Happy Christmas

Happy Christmas to all our readers! 

Currently suffering a chilly 20 degrees C, but warming up, so dont worry about us.

Enjoying a nice day with Sarah and James and their sons Nick and Sebastian. Lots of food and drink to savour and a 'locally sourced' christmas tree.

Some festive Australian pics:

Castlemaine main street - midsummer Christmas!

Christmas decor in Shepparton Victoria - with cows!

Castlemaine local Christmas lights at private residence (part of). Most people dont do this much!

Australian diary

 7th December 09

Its a month now since we came to Castlemaine, Victoria. We arrived in the early spring and found classic English style country gardens in full bloom, especially roses, and soaring temperatures . When the heavy rains came last week there was much relief, it gave the ‘dams’ a chance to refill and helped to allay fears of bush fires especially after the serious ones of last summer.

This is Sarah and James' house, where we are staying, which dates from 1930's and is within close walking distance to the main street, yet also close to bush land with walking tracks.

Main street Castlemaine

Castlemaine and surrounding towns, was settled after the 1851 goldrush and still has many Victorian and Edwardian houses with ornate metalwork supporting wooden verandas. Old shop signs and advertisements still remain. It still has the air of a country town being 120 kilometres inland from Melbourne.

We are close to the bush and as I write, I am listening to the sound of the bright red rosella as it eats the cherries in the garden. Yesterday I saw the tail of what was possibly a possum or an antechinus as it ran up the loquat bush to eat them. Hope to get a better look next time.  (We did and it was a black rat)

typical local house

This is a blue tongued lizard which lives under the wooden board walk near the front door.

There are not supposed to be snakes in the garden but just before we arrived a brown snake was run over outside our house! Very rare event I am assured! The other poisonous creature to be careful about is the red backed spider which was hanging around the compost heap but has now been despatched. At least I know what to look out for now. And wearing gloves is essential when gardening! But gardening is irresistible in these Mediterranean temperatures. There are peaches,apricots and vines in the garden and I have been helping with planting chillies, peppers, melons and tomatoes amongst other vegetables. 

We have the use of their Ute, to explore and for going sight seeing. First we had to dust off the Huntsman spider and then climb cautiously in. (James happily drives around with his crew of spiders on board).

A few weeks ago we went down to the Hanging Rock Reserve to help with the annual Koala count. Total found = 2.  Our group didnt find any although the reserve thinks there ar about 12.  Afterwards we went to look  at this very sleepy one. It was a very hot day so there was even less activity than usual.  

Out and about

Local winery on wine tasting weekend for 'Budburst' festival, lots of wine tasting, eating and live music.

Charlie in the bush

Last stop - Hong Kong

We left Dali by bus and then our final sleeper train from Kunming to Guanzhou which is close to Hong Kong where we were booked in for a couple of days before flying to Australia (7th Nov).

It is worth describing how the huge number of people who travel by train are managed. It is pretty much the same in all the big towns and more like catching a plane. Tickets are checked as you go into the station and baggage is scanned as in an airport. Inside the station electronic signs tell you which waiting room to go to for each train. In a large town there will be 6 or more waiting rooms, possibly on two floors. The trains are numbered like air flights and most signs have at least some English script so quite easy to identify your train. The waiting rooms hold several hundred people each and have many rows of seats, but this still leaves a lot of people standing. All the passengers cram in here with their usually large amounts of luggage (including ours). Then you sit and ponder the gate signs which tell you whether your train is ready or not. Only when the incoming train is clear of disembarking passengers do they let the hundreds of new passengers on. At this point you usually have to manoevre your luggage along a corridor or two and up and down levels. If you are lucky there is an escalator, otherwise you have to pull your heavy luggage up or down the stairs, aided only by a small flat ramp at the side of the stairs where you can drag it, usually with one wheel not on the ramp. Fortunately helpful young Chinese men often took Liz's suitcase and whisked it up or down the stairs. Once you reach the train the huge crowd magically vanishes into the 15 to 20 carriages. The carriages and seats or beds are numbered so again it is not too difficult to find and each carriage has an attendant who checks the ticket again.

As for getting off at the right stop. After being on board the train for a while the attendant swaps your ticket for a plastic card and puts all tickets for the same stop into a special folder. The tickets show your seat/bed number, so before each stop they come back and make sure all passengers that need to get off are aware of it and swap the tickets back. We were also told it is the personal responsibility of the attendant to make sure everyone gets off at the right stop and to put right any mistakes so they take it very seriously. Having said that, many stations have the name written in roman letters as well as Chinese. As a final back up I also had a database of China for my sat-nav and we could see where we were at any time and how far to our destination, so we never felt at risk of missing the stop.

 

 

Liz took some nice shots from the train which show how the landscape changed between Kunming and Guanzhou.

Every flat surface and wall is used to dry crops at harvest time

Water buffalo could be seen in many places all over rural China, pulling carts or ploughing or frequently just standing in water and grazing. They could often be seen standing with their heads completely under water, grazing from the water weed on the bottom.  

From Guanzou it is possible to reach Hong Kong quite easily though we were not sure of the best way until we got there. It turned out we could get a bullet train directly from Guanzhou station to Shenzen which is right on the border of Hong Kong. From there it is possible to walk into Hong Kong through miles of walkways rather like walking from one terminal to another in an airport. Hong Kong is still treated like a foreign country by the Chinese, but the customs arrangements are quite relaxed.

This was the view from our hotel on HK island. We overlooked the zoo so not too close to the adjacent skyscrapers.

Some hotel staff being given their morning pep talk. This seems to be quite a common routine for employees in China.

A nice park on the island to escape the hustle and bustle.

Typical shopping street. Note bamboo scaffolding on left.

Popular Chinese restaurant in Hong Kong. Reputedly untouched since colonial days. No menus. Food is wheeled around on trolleys and selected by sight and in our case guesswork. Typically Chinese and speedy service - everything whipped away as soon as you stop eating.

Classic nighttime harbour view from mainland across to the island. Frequent ferries cross the harbour to the mainland where the serious shopping goes on, which ranges from ridiculously expensive shops to street markets mostly selling the same tourist stuff we had seen all over China.

This was our last Chinese stop where we caught the plane to Australia.

Off to Dali - South-West China

After returning from our 7 day guided tour, we set off for Dali in Yunnan province. Yes - another sleeper train! Most of the way anyway. The train went from Guilin to Kunming, so still needed a 1 hour bus ride from Yangshuo to Guilin and a 4 hour bus ride from Kunming to Dali. The train itself was 24 hours, so we stayed in Kunming one night. Heading that way is quite a hippy trail towards Tibet. We did not have time to go that far where the real Tibetan style mountains are, but Dali is at a higher altitude, near a large lake and surrounded by small mountains. You can see a lot from the train during the daylight hours. We saw the landscape change from the plains and 'karsts', gaining altitude into more conventional mountainous terrain. Rice fields becoming larger though some still being harvested with water buffalo ploughing and pulling carts. Most noticeable was that the scruffiness of the towns and roads I have described gave way to much neater and more attractive areas. Quite a distinct cultural change with almost none of the unfinished buildings and dumped materials we had seen everywhere else. Tourism touts and shop keepers also seemed less desperate, so in spite of Dali being a hot tourist spot, it was much calmer than Yangshuo and we were happy to stay for 4 nights.

It is always a bit of a gamble who you will be sharing your 4-berth sleeper compartment with. This time it was these two off on 'water equipment' business. The 'boss' on the left was very keen to befriend us and bought us supper on the train. He even wanted us to visit his head office, which was hundreds of miles away in the wrong direction and had to be declined. Unfortunately all this had to be translated by his engineer (on the right) who spoke only a bit of English. The engineer was quite embarrassed, partly because he was struggling with the English, but I suspect also because this idea of befriending any random foreigner is rather old fashioned. In the morning we noticed he pretended to be asleep for as long as possible!

Town and countryside were much neater. Much less building going on and not spread all over the street when it was. There were also less tourists because the Chinese holiday season was then over.

We found a hostel (shown here) with very nice helpful staff who helped us book buses and trains and suggested nice places to go.

Most houses were kept in a good state even when very old and often nicely decorated with beautifully painted panels on the outside. We had seen these before, but usually quite neglected. The panels usually depicted animals, birds or scenes that were symbolic for the family in some way.

Dali is at the base of a small mountain range with a lake on the other side and more mountains beyond. We hired bikes to tour around the valley and the lake shore, where there was a mix of old villages and large areas where all kinds of vegetables were being cultivated in very neat plots.

The people cultivating the land seemed to always use one hoe/mattock tye implement for everything although the exact design varied in different areas.

At the edge of the lake the trees seemed to be growing in the water. This could be natural, but we suspected that there was another dam somewhere and the water level is still rising. It can take many years and it is quite likely the lake used to be much smaller. Some of the paths seemed to have been raised up like causways, which reinforced this imepression.

The old town used to be walled and the four (N S E W) gates are still there along with some of the walls. The traffic still enters through some of the gates.

The streets were nicely maintained and houses mostly finished in white. The three road menders shown here are all women, which is quite common. A large amount of the work seems to be done by women - it seems to be more than half! Men seem to spend a lot of time playing cards or like the ones shown here chatting to a street vendor who is repairing shoes with a leather-sewing machine transported on his 3 wheel bike.

Liz casting an expert eye over the ceramic wares.

A hardware shop but not as we know it! All these pots and implements were being made here in the shop or nearby.

We went up the nearby mountain range where you can walk for 4 hours along the contour looking down on Dali. However this was no Welsh mountain rock climb. I dont think serious walkers among you would have approved - we went up about 1000 metres in a very modern cable car with gondolas for up to 4 people, over a breathtaking forest and a deep valley or two, then walked on an almost level and decoratively paved walkway all the way to the chair lift at the other end - much too easy! The other end however was an open chair lift as used for skiing where you get on without it stopping. It seemed to plummet straight out over the precipice with just a loose bar/handle to pull down in front of you, whilst holding our backpacks! Since nobody else seemed to be using it, we funked it and decided to walk down through the forest. Of course it turned out the lift went down quite close to the ground and would not really have been very scary. We were so close to it we had cheery 'hellos' from Chinese tourists on it. It was quite a steep walk down. We did however meet ponies on the way down that are still used to carry goods and tourists up the mountain. There were also a lot of old tombs which are always sited for good feng shui facing South and with a mountain behind. contemporary burial sites are still often layed out with an artificial mountain at the back for the same reason.

7-day Tour of North Guizhou Province - 21st Oct to 27th Oct - Part 2

When we left the rice fields at Longji our guide drove us a long way over to the Eastern border of Guizhou province to a town called Xingan. The route was quite scenic but marred with frequent building work. Obsessive house building as we had seen elsewhere. Often left unfinished and with debris spread around the roads and pavements. There was also a lot of road building which is more purposeful bu t not pretty. New highways are being built and the construction of tunnels and massive viaducts could be seen in many places. This results in the existing roads being overloaded with trucks full of road building materials, which then clog up the small towns we were passing through while they try to negotiate past the inevitable house building messes in each town. The Chinese goverment want highways to reach more of the rural areas so that they can develop poorer areas and make more use of their labour and produce but it does tend to cause massive detours while it is going on. The roads  also make it more viable for people to stay in their rural or small city locations instead of moving to the big cities. Fortunately our guide had good contacts in each area who could inform him which roads were not being dug up or congested, so we were never seriously delayed.

Xingan is quite a large modern city though with a few older streets as here where we were looking for a place to eat. We tried to order a hotpot, like we had in Shanghai, like a fondue where you cook your own bits of food in a boiling sauce on the table. Even our guide's language skills were defeated this time and to our horror we ended up with a huge wok of food already cooked and full mostly with snails. Fortunately there was enough other stuff to feed Liz and I but our guide had to eat a lot of snails!

The reason for going to Xingan was that it is the beginning of the Ling canal. This was amazingly built in 214 BC to facilitate the movement of supplies for the troops into south China while their first and most revered emperor was uniting China for the first time. This was the same emperor who started the first great wall. The picture here explains it in detail (if you enlarge it), but basically it joined two rivers, one flowing North and the other flowing South with some impressive and very innovative river diversion and management.

The main dam and diversion channels are still there in Xingan and some of the canal as in the pictures. The ploughshare shape dam still works to divide the river into the canal section which then flows through the city.

The rest of the city was quite modern and commercial. Although we had seen them elsewhere, there seeemed to be a great concentration of 3 wheeled transport in Xingan. Mostly motorbike based. The slick new red one in the picture is one of the many taxis. We used one of these after our snail meal - 3 of us! It looks like the old Reliant 3 wheelers such as I had myself as a student, but with only a motorbike engine, so in spite of there being no hills, it felt like it would not survive the journey to our hotel. It was really on ly a fibreglass covered version of the old ones you can see in the background. Three wheelers are also used for moving goods as well as the ubiquitous 'tractor' style ones where the entire engine is outside the vehicle and suspended above the single front wheel. Some of these are scaled up and used on much larger trucks, which are then piled with huge loads and look extremely unstable. However we only once saw one that had fallen over, so they seem to do the job.

After Xingan we continued driving East and visited 'the scholar village'. This is a village that became famous in about 16th century (?) when a school was founded there and several students from the village passed the imperial civil service exams, allowing them to work in the imperial court. It was unheard of for so many to pass from one small village, so it quickly became believed it was a lucky place (very common in China to attach luck to things). A shrine to the original founder was built and students still place offerings to help with their exams. You can also see the shrine is placed in front of a hill. It is facing South and the hill blocks the bad luck spirits that would of course come only from the North. This principal is used for most spiritually significant sites, e.g. tombs, temples, shrines. Even now new graveyards often have an artifical hill built in them so that the gravestones can face South with their back to it.

Similar beliefs are made visible in the old town centre market place shown here where sections of wall stand opposite the street entrances so that bad spirits cannot enter the town. Bad spirits apparently dont go round things.

The town had been very prosperous in the past but is now very run down with many once expensive houses now very neglected. The town is a very minor tourist attraction and gains negligable income from its former fame. The local policeman even asked our guide to show him our passports - not because he needed it, but because he had never seen a foreign passport before - on our behalf  our guide declined, not least because the policeman seemed a bit drunk. The residents seemed to live in very poor conditions and in old dark houses, probably supported only by local subsistence farming.

Continuing on from the scholar village we were held up for an hour or so by an accident on a rural main road where a motorbike seemed to have rammed into the side door of a truck and sadly been killed outright. A large number of policemen spent a very long time measuring and photographing everything during which time only bikes could pass along the road. A vast queue of mostly trucks built up in the mean time, but everyone seemed very calm about it. The Chinese people dont seem to get upset about traffic problems. If something gets in your way or holds you up, you just wait for them to move. Hooting the horn is used a lot, but it only seems to mean 'watch out, here I am' rather than 'GET OUT OF MY WAY!' This was the only accident we saw in spite of the apparent wildness of the driving. People seem to expect the unexpected and are not in fact driving very fast most of the time.

We ended the day at a hot spring centre. Quite a contrast to the old world towns and accommodation we had been in before. This was a very posh new spa resort adjacent to a natural hot spring. A set of pools have been built with different temperatures and accommodation in a large hotel, or in 'VIP suites' where we were put which were cabins close to the pools so you could pop out for a dip before breakfast. A very welcome luxury at the end of a quite exhausting 7 days of touring.

 After the spa we set off back to the hostel owned by our guide at Yangshuo where we started, but stopped a couple more times. First at a typical village of the Hakka people which were built with a walled enclosure, usually for a single [large] family. The one we saw still houses about 200 people, all related. The 'village' is more like a single large building with a sequence of large courtyards all through the centre of it. Accommodation was split with the master of the house and important offspring on one side and his other wives and their families on the other side. The current residents still owe their occupancy to their seniority in the family. Other family members live in a more conventional village outside the enclosed building.

A typical contemporary village main street on our route with the usual building materials in the street and many small businesses and eating places.

We also stopped at a larger walled town which was much more on the tourist map. Pretty but all rather sanitised for the Chinese tourists to take their photos and buy not very relevant souvenirs. As you can see in the photo we were back in the area of the 'karsts' familiar from Yangshuo where we started. The contorted tree is an old 'Banyan' which grow parasitically on other trees until they completely replace them.