Month: May 2005

so it’s here that i stop moving for a while. i’ve got an apartment in shanghai and a load of work to catch up on. this 8 week tour of china, tibet and nepal has been AWESOME.

thanks stretch, it’s been a fantastic experience traveling with you. (you have no idea how wasted i was by the time i got to the airport!)

of course you can’t travel with out the essential equipment. take note.

so now i’ve got 280 videos to edit together. they’ll all be avaiable on line.
i’ll also be explaining what it’s like to move to china… incase you’re considering it!

kathmandu is cool. ok so there is a civil war on, there’s hardly any tourists, all the bars are empty. BUT. everyone speaks english and you can get a hotel for a dollar. not only that but nepalese hashish. mmmmm. oh it’s lovely. you can get any food you like, hire a fake harley davidson for peanuts, you just can’t leave the city limits and venture into the war zones.

little shops like this one have the same stock as a corner store in england in the 70’s. it’s very surreal. i’ve taken very few photos as i promised my self i’d come back. hence i’m writting very little also.

so we finally got our ever so dusty trusty land cruiser down off everest – i say trusty, we had 2 punctures, the rear brakes siezed up and my door was help shut with gaffa tape.

at the chinese border we were greated with stern gaurds taking they’re job seriously, i almost had my camera confiscated.. we were surronded by chinese touts on a back drop of concrete and nasty chinese buildings, as i remember it was damp and cold, no one spoke a word of english. we crossed the bridge to nepal it to a warm and sunny red soil street. check point was a homely office, everyone spoke fluentish english, baskets of indian food, every single thing changed in an instant. WTF.

there is something very humbling about this big hill. maybe the fact that you can see it 2 hours before you get there. maybe it’s the fact that at 17,600 ft you can’t breathe when you look at it. or maybe it’s the fact that it’s so big, it’s the biggest thing you’ve ever seen, and you just become over come with the insane need to stand on top of it. then you think about the 160 that died trying and the 2000 that endured weeks of oxygen starvation, losing hands and feet, temperatures of – 50 or less and you decide to return to the hostel.

early attempts to be the first to the top were crazy, my favourite, an ex british cornel, with no climbing experience, who decided to fly his sopwith bi-plane from hendon in the uk, all the way to nepal. crash it into the north face of everest and walk the rest of the way… he didn’t make it past india.

i’m in lhasa, tibet. one of the highest cities in the world at over 3600m. my first 24 hours i couldn’t breath, so this is what it’s like to be 80.

you must visit tibet, it’s almost gone.

more faces of tibet on my photography site…

went to see the pandas. i really enjoyed it!

(large picture is different)

yesterday we took our luxury 20 hour bus from yangshou to chengdu, firstly a 20 hours bus is never 20 hours, it took 25, and luxury really only meant that i had somewhere to sit. we left at 4 pm and we reached the mountains by midnight, it was a shame i only saw the last of them as we were coming down in the morning. the mountain roads are made of novelty concrete, the ride was loud, bouncy and uncomfortable there really was no chance of sleep. of course stretch slept. he can sleep anywhere. never more have i wanted to wake someone up purely out of spite.

the journey gave me enough time to make some observations; at night in the mountains drivers flash their lights before over taking, this makes sense, they also flash their lights while over taking, before corners, while going round corners, while over taking going round corners and at on coming traffic – i’m not joking, i was sat at the front and being constantly blinded. from 6am the 6 reasons lights were used we’re replaced by the horn. the horn, as i could tell was located inside the bus and the only good thing was that it momentarily blocked out the monotonous telephone hold music that the driver and his buddy seemed to be getting down to. i don’t think i’ve ever been pleasantly surprised by a petrol station toilet, and i don’t think it’s going to happen in china. on our journey i found myself in a small brick hut big enough for about three people. there were six of us in there looking into a ditch around the edge, this ditch was full to the top with human feces of varying ages. even in england i’m not the biggest fan of men packed shoulder to shoulder, pissing into a stainless steel trough, all that splash back on your shoes and jeans. but this is china, not even a stainless steel trough! to my surprise the guy next to me, turns around drops his pants and squats. i presume it wasn’t to listen to the back of my hand, but it may have well been. i consider how much splashing there will be and what it will be splashing from, and fortunately for my new white shirted friend, i got stage fright and had to retire to the bus pretending i couldn’t handle the smell. fortunately for me i had a cold and couldn’t smell a thing. stretch could smell perfectly, i guess there is some justice!

as quoted by phyllis on her blog! chinese / english (translated by babel fish)

on our first day here we met some travelers who said they’d come to yangshou for a few days and hadn’t managed to leave (2 years later). what’s so great about it? a few hours later i was offered a job, somewhere to live and carried on drinking in a funky western run bar into the wee hours. more like thailand than china, i started to understand.

on our second day we found our selves a few hundred meters into a mountain side, in a mineral mud bath of all places. it was a beautiful relief from the permanent humidity.
tomorrow we’re on a 20 hour bus journey to somewhere. why the fuck i agreed to get on a bus for 20 hours when i could fly for only £30 extra, i have no idea…