CHENGDU, China

We spent 4 days in Chengdu, in a really neat hostel, which was an old printing factory that has been converted into a loft with artwork inside from local artists, so we quite liked staying at this unique place.




Our first morning there we went to the Panda breeding and research centre. It was so neat seeing pandas in real life for the first time and learning about the efforts of this centre to try to maintain the number of pandas, which unfortunately continues to dwindle in the wild. We got to see four baby pandas that were SO adorable!! Two of them were only 6 weeks old, and still so tiny.





Afterwards we decided we needed a break so that we don’t tire ourselves out so much, and spent the afternoon doing some trip planning, reading and getting a Chinese massage.


The following day we went out to hike a mountain called Qingcheng Shan. We had a bit of an adventure getting out there by local bus, as first thing after we got on we witnessed a big fight between two women on the bus and the bus driver, which was quite intense. The bus driver was so flustered that he almost hit a pedestrian, and then he really lost it…we were worried at this point that we had really gotten on the wrong bus! Anyways, everyone’s temper cooled down, but about an hour and a half later the driver waved down a city bus that we passed and ordered everyone off of our bus, as one of the wheels was about to fall off the bus!! We ended up taking the other bus the rest of the way, and arrived safely! Once we got to the mountain we were glad as it was a very beautiful and peaceful place. There are steps the whole way up the mountain, with temples and caves to check out along the way, and beautiful massive trees that are between 250-300 years old. We met some other local Chinese people on the way who were quite friendly and nice and filled us in with some interesting details about the mountain. At the top there are beautiful views of the surrounding mountains from a pagoda.



The next day we decided to stay in the city of Chengdu, as we weren’t really up for another long bus ride! We went to a tea house at a beautiful temple called Wenshu, where we encountered Sichuan people’s fiery tempers again! A heated argument broke out between a customer and one of the tea servers as the customer felt he was not being respected, but the server refused to apologize. The strange part about it was that several people in the surrounding crowd (total strangers!) just stood up to join in the argument and give their two cents worth. Again, it was quite intense, and not what you would expect at a peaceful temple! We had hoped to get into the vegetarian restaurant at the temple for lunch, but it was already closed, so we wandered around the city until dinner time when we went back again to eat. We came across a big group of performers who were rehearsing on an outdoor stage for a big performance they will do in a few days for the Chinese national holiday celebration, so it was fun to watch their singing and dance routines for a while. Dinner at the vegetarian restaurant was really great, and it was nice to eat outside in a picturesque courtyard.

BEIJING

We were kind of anxious before getting into China after hearing about all the scams and hagglers that visitors encounter here, but thankfully we have not had trouble with that up to this point, and have really been enjoying our time in China so far. It makes a huge difference that Wehuns speaks Chinese, it is so much easier getting around! The only problems we have been having has been adjusting to the incredible amount of pollution (we both felt pretty nauseated the first day from the fumes), and also adjusting to some different food. Wehuns has actually been having more trouble than me after we had a dish our first day that was brimming with whole Sichuan peppercorns. Those peppers give you the strangest numbing sensation in your mouth when you eat them, which we both found quite unpleasant. We can both usually handle a fair bit of spice, but numbness is just too much! Wehuns is finally feeling more back to normal after having quite a bit of stomach pain over the past few days, so that is great!

Actually, one more thing to get used to has been all the staring I have been getting! I guess it's hard not to stand out in this culture, but I am really not used to all the stares and people trying to take my picture!

We stayed in an inn that was in the “Hutong” area of Beijing, which is a really old area that consist of alleyways of one-storey courtyard homes. It looked a bit scary when we first got into the area, as it looks pretty run down, but it was pretty interesting to stay there and to see the everyday life of people who live there, which is very oriented around family and community it seems. The Inn was wonderful, with such friendly and helpful people.

We had the most amazing time visiting the Simatai section of the great wall of China, and that has been our favourite experience of the whole trip so far. That section of the wall is not as touristy and has some sections that are more rugged as they have not been maintained like the other parts. The scenery surrounding the wall is spectacular with beautiful green mountains in all directions. We did a 10 km hike along the wall, which got to be quite steep in sections, but it was so awesome!

The following day we visited the Forbidden City which was interesting to see, but was quite a contrast from the serenity of the day before at the wall as it was teeming with massive tour groups. It was still nice to see all the ancient palace architecture. We also visited Tianamen square and Mao’s mausoleum, which was interesting, even just to observe the other hoards of Chinese people who were paying their respects.
Our last day in Beijing we checked out a shopping area called Silk road, which was kind of chaotic. When you walk in you are bombarded by sales people at each stall trying to convince you to buy things (we figure that most of the stuff there were knock-offs, because there’s no way those things could be that cheap!). Wehuns had quite a bit of fun bargaining with the sales people, which was quite entertaining for me to watch! It ends up being quite draining after a while though, so we were tired by the time we were through.

TOKYO

We spent two days in Tokyo, and although it is such a huge city with lots to see we felt we had enough of it after the two days, especially since it is such a busy city, with more people than we have ever seen! Sometimes in the subway stations or in intersections we would pause for a second to look around and take in the unbelievable numbers of people whizzing by us. The best part in Tokyo was when we met up with Wehuns’ friend Dave Wang and his girlfriend Akiko for one of the days (they live here in Japan, outside of Tokyo). We had a nice day visiting with them, and they gave us a great tour of so many different parts of the city that are so unique from each other. They also introduced us to some great Japanese food that we had never tried before – Japanese style “pancakes” for lunch and Shabu-shabu for dinner, which was delicious! The Shabu-shabu is sort of like hot-pot but with different types of broths that you cook your meat and veggies in, in the centre of the table, and then you have different sauces to dip it in. It was really interesting to learn some more about Japanese culture from them.

In this picture we're checking out some foot massager machines at one of the electronic stores! They have so many different types of gadgets, and it was fun trying them out!

Kyoto

We travelled to Kyoto on Wednesday by shinkansen (bullet train). We found our hostel finally, which seemed like a very long walk in the heat with our backpacks (it’s been 33-34 degrees here every day! At least it’s been sunny and dry most of the time though, so it makes it great for sightseeing.) We then set out to explore the downtown area where we saw a couple of temples and the massive imperial palace park, which is lovely with many walking paths and a nice pond with carp swimming around. We then checked out the Gion district, where there are still traditional tea houses that real geishas still entertain in. We did actually see two geishas that night passing by, so that was neat.

The next day we decided to give our tired feet a break and to get around by bike instead to explore the regions of Kyoto that are further away from downtown that are much more scenic and ancient. We had a fantastic day seeing many beautiful gardens and temples. The highlight was seeing a temple called Ginkaku-Ji, which has the most delightful Japanese garden filled with delicate Japanese maples, bamboo groves and many different types of moss. There were also beautiful ponds and waterfalls as well, so we spent quite a bit of time at this garden in particular admiring it all and taking lots of pictures. Afterwards we biked back downtown and checked out the Kyoto station, which is an enormous and very interesting modern building. It takes several escalators to get to the very top where there is a garden and look-out point where we saw the sunset. There are several restaurants at the top, so we tried out a soup place where we had ramen noodles, which were very good.

Friday we took the train out to a different district of Kyoto called Arashiyama. This is another very scenic area with beautiful views of the surrounding mountains. We started out by doing a nice walk along the river and we were trying to find this monkey park that we heard about from another traveler we met at our hostel. We got sort of disoriented and lost, but we finally figured out how to get there, so after some lunch we started the hike up one of the mountains to get to the monkey park. It was well worth the trip to get there once we did, because it was so much fun seeing the monkeys! This park has about 150 monkeys that are free to roam in the wild, but they chose to stay in that area since they are well fed. We got to feed them some fruit from inside a little enclosed area, which was really fun.

Today was an exciting day! We had read about a festival that is going on this weekend in Osaka called the Kishiwada Danjiri Matsuri, so we wanted to check it out. It took us about five different trains to get there so we got a thorough tour of Osaka by train, but we finally arrived, and we were so glad that we got to experience this! (I have not uploaded the photos yet, but I'll include some in the next post!) It was the craziest festival either of us had ever seen! In this festival they have big floats (danjiri) that weigh over 3000 kg, that are pulled by hundreds of people using ropes. When they come to a corner in the road they speed up and start running to turn the corner as fast as they can, and meanwhile there is a man on the top of the float that is dancing and jumping around as they turn the corner, so he has to have amazing balance! The crowds attending this was unbelievable as well, it’s sort of overwhelming to be amongst so many people. We left as the festival was still just ramping up and getting crazier it seems, which was good, because already the train on the way back was super packed…I have never been in such a busy train before, where personal space just does not exist. With each stop I thought, there’s no way to fit any more people in here, but somehow they managed to squeeze in more and more! We then made our way to Himeji castle which was built in 1580, and was very interesting to visit.

We miss you all and hope you are all keeping well. We really appreciate your e-mails, it is so nice to hear how you are all doing!

Our first entry finally!

We left for our big adventure to Asia and New Zealand on September 4th. It feels like we've been gone much longer than a week already, with all that we've done so far!

I'm going to have to catch up briefly in this one entry for all that we've done in the past week.Our first stop was San Francisco, where we stayed overnight, which was good to break up the flights. Wehuns surprised me with a nice hotel instead of a hostel for our first night, so that was a nice treat! It was a beautiful day, and we had a great time wandering around the city, riding the cable car, and meeting up with Dave and Anna for the afternoon.

The next day we had our first long flight out to Seoul. We flew with Singapore airlines, which was an awesome experience, besides when I was really sick from all the turbulence :( Once we arrived in Seoul we found our hostel and then set out for some dinner at a Korean BBQ place, which was quite a funny experience since no one there spoke any English. They have a pit of coals in the centre of the table, covered with a grill where you barbecue the meat yourself. They bring you a bunch of condiments and lettuce and other leaves, which we had no idea what to do with. They must have found it hilarious to see Wehuns eating some raw garlic and chowing down on some green onions straight up. Finally one of the waiters came along to gesture to us what to do. People speak very little English in general in Korea, so we had an interesting time food-wise the rest of our time there and so it helped going to places with the pictures and motioning to what looked good.

The next day we went to an ancient palace called Changdeokgung, which was interesting to see. Afterwards we met up with Wehuns' friend J. Dan who has been living in Seoul for the past 2 years, so it was nice to see him and to get the inside scoop on Korean culture and so on.
The following day we did tons of walking, in fact we happened to come across a walking festival randomly as we were going along at the World cup stadium, so we stayed and watched the festivities for a little bit! It was quite entertaining, with a marching band, confetti and cannons! Afterwards we met up with our friend Matt who has been teaching English outside of Seoul. He took us on a little tour of parts of Seoul, especially to check out all the good food to try, so it was great! My favourite part was seeing the stream called Chonggye that runs through the downtown core. It's really beautiful at night with all the lights illuminating it, and it's a really popular hang-out spot for locals.

The next day we headed out from Seoul by bullet train to Busan, where we stayed overnight. Busan is an industrial city on the southern coast, as that's where our boat for Japan departed from. Our highlight of our time there was going to the spa, or traditional Korean bath house. I was a little hesitant at first, seeing as you go totally naked, and also being the only non-local (and really standing out!), but in the end it was really great! There's an area that's separate for men and women where there's all kinds of baths...extremely hot ones (45 deg) to ice cold ones, jasmine, blueberry, grape and apple, whirlpools and saunas. There's also a common area which is co-ed, and they give you a little suit to wear for that area. In that area there's lots more to do - steam rooms, cold room, hyperoxygenated room, an aromatherapy room to name a few. It was a great experience and not too pricey, and we left feeling really relaxed, sleepy and feeling very clean!

The next day (yesterday) we left Korea on the hydrofoil boat over to Japan. We took the bullet train right away to Hiroshima, where we did a super quick tour of the atomic bomb museum in half an hour before it closed. It was very sad to see the horror and devastation that people had to go through. We then wandered around the peace memorial park which is very nice. After dinner we found a massive arcade...everything is so advanced here in terms of technology! We played a couple of games against each other then called it a night.

Today we took a ferry over to the island of Miyajima. It's a really nice little island surrounded by beautiful green hills, with tame deer wandering around all over the place! The main sight there is the famous torii, which is the Shinto shrine gate, which you've probably seen pictures of before.

We did a hike up the mountain, which was fun but tiring as it was very hot today. There were stunning views of the surrounding islands at the top, and at the top there is some temples with one that has a flame that has been said to be kept burning for the past 1200 years! When we got back to Hiroshima we had some sushi for dinner, and it was my first time trying actual fish sushi instead of just the california rolls, and I was pleasantly surprised, it was really good!
Ok, that's it for now! I realize that I was not so brief after all!