China 'Katze im Sack Tour' Pictures

China's Southwest or Katze im Sack Tour - Part I

As many of you know, we have two lovely German friends who live and work in Chengdu, the capital of the province of Sechuan. Mirko and Olli visited us in Sydney in February and mentioned that they will be touring western China in July, so they offered us to join their little trip. There were a number of compelling reasons to accept the offer: 1) Mirko is a diplomat, so nothing can happen to us, 2) Mirko speaks fluently Mandarin, so we won't starve, 3) Olli is a good old friend of mine and always fun, 4) we can travel in our a private vehicle, so traveling will be more convenient. Most of the reasons turned out to be true, but reason number 4, the roads in China are shocking and traveling takes a lot of time (have a look at the pics). As we practically booked an 'organised' trip, Timo and I did not really look into where we would be going or what to expect. That's why we named the 19 day adventure: Katze im Sack Tour (pig in a poke tour).

After having spent 4 days in muggy Beijing, we flew to Chengdu where Mirko started the Katze im Sack tour with a personal airport pick up. Upon arrival we received instructions on what to expect: 19 days traveling, 6000 km to cover, spending every night in another hotel, crossing 4,000m high passes, passing military and police checks with the possibility of being send back, driving through tibetan grassland, desert, minority villages as well as Chinese mega cities.

So initially 5 of us (tour guide Mirko, us and two other friends of Mirko's, Olli joined later) started the Katze im Sack Tour the day before the total solar eclipse on July 22. Aim was to see the eclipse on a 3,000m high holy buddhist mountain (Emei Shan), yet, everything was covered in thick clouds and mist, so we witnessed darkness, but no solar wind nor corona. Nevertheless, it was a very mystical experience as there is a monastery on the mountain top and pagoda and temples disappeared into the darkness only to be revealed again 6 minutes later. 

Our tour continued through the mountains of northwest Sechuan, a landscape that impressively shows nature's force. We were traveling in the rainy seasons, so massive swollen rivers destroyed and landslides blocked roads and buried trucks or whole villages. Roads under construction became mud slides and 200km sometimes took more than 6h to cover. Mirko's appeasement strategy was to say loudly and frequently: "This is China, this is China". 

Once we were past the dangerous terrain of rivers and gorges we entered the dreamlike world of the tibetan highland (tibetan autonomous region of Sechuan). There old style architecture is still preserved, houses are still being build with mud and straw bricks and decorated with ornamented windows and doors. It all looks very romantic as we love to discover the 'old' China, yet mobile phones and 4WDs are ubiquitous. Young people and kids dress normal, only old people seem to dress in a traditional way, time will show if traditions can survive. Thanks to the economic boom, most villages have electricity. In most regions air and water pollution seems to be more of a problem, not to speak of access to education or health care. 

We spent almost a week in the tibetan highlands, witnessing by pure accident temple festivals were everyone was dressed in their best sunday outfit (as we would say in German), a village excited because a worshipped Lama was passing by in a car convoy, a very big monastery (Labrang) from the yellowhat order where the number of monks is limited by the Chinese government. The Tibetans in general are very strong believers in Buddhism and religion is part of every aspect of life. Once we stopped to take photos of prayer flags and noticed women walking bent on the road picking something undefinable from the road. As we were approaching them, we discovered that they were rescuing earthworms from passing cars. 

From the tibetan grassland we travelled west into the desert. Yes, this is China's part of the Gobi and there is also a lot of nothing and something, mostly passes to climb, snow capped mountains, muslim minority villages, and our favourite city Golmud. Golmud is in the middle of the Gobi, it only exists because mineral richness surrounds the town. The city  looks like someone dropped a lot of concrete in a very big sand playground, everything is artificial, the city can only survive because of its umbilical cord of trucks bringing goods and water in and out of town. For us, it epitomises hell on earth. It is an ideal place to put inmates or detainees, a bit like one imagines Siberia. 

In the middle of the desert there are several oasis, one of the most famous is Dunhuang. Famous for its strategic position on the old Silk road; the city marks the end of civilisation (Gansu province) and the beginning of the unknown (Takla Makan desert) and was one of the highlights on our Katze im Sack Tour.....to be continued...

Mongolia update

What did we had in mind when we planned our trip to Mongolia? Probably the vastness of the never ending steppe, massive sand deserts, Mongolian gers (their nomadic tents, "jurten" in german), their love for goat products (milk, cheese, Cashmere) and of course the national hero Chengis Khan. We've spent 3.5 weeks travelling through Mongolia's Gobi desert, stayed in the striving capital Ulaanbaatar and were privileged to attend the famous national sport festival called Naadam, and yes, Mongolia certainly lives up to its stereotypes, but there is much more that meets the eye.

Take the vast steppe and the dry Gobi desert for example: Sure, the scenery doesn't change much and that's part of the Gobi fascination. However, if you look closer you discover the real richness of the Gobi. Quite surprisingly there's a lot of change in Gobi's nothingness: Every couple of kilometers you see a lonely set of gers where nomads still live like hundreds of years ago. animals and herders are never far away, but all of them already own a mobile phone and a satelite dish is decoratively placed outside every yurt tent. Then you have this enormous blue sky that doesn't want to end at the horizon, it's even bigger than in Australia. It also came to us as a big surprise that there is a lot of life in the Gobi desert. We came across a couple of camel and goat herds that eagerly waited next to wells for someone to pull up some water for them (which we of course always did on our tour). Last but certainly not least there are many spectacular mountain ranges (we even hiked to a deep valley that still had ice along the river bed) and the massive sand dunes of Khoryn Els. Yet, only 3 per cent of the Gobi consists of sand! Watching our driver navigating through the Gobi was another highlight. Picture a massively big field of steppe grass land, no trees, no mountains or houses let alone street signs to find orientation, just some tyre marks here and there in the dirt. Now you know how difficult it must be to find your way through the desert (much to our discomfort our driver had to ask for directions numerous times).

Then there is the quickly growing capital called Ulaanbaatar (UB) in the middle of all this nothingness. For us it was a bit like a beast: Soviet style inspired building blocks didn't make it look pretty, the non-existence of any driving rules made it chaotic and nearly dangerous of us to walk around (the bigger and stronger a car is, the faster it will reach its destination; red traffic lights don't mean that cars stop) and we could see and feel the (too) quick growth rate of the city. But UB also has its nice sides: Eg. the old monastery in the middle of town where ancient Buddhist traditions are still alive. Or the numerous traditional yurt tents in the middle of a 3 million inhabitant metropolis.In fact, half of all Mongolians still live in these yurt tents, but only a quarter are real nomads and move from place to place with all their belongings.

A true highlight towards the end of our trip was the national sports festival called Naadam Festival. Imagine the whole nation in a stand still for 3 days, all trying to look beautifully, some with colourful traditional Mongolian dresses all eagerly watching the three Naadam disciplines archery, horse riding and wrestling. There's also a fourth weird competition going on called angle bone shooting where three sportsmen try to hit 2 sheep bones in a distance of about 3.5m with a little square bone that gets accelerated on a angle bar through their ring fingers.

And of course, we were succesful in researching for Leibspeise. We could sample a German Wurstplatte at the Khan Bräu, and speak to the owner who is from Böblingen (around the corner from Leonberg, Gislind's hometown), we ate Berliner at the Sacher's Bakery and we found Liverwurst from Werner's Fleischwaren in the supermarket. Check out our Leibspeise blog for the Khan story.

Mongolia pictures

rough edit only, more to come (depending on the Internet access in China)

Japan pictures

Japan - what we liked and what we didn't like

Likes:

• Ubiquity of automated food vending machines
• Most perfect transport system we experienced ever
• Toilets that need a little instruction booklet to understand
• The clean feeling after using such a toilet the right way
• The Japanese Alps - After 5 years in Oz a real eye candy
• Crazy Harajuku girls
• Traditional houses in Magome and Tsumago
• Mingling with locals in the hot onsen in Nozawa Onsen, best and cleanest body scrub ever
• Naoshima art island with Yayoi Kusama sculptures and Tadao Ando buildings
• Cycle paths everywhere
• Kyoto's temple abundance

Dislikes:

• Limited English language skills in Japan
• Bowing the lot
• Starting every sentence with "excuse me" or "thank you for waiting"
• The Japanese fear of sunlight and with it comes the lack of outdoor seating
• Architecture weirdness - either extremely ugly or super modern
• Non-existence of chairs and lounges
• The costs of travelling in Japan

G&T's Japanese food experience...

... or two Germans lost for words while dining out in Japan.

Everyone knows that Japanese culture is one of the most complex and one of the hardest for all Westerners to comprehend, let alone putting it into practise in the correct way. Even if you try hard, you will encounter numerous situation where you wonder "why are they doing this" or "what have I just done wrong".

First of all, Japanese and Western views on how to enjoy a comfortable meal are very different. Sitting down on a nice and soft chair in a restaurant hardly exist in Japan. The best you can get is a pillow on top of their tatami mats, which hardly adds to your comfort. In fact, after travelling through Japan for 3 and a bit weeks, we started to judge places to eat and sleep by the pure existence of chairs. I guess, IKEA (or any other furniture store) has a really hard time to get business here. This is how we had dinner at a traditional Japanese B&B. Obviously we chose the wrong dress code:

Secondly, speaking while eating is still not very common. That's why there are numerous restaurants with automated vending machines. These "quick bite - no speak" restaurants become one of our preferred lunch options. This is the way they work: In front of a restaurant you find a big box with lots of buttons on it like pictured below. These are automated vending machines where you can chose a dish, pay for it and receive a dish voucher. If you are lucky, you can see pictures of what you are going to expect. However, in most cases you are faced with lots of unrecognisable Japanese characters. In a way you can't go wrong as most of the dishes are udon soups (Japanese noodle soup) in different variations. We always enjoyed judging the dish by the price, then pressing a button and hoping for the best. Once you receive a voucher, you present it to the kitchen staff inside and minutes later you receive your dish.

The same system at Japanese beverage vending machines that are literally everywhere. All different drinks are sold through these vending machines including cold AND hot drinks:

Thirdly, bowing in pretty much any occasion is just normal and of course considered very polite. It's quite funny to realise that we automatically started to bow while talking to locals as well. This short video below is a nice example of a Japanese train attendant:

Finally, we found a restaurant in Hiroshima that epitomises Japanese food culture in a nearly bizarre way. It's a nice example of people not really talking to each other as you sit in your own booth and you don't order food by speaking to a waiter but by pressing buttons on a machine. A little curtain in each booth blocks the view to the inside and also never really makes your waiter fully visible to you. Your food gets served through this curtain and as soon as the food is served the curtain gets fully pulled down so you can enjoy your udon soup in privacy. Have a look at the video below. It's bizarre and hilariously funny at the same time:

Of course, everything is followed by a nice Japanese bow behind curtains:

Some observation on Japanese housing and architecture

If I had one word to describe Japanese housing, it would be `dense`, not even in height as the floor levels are restricted due to the frequent earthquakes, but there is housing everywhere, squeezed into the tiniest lots, next to each other with no space in between.

Apparently they have land use regulations and development control plans that outline things like building height, usage, built form. But I could not make out any pattern, high risers are built next to one storey houses, massive housing developments close to temples, industrial operations 10m apart from hotels. Also the design of most houses is appalling to say the least. They remind me of a mix between socialist GDR style and cheap Australian prefabricated housing.

Yet, in between all this chaos there are jewels of modern architecture: my absolute favourites was the Cocoon Tower in Shinjuku designed by Tange Associates.

Another great building is the Tokyo International Forum by Rafael Vinoly. As one website describes it "a gracefully expressive great curving ship shape in glass and steel, set off across its plaza with blocky recalls the scale of other European supporting halls".

Also I now have a new favourite architect: Tadao Ando. We went to an art island, Naoshima, a once tiny fisher village where a publisher decided to build a world museum by a world class architect (Tadao Ando). They even had some of Yoyoi Kusama's art, one piece was a nice big yellow pumpkin sitting on a pier.

Bali and Lombok in Pictures

G&T in Bali and Lombok, Day 1-21

We spent 21 days in Bali and Lombok and it already felt like being away for months. How can this be? Maybe because we saw so much in such short time, maybe because the islands are so different, one Hindu, one Muslim, one with a parallel universe of super chique tourism next to very basic farming villages, the other struggling to get tourism off the ground after it had been hit by racial tensions in 2000.

We started in Padangbai Bali, a small seaside village and the jump off point for ferries to Lombok. The best hotel in town - with 3 swimming pools and massive rooms - was our resting point for the first days. It is amazing, but you can easily stay in famous Lonely Planet `mid range accommodations`, eat and drink as much as you want, and still don`t spend any money (see Timo`s price index below).

After adjusting to the constant approach by local hawkers who will sell you anything, but most frequently `transport`, `sarong`, `massage` and only give up if you strongly decline their offer several times (ignoring won`t help at all), we decided to rent a scooter for a week. With our own set of wheels we discovered lovely rice paddies, an amazing variety of shades of green, lovely small villages with literally no tourists, volcanic mountains often hiding in the clouds and fantastic small seaside towns with excellent snorkeling off the beach.

The underwater life in Bali and Eastern Indonesia is amazing! There are so many varieties of corals, so many fish, including Lion fish and we even saw Hawksbill turtles. On the down side, there is no concept of trash collection, all waste is still burnt. A lot of it also ends up in the ocean and we saw a lot of trash floating in the open water. If Indonesia will not tackle this problem, it could severely affect their tourism, who wants to snorkel with plastic bags? On the other hand, Indonesia has a lot of other problems and I guess, rubbish collection is one of their last priorities.

We also spent a few days in the famous artist town of Ubud. We found it more touristy than arty and you have to look very closely to find real art, nevertheless, the surrounding landscape is very lovely and the Balinese dance and Gamelan orchestra we saw was enchanting.

On a very rusty old Ferry (a big thank you to our parents that they gave us swimming lessons) we tackled the 7h journey to Sengiggi in Lombok. From there our 5 day `Komodo hunting adventure tour`(that is what the brochure said) started. With 20 Dutch, one Swiss, three Australians and three French, we boarded a very small ship where Timo and I were lucky to have the best room on the upper level away from the engine noise and fumes. After a day adjusting to be on a moving vessel we really enjoyed the frequent snorkeling stops and of course we were thrilled of seeing the Komodo dragons. They are amazing creatures, with elephant like skin and hawks like claws. They look friendly and almost lazy, but can speed They look friendly and almost lazy, but can speed up to 1 and almost lazy, but can speed up to 18kmph and feed of creatures such as waterbuffaloes. The five stays went by in a fly and we really loved the under water life around the islands, though not the stingers that attacked Gislind.

Back in Lombok we could not resist of renting another scooter to explore the country side and further beaches in Southern Lombok. Again we found it really striking that outside the few tourists spots we hardly met any other tourists and that is probably why we liked driving around so much. The last two days of our trip we spent on a nice little backpacker island called Gili Air where we had the luxury of a two storey house with hammocks and daybeds on the second floor right next to the beach, and guess what it cost less than 20 AUD.

On our last day we boarded the shortest flight in our life: 17 minutes from Lombok to Denpasar Bali and spent a couple of hours in Bali`s major tourist town Kuta. We didn`t expect much of tourist town Kuta. We didn`t expect much of that place, but it was even worse than what we imagined it to be: no nice beach, loads of people, plenty of hawkers, busy congested roads and teenagers on the loose, etc you get the picture. One good thing was that we interviewed a German restaurant owner for our Leibspeise food project.

We nearly had the opportunity to extend our stay in Indonesia, as Garuda Airlines refused us to check us in for Tokyo at around 11pm due to the fact that we had no outgoing ticket from Japan. After a lot of hassle, we had to purchase a refundable ticket and made it just in time on our flight to Tokyo.

In a nutshell, it was the perfect start for our one year trip as it was very easy to travel around and we felt very relaxed from day one on.