YO

Last week I returned from a trip to a world where you can place the 1000 and 1 nights, Xinjiang, a muslim region of China that feels closer to the middle east than to China itself. I had an amazing journey full of warm people, incredible landscapes, lamb based cuisine and happy turkish/latin like music.

I had the priviledge of having Dom and Sheila as my partners in crime.

Dom is a 25 years old Swiss guy, interested in politics and international afairs and now doing a traineeship in Exoweb(Beijing)... he is the most Colombian/Swiss guy I have ever met (or imagine meeting). His favourite sentence is "open dialog", he will fall sleep playing "I have never" but can talk about Chinese politics all night long!

Sheila is 22 years old, born in Beijing and raised in New Jersey. She claims to have studied journalism (and some anthropology classes) in some Indiana university and has a very interesting/critical point of view on everything. She loves waking up early (which means waking us up early too). Thanks to her fluency in Mandarin she has been the unoficial (unpaid) translator and guide on this trip.

I usually plan and organize my trips on detail, specially when I am the one in charge of the trip, I take care of the smallest details and schedule in advance to save time while traveling. This time I wanted it to be different so, I let Sheila and Dom plan it and had just a rough idea of places we were going to. Not knowing the schedule got me in really funny situations where people asked me "where are you going tomorrow?" and I gave totally wrong answers... thanks guys for the amazing planning!!


Facts of every day:

• Day 0 (April 30th):
  

-> To go early to the airport we decided to overnight in my place. Sheila, with her wonderful sense of location, could not find her way to the two big 'China world apartment' towers in Guamao.
-> The first drink of the trip was a tribute to Norway: Aquavitt.. skål!
-> Pavel (the Mexican trainee) had to pick up Dom's keys in my place, doing it at 1am ment he also spent the night with us.

• Day 1 (May 1st):
  

-> After very little sleep we went to take the early plane to Urumqi. Before this trip, I thought that was only Krip (my best friend in Oslo) who had the bad habit of forgetting swiss knifes in her hand luggage, now I know that Dom is another victim of such habit forgetting a swiss knife in his hand bag on the way to Urumqi and a Xinjiang style knife on the way back to Beijing...
Then, we are finally in our way to Xinjiang!

-> 3,5 hours later we arrived to the capital city of the" Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region". While waiting for our next flight to Kashgar (or Kashi in Chinese) we felt hungry so, we had our first meal: pizza and carlsberg (it was not very tipical or exotic but, it was the only food we could find in the airport...)

-> 2 hours flight to Kashgar... zzzzz.

-> We were deciding how to get to Karakul lake and Tashkargan on the following days. We could either take a car rented from "Caravan cafe" (run by an Australian guy this place organized tourist activities in the region) or follow Mark's advice and take a driver he recomended us. Mark is Sheila's friend, journalist and traveling from Xinjiang to the countries in the middle east. Due to a significant price difference and after some discussion (yes, discussion and "open dialog" are key words of the trip) we decided to take Mark's driver: Ibrahim. I will never regret this decision! He is an amazing, happy, smilling person who played latin music for us, took us to the best local restaurants, taught us some Uigur language, drank and partied with us and more than a driver became a companion and a friend. (If you ever go to Kashgar contact him at 13999092675).

-> After having left the stuff in our hotel we decided to go and explore the old city. We found a laberint of small streets that transport you in history to anywhere in the middle east 100 years ago. Lots of local children around who were having fun with us taking pictures of them. Camels and sheeps in the streets, narrow alleys and colorful doors. Suddently we met a family who was slaughtering a cow in the middle of the street, they invited us to their house, introduced Sheila and me to their women, asked us (through Sheila) so much about our background and invited us next day for breakfast at 8am... it was such a priviledge to be welcome by this local family, so warm and friendly!

• Day 2 (May 2nd):
  

-> Living in the city I usually wake up with the noise of the cars, my neighbours or my alarm. It was a pleasure to wake up with the noise a big group of birds was making in a tree next to us.

-> Xinjiang is located in a different time zone than the rest of China and, even if the official time is the same, locals keep a "Xinjiang time" 2 hours before the official. So, the Uighur family from the day before had invited us for breakfast at 8 am and we (Sheila) asked one of the children if 8am was Beijing time or Xinjiang time Late for breakfast, he had answered it was Beijing time. Lost in translation we felt very bad when, at arrival, people told us we were late and the family had already got breakfast 2 hours before. Anyway, they received us as their very important guest, gave us tea, nan and polo (rice mix with carrots, meat and sometimes raising)... amazing breakfast!
Men were wearing white turbants which we had read means someone in the family had died.

-> Children in Kashgar are lovely! Not only because of their beautiful eyes but because of their happiness and excitement with the pictures we took from them. We have taken sooo many pictures in this trip from children, mountains and sheep... in that order.

-> A Beijing based organization charges entrance for the old city and we got to know that none of that money goes to the local people so, when we meet the lady trying to charge us for the entrance, we refused to pay and were escorted outside...

-> Before lunch we got in our way to Karakul lake with Ibrahim. We had lunch in the road: Laghman (thick spaguetti with spicy sauce). Ibrahim didn't join us because he was not hungry, he had eaten 8 boiled eggs already!!

-> There was such an amazing landscape on our road to Karakul lake. It was a gourgeous combination of mountains, desert and white peaks.

-> Arriving to Karakul Lake we wanted to stay in Yurts with the locals. There are some "oficial" yurts that costs 50 yuan ONLY for the entrance so, we tried to stay with a local family. We slept in this rounded yurt where they made dinner for us, prepared our accomodation = carpets in the floor.

-> Before going to sleep we learned some Uighur sentences, played "bulshit" (cards game) with Ibrahim (which he learned very fast) and spent a great time with the locals under the light of a candle. I haven't felt so far away from technology, electricity and even modern plumbing in a long time... it was awesome!

-> My last memory of the night was to go running to the bathroom (behind the stone in front of the lake) in a freezing cold, stars painted night.... the view was incredible!


More pictures of our journey at:

My local version of day 1, 2 and 3 pictures : http://my.opera.com/yennyotero/albums/show.dml?perscreen=60&id=72617

Dom's page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dondomingo/

Sheila's page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/96434059@N00/sets/72057594134505132/

Soon to come about this trip:

- Meeting a whale and a chinese "mamasita" from Belgium.
- Riding horses and cammels 4000m over sea level.
- Pico + baijiu = party night in Urumqi!
- Stefan and Martin from Pakistan
- Kanas lake
- The 1000 and 1 snacks in our way to Mongolia
- Lamb, lamb and more lamb...

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If you fish the whale, the whale will die

After a week of hard work and, after fixing one issue that had me working around for more than a month, last weekend we went to Taishan with Greg, Katleen, Mads and Svenja.

"Mt Tai,the first of the "Five Sacred Mountains", is located in the central part of Shandong Province... The highest peak of this mountain range about 1545 meters above sea level, lies within Tai'an City. Mt Tai abounds in lofty peaks, deep valleys and rare cultural relics of the old days. Included in the UNESCO world heritage list in 1987.(for more info click HERE)"


Everything started on saturday early morning (7am) where I took the train to Jinan, our meeting point. As I didnt have so much sleep on friday, I was expecting to get some in the 6 hours ride... I never expected this train to have the hardest seats I have ever been seating on. My lack of sleep could only be complemented by a quite aged chinese guy that decided to declare eternal love to me after telling me about all his problems in life... very random situation.

After taking the bus from Jinan to Tian'an and finally meeting Greg (who got also quite some issues to get there), we managed to convince the people in the "minibus" station to sell us tickets for the full and 'last bus of the day' to "Zhong Tian Men". Getting there we met the rest of the team, played 'I have never', cards(... the David Haselhoff game) and some other games before going to sleep at almost midnight.

Waking up at 3:00 am. wasn't so hard as it was to climb up the 2000 step climb from "Zhong Tian Men" to the top of the mountain, specially because my stomach was quite angry with the mix of food and beer of the night before. All that mixed with the cold wind and the lack of sleep made the hike a very challenging experience ... I am very proud of having managed to get to the top just in time to see the sunrise!

Going down was not easy but, much more pleasant than climbing up. We meet a group of chinese kids that spoke German and showed us some taichi, we had lunch outdoors and we had a very good nap in a sunny non-touristic spot in the middle of the trip down. What an amazing time we had!!

To come back to Beijing I should have taken a train at 3:00 pm but, due to a traffic jam, I arrived at 3:30. My only choice was to take the only and last train of the day at 11:30pm, the cheapest, most crowded and most interesting train where I have ever been. Thanks God I was not alone but traveling with my new friend Florian who was to tired to speak english and gave me the chance to practice french...

Found a cool page where I can get a map of the countries in the world where I have been. It is a shame... they should be more (specially in South America...)




Create your own visited countries map

Chinese has proven to be a difficult language. I want very much to learn it and now I am trying to get one character a day.... "piano piano si va lontano"... The characters in the right are supposed to be my name in chinese.

And in the middle of all the work and the every day battle for our lives while crossing Guamao bridge to get to work, between the every day lesson on patience and how much easier would be to get something done by speaking chinese and the constant excitement about getting deeper in the chinese culture iceberg, I am very happy to have got confirmed my "labor day"/ week vacation to Xinjiang with Dom and Sheila. This sounds like a very exciting, relaxing, challenging oportunity to discover life in the old silk road cities while traveling with very interesting people. Looking very forward to it!

Dom's blog
Sheila's blog

Last weekend we had a very good and relaxing weekend in Shanghai. Was pretty cool specially for the nice people we met, the incredibly yummmi Thai food and the cozy Barbarossa bar in the middle of a lake. Pictures of that trip will be uploaded soon.

And for those that fell sleep in the maths class: "10 binary == 2 in decimal" I guess that if you are able to get in the first try, you have confirmed to be a geek.

New picts from Beijing uploaded in the following album:

http://my.opera.com/yennyotero/albums/show.dml?perscreen=20&id=48378

Mainly pictures of the weekend. The tipical XiShuan restaurant where we went with Alex and his friends, the beach party at VICs and some streets/subway stations.