needs 5 injections over the next few weeks.

The day after we checked in our bicycles. They went on the trip to Panzhihua some hours earlier than ourselves. After our first bicycle transport from Korgas to Ürümqi we were quite confident in the Chinese railway service. We prepared mentally for the overnight trip in the hard seat compartment. It couldn't be that bad to sit and sleep. We got on the train and it was worse than we expected. The hard seat compartment was packed, fully packed! A single row had two seats on the left-hand side, three seats on the right-hand side. The compartment was so full that sometimes four people sat on three seats. We squeezed between other passengers and accepted our fate. The noise level was incredibly high and sleep was impossible. Chinese love talking loudly (my uncle does so too)! When it was dinner time, Holger couldn't stand it any longer: his neighbour was chewing crispy chicken feet, spitting the bones on the ground at his feet :-)

After a restless night we arrived in Panzhihua at 5 am. It was still dark, so we checked into a hotel by the railway station. Did we mention that Chinese love talking loudly? At 9 am we were woken up by "talking" Chinese guests next door. We only could find more sleep in the evening after we had changed room because of cockroaches and ants in our beds.

Some more words about the Chinese noise level. Again they love to talk loudly, sometimes it is rather shouting. Many watch TV at full volume. Our theory is that the honking trucks and cars damage people's ears, so they have to talk louder and end up in a vicious circle.

Sunday morning we hopped on the local bus with three bicycles. The bus driver and conductor didn't like that at all and made a scene. Well, we were told the day before that we could take the bicycles with us, so we did. Sometimes just ignoring the nagging helps. The local bus took us from the railway station to the long-distance bus station where the buses leave to Lijiang. When we bought the long-distance bus tickets, we already felt that three bicycles would never fit into one single bus. So Holger was supposed to go first, we would have followed 30 minutes later with the next bus. The big problem was that already Holger's bicycle didn't fit into the trunk. So his bus left without him. Thanks to the next bus driver and additional 100 Yuan per bicycle we managed to squeeze all three bicycles on the rear bank. Happy and relieved we left Panzhihua and thereby Sichuan province. After 10 hours and stunning Yunnan mountains we arrived in Lijiang. From here we plan to finally get back on our bicycles and cycle again. So much looking forward to it after all this complicated and nerve-wracking public transportation!!

The Sichuanese hotpot experience

3026 km and 49 hours later: we made it to Chengdu, Sichuan province, in southwest China. OK, we didn't pedal this distance but we hung in long 49 hours in a small train compartment. Actually the train ride itself wasn't as bad as we had imagined. That is probably due to the so called soft sleeper beds (4 beds in one compartment) that we had. Initially we wanted to have the cheaper hard sleeper versions (6 beds in an open compartment), but they were all sold out. We didn't regret the soft sleeper variant: much more comfort and more place for our many panniers (no idea how that would have fit the hard sleeper wagons). Also surprising was the cleanliness in the train. More than that, we also had nice 'compartment-mates', two Chinese girls on the way to meet the family-in-law of one of them. We were so lucky not to have old, spitting, snoring men that gnaw on chicken feet in our compartment.

 Probably everybody knows the Chinese instant noodles. Really every passenger on the train brought many of the noodle cups for the long ride and there is hot water supply in each wagon. Actually it was surprising how much food the Chinese took with them. We did understand later why. There is not much to do on such a train ride. Eating is the best time filler.

We arrived in Chengdu today. The train station is one of the busiest train station in China. When we got off the train, we went to pick up our bicycles. Did they survive? Yes, they did! And they survived even better than on the Air Baltic flight from Helsinki to Dushanbe. Both bicycles - unpacked by the way - were in impeccable conditions. As you can imagine we were really happy to get have them back!!

James and Sophia, if you read this post ... we are in the same hostel again where we stayed altogether 4 years ago. You always come to a place twice :-) And another second visit, we went to the same hotpot restaurant just around the corner. We ordered the spicy version of course and thought we would be used to it now. Oh, I was so wrong! Gosh, it was so spicy that I couldn't eat much. Sarah didn't mind the spice. Brave! I once read that the Sichuanese food is so spicy because in the past food quality wasn't that good, so they used the spice to hide the bad taste. I do confirm: Sichuanese hotput destroyed my taste buds!

Buying a train ticket in Ürümqi

Even if it was already a bit warmer again when we reached Ürümqi we decided that we would try to get south as quickly as possible. The only 'deadline' we have on our trip, is to be in Cambodia in December when Peter's mum and brother will come. But due to this one single deadline we are kind of running out of time now. China is so huge and there are so many things to see, but we had to cut things off and make a decision. So we decided to spend the time we have in the south of China, mainly in Yunnan. So I guess we have to come back one day to discover all the remaining places.

Due to our planning, our most important task on our first day in Ürümqi was to get the train tickets to Chengdu, which is the place the furthest south we can get without having to change trains. Last time I had tried to buy train tickets in China, I almost had had a nervous breakdown and in the end decided to get airplane tickets instead, so I was prepared for the worst. We went to the train station, just to find that it was really busy - Chinese train stations are busy by default, but it gets crazy before public holidays as everybody wants to get back home to celebrate with their families. And of course, our timing was perfect as usual, because the day after was the Chinese mid-autumn festival, one of the four main holidays in China. So we queued for what seemed like an eternity, when we finally reached the counter, I almost got the tickets, but then I mentioned that we have two bikes to carry with us - yes, big bikes. From this point in the conversation on, I was lost. So she sent us to a different counter, to a lady who spoke English. That meant queuing again. And same procedure again - all went fine to the point where I mentioned the bikes - she just said 'You can't take the bikes' and sent us away to yet another different place. We got there and this was apparently the place to drop off goods that you want to send by train. Nobody here spoke a word of English, so it took us a while to figure out that we could actually send our bikes from here the next day and they would go to Chengdu ahead of us, so that we could pick them up there once we arrive. But first of all we had to buy tickets for ourselves, which was not possible here - so back again to the first place. Queuing again and after more than 2 hours in total, we finally had our tickets to Chengdu - a train ride that will take us 49 hours!! As there were no hard sleeper tickets left, we had to go for the luxurious version and bought the more expensive soft sleeper tickets, which we hope will make our journey a bit more comfortable at least.

So then we only had to drop off our bikes the next morning, which we did with a bit of a strange feeling. Seeing our bikes, which had accompanied us for almost every single day in the last 4 months, being wheeled away and we were left alone with only a piece of paper in our hands that made us wondering whether we will see them again - but we have hope!

Now finally after everything was organized we had 2 days left to explore Ürümqi before the train leaves. As you can see on the pictures, we mainly explored the food of Ürümqi. They have great freshly-prepared noodles here, while sitting in the small restaurants enjoying your bowl of noodle soup, you can watch the cook in the kitchen swirling around the pasta dough, preparing the next portion. And as we were here for the mid-autumn festival, we also got our fair share of mooncakes - small pastries with different fillings. We tried many different versions: with red bean paste, with yellow bean paste, with nuts, the traditional version with a kind of almond paste and an eggyolk symbolizing the moon in the middle and so on. All of them yummy and with I don't know how many thousands of calories - but this is the advantage of biking: so many calories are always welcome :)

Apart from that Ürümqi is like any other big Chinese city. We expected to see a lot bigger Uighur community, but apart from the food, you don't see much of it here. We would have loved to get out of Ürümqi and to discover the rest of Xinjiang, but we will have to come back here and do that during a different trip.

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