We’ve finally gotten off our butts and posted a few blogs for the last 6 weeks of travel that covers Malaysia, Hong Kong, Macau and a bit of China.

It wasn’t bad enough that it took so long for us to get moving, but when we did we found that the blog is banned in China. Apparently the Chinese censors can’t handle all the uncontrolled content at blogspot.com, so they just block everything. So that’s our excuse for the poor formatting (and writing?) in all the posts below – because we can’t see what we’re posting!

That’s right, the blogspot domain is blocked so we can’t see our final posts, but the censors haven’t figured out that it is through blogger.com that all the objectionable content get’s put on the web. Yes, we have peeked at it through an anonymizer, but that’s just too slow and I’m too lazy…

Better yet for you non-readers out there, the photo albums for Indonesia are posted. Just click on Indonesia in the itinerary list to the right.

It’s well past my bedtime now, so go read the blogs. We wake up in a couple hours to fly east to Xining where we’ll catch the highest train in the world to Lhasa. Yay!

Mary didn’t believe me at first when I said we should go to Beijing on this trip just to have roast duck. But I was serious. I had Peking Duck for the first time when we were here 2 years ago and it was a life altering experience. I vowed then that whenever I returned to China, I would come back to Beijing for dinner. She quickly succumbed to my plan and so we find ourselves now in Beijing.

We returned today to the 150 year old restaurant near the Forbidden City where they actually track the number of ducks they’ve served during that time to emperors, kings, presidents and us. It’s a magical place, from the duck to the atmosphere, to the giant LED sign on the wall that tells you that duck number 115 million just popped out of the oven. Yeah, maybe it was a little touristy, but mmmmmm.

As we passed Tiananmen Square today, focused on our impending happiness, we stumbled not across the gate that leads to our ducky wonderland, but a giant wall enclosing block after block of the Qianmen district.

In preparation for the upcoming Olympics, this historic area that was home to houses, shops and our dinner is being razed to make way for a Chinese Santana Row which will have none of the character or charm of the original. Since this blog is being censored here anyway, I’ll just say that it stinks that China is tearing chunks of real history and culture out (not to mention displacing how many families and small businesses) just to give Olympic tourists a Disney-fied China.

Fortunately for our stomaches, the Quanjude restaurant does have a temporary location until the reconstruction is complete, so we did get our fix. But it just wasn’t the same. So tomorrow we’ll try our host’s recommendation for the new best roast duck in Beijing, serving #15,621.

-Steve

Our last (only?) Everest base camp warm-up hike before the real thing was to Huashan, a group of five mountain peaks a 2 hour bus ride from Xi’an. Locals go in droves to take the cable car up to the lowest peak and walk around a bit. Younger locals start at the bottom around midnight and hike up to the 6000ft eastern peak to catch sunrise. We’re not local and no longer young, so we took the middle ground and started up the windy path from the bottom at 8am, did a circuit of all 5 peaks and stopped for the night at a hotel on the eastern peak at 7pm so we could more leisurely catch the 6am sunrise the next day. That’s 10 hours (1hr for breaks) on an unrelenting stairmaster.

We don’t know how to speak or read mandarin so when it came to reading Chinese menus we were sadly useless. We found the best way to satisfy the stomach was to point at what other people were chowing down. This ended up working very well as we got to taste some great stuff that we otherwise wouldn’t have known to order.

Bowl of crossing bridge noodles famous in Xian. It only comes in one size, enormous.

Hot pot with spicy goodness, a Sichuan specialty.

Grilled skewers of pork, eggplant, stuffed buns, quail eggs, lotus root, tofu, mushrooms and so much more . Street food at its best in Jiuzhaigou.

Jiuzhaigou is one of the premier Chinese tourism locations with tens of thousands of locals visiting from all over China each week. The beauty of this national park is astounding if you can only get around all the other tourists shouting into their cell phones while bumping you to take a picture of their spouse in a Tibetan fur hat. It’s an absolute zoo at the popular sights. We did our best by starting as soon as the park opened and walking the back country paths instead of taking the bus. That allowed us to take photos that make it SEEM like there aren’t a thousand people around, but there really are in most cases.

All good destinations start with a good meal.
Pearl Shoals waterfall

The amazing color of 5 Flower Lake. No photoshop here.

Grilled skewers to finish off the trip

In 1974 a farmer was digging a well for water after a 3 month drought. Five meters down he pulled up a clay head. He had hit a far corner of the pit that housed the now famous pit of terracotta warriors near Xian containing an estimated 6000 big life-sized statues. It’s an estimated number because maybe a fifth of it has been excavated. The rest is still under layers of dirt and clay waiting to be released. Every night a team of archaeologists painstakingly brush away the debris then piece together the parts. All the soldiers were found in pieces so now it’s a giant jigsaw puzzle of history.

The army was created by the first emperor of China. Before Emperor Qin China was made up of seven dynasties each with their own currency, spoken and written language. In 221BC he conquered all seven kingdoms under heaven and united them, the new nation named after him. Part of his lasting legacies is a common language and money. One mile to the west was his mausoleum, and here stood his army facing the east to protect him from invaders. After his unexpected death on the way to an inspection his eleven year old son became the second emperor and his stone army was placed inside the ground, covered with a timber and straw roof and sealed from the world. Peasant uprisings spread throughout the country and the inexperienced emperor lost his head. The new ruler broke into the pits smashing the statues and setting fire anything that would burn. For two thousand years the remnants of the soldiers laid buried under ash and dirt.

Since the first excavation two other pits had been discovered, with the first being the largest by far. The clay that was used to make the army and their tunnels were brought from 50km away and is attributed to the strength and resilience that allowed these terracotta time capsules to last through the ages. They were made hollow to minimize weight and lower the risk of explosion during firing. Each is unique and vary not only in the hair, shoe tread, clothes, height and girth but expressions and proportions. Two hours after exposure to air their color dries up and disappears leaving them the earthy yellowish brown of dirt. To see them stacked in their reconstructed formation is equally as impressive as seeing the partially exumed shards. There is decades if not centuries of work left to be done.

Wish we had more to say about Macau, but we don’t. We took the short ferry over from Hong Kong and spent just a short day here. The Portugese influence on Asian culture makes for some interesting architecture and food. We saw these sheets of processed pork all over. Sort of a melt in your mouth pork roll-up.

There was a bit of work going on in the main square to prepare for some kind of party. Lucky for us, they left the fruity props lying on the ground for us to play with.

A daily obsession we adopted was getting Mango Strawberry Crystal Jelly drinks and Mango Stuffed Mochi balls at the Hui Lau Shan dessert shops. It’s fruity lust. You feel guilty eating it at the windows seat while passerbyers jealously ogled.
But HK isn’t just about asian food. At the International Financial Center was a massive western supermarket with a bakery and deli. This was where all the expats shopped. We made a straight line to the prosciutto and salami. With a hot crusty baguette in hand we made sandwiches made our mouths sing. We could go on and on. Everything here is made fresh when you order it. The food is so good its obscene. But there were a few things we didn’t try – like dried flying lizards…

I lived in Hong Kong for a year when I was 5 and this was my first time back. The only memories I have are of a counting the round windows on a building by the water, thinking getting ice cream for taking immunization shots seemed like a good deal, going on rides in a playground, and living in a tiny one room apartment in one of the many highrises. Well, the skyscrapers are still there and have expanded to fill all available space. The playgrounds have gotten even better though there doesn’t seem to be enough for the population. Prosciutto eased the pain of the Chinese visa office. And there are 315 round windows on one side of that building.

There weren’t many touristy things to do other than seeing the peak, shop and eat. We did plenty of that latter one. There was a lack of bicycles, rickshaws, tuk-tuks and scooters. It seems they are all banned in HK and the new territories. Walking is part of daily life here and the streets and subways were pleasantly clean considering the volume of constant traffic they get. It seems that HK has taken a middle ground between the village tainted cities of mainland China and the sterile assimilation of Singapore. We didn’t even need to carry our own chopsticks around.

We found one new form of entertainment. A crazy Japanese videogame where you throw soft plastic balls at targets on a pair of big screen TVs. It’s really competitive and incredibly tiring. We both had sore arms for a couple days.