rupert and hannah

Hi there,

sorry to put so many pictures on the blog just now but I did get a bit carried away. We've been back in Haikou for a couple of weeks and have just finished our first week of the new semester. We've only got ten hours a week of teaching each this term since the third years have left. It feels very easy indeed, I just plan one lesson a week and teach it to five classes. I have Wednesdays off and on the four days I do teach I am finished by ten am on three days and finish at midday on one day. Rupert only teaches on three days, he has Wednesdays and Fridays off and only has one afternoon class. He has to prepare two or three lessons a week but then as I had to plan six lessons last term when he only planned one we think its fair!

Its nice to be back, although we are now trying to think of thinks to do with all this free time we suddenly have. We going to give Tai Qi a go and have fixed up lessons for every weekday evening starting next week. We've started running, playing tennis and cycling so hope to get fit but i'm not sure how much exercise we'll want to do once it gets hot again.

We are very excited by the arrival of Pizza Hut in Haikou, it has a different menu to UK pizza huts but still has some very genuine and non-chinese tasting pizza.

We plan to see more of the island this term, we plan another trip to the Resort Golden Palm in Sanya with my sister when she visits next month. We also want to visit some hot spring resorts on the island too. Our winter should end soon, the last few days have been a bit grey and miserable, temperatures are around 18/20 degrees but when the sun comes out its pretty hot. Last week we had a couple of sunny days and it must have been about 27 in the sun which felt really hot.

love Hannah and Rupert

Strawberry seller at a market in Kunming. Kunming is a great city, it feels very modern and clean for China and much time was spent rediscovering the delights of Western food at some of its backpacker hangouts. Sadly though much of the old part of the town has been destroyed to make way for the shiny new highrises, and what is left of the old town is disappearing fast.

Fish shop in a market in Kunming.

Rupert at the amazingly well kept Bamboo Temple just outside Kunming.

The west gate of Dali old town. Dali is a beautiful old walled town of the Bai minority. It lies on the shores of a gorgeous lake set against some impressive mountains. It is one of the loveliest places I have seen in China.

Lady resting in the market in Dali.

Grandfather and baby on market day, Dali.

Bai women in Dali on market day.

We visited the town of Shaping, just along the lake from Dali on market day. It was a colourful Bai market with most people in traditional Bai dress. Lots of incense and paper money was being sold, to be burnt on Spring Festival. This child is carrying some sugar cane.

Vendor, Shaping market.

Lady counting her change, Shaping.

Shaping Market

Old headgear, new phone. Shaping Market.

Shaping Market

This is the Lijiang old town, hundreds of buidings fighting for space around a web of streams and alleyways in which we got lost more times than I can remember.

This is the village of Baisha, we cycled to it one afternoon from Lijiang. It is home to the famous Dr Ho, who you may have seen in the most recent Michael Palin expedition Himalaya. Palin visited him in Baisha as have various other famous-ish people. He hangs around outside his home with various newspaper cuttings from international papers stuck to a board by his home, inviting travellers in for a consultation and to make a donation. We met him but declined to visit his home and went off to explore some surrounding temples etc. which (like many things in our guidebooks) we never found but had fun cycling round the villages looking for anyway.

Naxi lady with grandchild in Baisha.

Some Naxi people playing cards in the village of Baisha just outside Lijiang. The Naxi women carry round this white thing on their backs mainly, I think to protect against chafing from the the baskets they often wear on their backs.

This is Lijiang, a town of the Naxi minority in Yunnan province. Much of the town has been rebuilt having been destroyed by earthquakes, the most recent one in 1996, so many of the bulidings are quite new but they have been rebuilt in their former style and the whole place is really quaint and charming. At first we were not too impressed, having come from Dali, a beautiful old minority town, but after a day or two Lijiang really grew on us. It is a maze of little canals, streams and alleyways and really comes alive at night when all the lanterns are lit.

We stayed in this quieter part of Lijiang in a lovely little guesthouse that was part of a Naxi family home, set around a little courtyard in traditional Naxi style.

More of Lijiang, early one morning.

Rupert suffering from his second bout of food poisoning on our travels. He also has sunstroke as he got a bit sunburnt during a cycling trip the previous day, hence his face being the same colour as the flannel! The grey top is part of a set of chinese underwear, the bottoms being some grey trousers which are so tight that the overall effect is that of a Russian ballet dancer - very amusing and worth teasing. But this day he was not amused and spent the day in bed diving under the bed covers to hide whenever the grandmother of the house in which we were staying came to see how he was. She was lovely, we were staying in a family home of the Naxi people, the minority of Lijiang and she brought some wierd looking medicine and some kind of fried toast that I couldn't even stomach and I was well.

We stopped to admire this view on the way to Tiger Leaping Gorge. This is the first bend of the Yangzi river after it has descended from the Tibetan Himalaya and bends round to make its way through Tiger Leaping Gorge all the way east, across China to the sea at Shanghai.

This is Rupert at the bottom of Tiger Leaping Gorge, recovering after having descended the sky ladder. We decided to visit Tiger Leaping Gorge as a day trip, most travellers trek for a few days through the gorge but not being great hikers we decided that a nice little four hour trek through a section of the gorge was more appealing. We expected some big drops, cliff paths etc. but were quite shocked by what we found. First we had to descend something called the sky ladder. This is a series of steps, ladders, scree slopes that take you down to the river (bearing in mind that this is the deepest gorge in the world) which took us well over an hour and was definitly one of the scariest experiences of my life. Ru has a fear of heights and was petrified whenever he was faced with a big drop - pretty much the entire trek. I don't mind heights but discovered a new phobia - ladders. Actually, maybe it's just ladders when the ladder is attacthed to a shear cliff and one false move will send you bungee jumping without a rope but anyway by the time we got to the bottom we were both completely exhausted and sat on this rock for a while in shock before attempting to move on. Our legs were really shaky and it took us both days to recover. During the following week we both had great difficulty walking and Rupert even had to buy a walking stick just to take some weight off his legs, going down steps was the worst and had us both yelling in pain once we got to the bottom, much to the amusement of the locals. However this day was a highlight of the trip, the views were breath-taking and sadly this gorge, like the famous three gorges further along the yangtzee will one day disappear as they are flooded due to the huge dams the government deems necessary for supplying water and power to this vast nation.

At the bottom of the gorge, having descended the sky ladder, the path then climbed part of the way back up the cliff to follow join a path along the side of the gorge about half way up the cliffside.

Another view of Tiger Leaping Gorge, this section of our path somehow wound round to the left, it had been blasted out of the rock, so we had rock wall above us, below us and to our left. To our right was a massive drop, so we were quite relieved to get out of there.

Part of Tiger Leaping Gorge.

Ru holding on to the mountain, something he did quite a lot of that day.

When we started the trek, our driver told us to walk for about four hours to a place called Walnut Grove further along the gorge and he would meet us there. After seeing the expressions on our faces when we saw the top of the sky ladder to descend the gorge, he said not to worry about time, four and a half hours/five hours would be fine, just to be careful. So after three hours of being terrified we were so relieved to arrive at a village and even more relieved to find it was Walnut Grove. Our driver wasn't even there yet and when he did arrive a little while later he was amazed to see us and said he had never known anyone to do it so quickly. We spent most of the walk trying to get away from the edge, always hoping that around the next corner would be a slightly bigger and less slippery path and I supposed this kept us racing along without realising it!

Nanning on the day of Spring festival, the first day of the Chinese lunar year. We were a bit disappointed by spring festival, people just seemed to want to shop and all the shops had sales on. The streets were packed but there didn't seemed to be much of a celebratory atmosphere, just crowds of people fighting their way through shops and markets on a crazy bargain hunting expedition. The fireworks in the eveing were quite impressive and went on pretty much all night but after a few days of being kept awake by fireworks or of jumping out of your skin at a firecracker some four year old had let off next to you in the street, the novelty seemed to wear off. People had no idea about fire safety, apparently every year hundreds are maimed or killed from misuse of fireworks but this doesn't seem to deter people.

Cormorant fishing at Yangshuo.

An alleyway near Shamian Island, the old colonial part of Guangzhou. Guangzhou has a great mix of old and new, the back alleys around the old colonial areas are nice for a wander and insight into Cantonese culture whilst the newer parts have some fantastic, modern shopping districts.

A family shopping for unidentified dried goods at Qingping Market, Guangzhou.

The Chen Clan Ancestral Hall in Guangzhou, built in the late 19th century to house the very large Chen family of Guangzhou. Lots of pretty coutyards and strange carvings and statues.

This is us at a temple in Guangzhou which was really unimpressive and new looking so we took picstures of us instead.

Because CDs and DVDs in China are soo ridiculously cheap, they were the obvious thing to spend my holiday money on. So, here is the result of the holiday, audiovisually-wise: The Thrills, The Killers, Jet, The Prodigy, Fatboy Slim, DJ Shadow (a rare mix album I have never heard of, plus a re-mix album of his stuff), the Office, Lost Season 2, Groove Armada live at Brixton Academy, the list goes on....ahh, bliss. I am not sure if Hannah quite agrees though.

A photo of a Chinese lantern, from below. 

An amusing sign, if you can't read it, it says "U-Style Flagship Stove". How proud they must be, I wonder what they cook using their flagship stove...... 

A view of the amazing Karsts around Yangshou. A truly spectacular part of China. Yangshou itself is a touristy travellers hangout with about 100 Chinese tourists to 1 foreign tourist. 

One of the literally hundreds of fireworks set off every minute during Spring Festival evening celebrations - the biggest day in the Chinese character - sort of like Christmas Day and New Year's Eve all in one (we found it a bit boring really - people just seem to go shopping). 

Hannah waiting for some breakfast from one of the many street vendors who chef up some very tasty snacks with just one wok. We had a kind of fried bread/pancake with herbs in it, it is very tasty and one of the better Chinese options for breakfast (although not that healthy). It beats wierd beancurd-filled bread and rice any day.

A view from Tiger Leaping Gorge (well looking back on it, I was far too scared to take out my camera whilst actually climbing it (sorry Pete, Al and Franco, for letting the side down, I just can't hack high mountains)). 

Here's a little photo of Hannah and me just before we nearly died of fright whilst descending/ascending Tiger Leaping Gorge. The Yangzi which flows through the gorge is in the background.