Higher than the sun

Thursday, 29/11/2012 – 168 A.D.

Last day in China.

Today was notable for the fact that I did not take a single picture all day. That’s the first time this has happened in 168 days!

[A piccy from another day - the maid actually knocked on the door especially to thrust a copy of a Chinese-only newspaper into my hand!]

The only other incident that occurred was when I went to withdraw 300 yuan from the ATM and my card was refused. Not again! Last time this happened (way back in Sydney airport) I wrote a snotty email to Barclays, but the best advice I got from them was to reverse the charges and call their debit card hotline. Well, reverse the charges I damn-well would! I phoned the operator on the phone in our hotel room, but got told that the rate was 10 yuan a minute. They did not understand what I meant by a reverse charge call. So, I went down to reception and tried the same line on the lady behind the desk. She didn’t know what I meant by a reverse charge call. Neither did she know what I meant by a payphone. Eventually I think she just got fed of my lingering by her desk and let me call the UK via the hotel phone. 14 and a half minutes I was on there, going through various queues, passed through three departments, and going through security clearance twice. After all that I discovered that the fraud department had stopped my card because on the one hand it was being used to withdraw cash from ATMs in China, but it was also being used to order things from Amazon, which is registered in Luxembourg. Uh, hello guys, it’s Christmas! Do you not think people will be ordering Chrimbo prezzies online??? [Sigh!] I just hope they don’t block it again – there’s only three weeks to go! And I hope the hotel don’t charge the duration of that conversation to my card. At 10 yuan per minute that’s £14.50, and we only paid £88 for the room for the four nights!

So, that’s China done and dusted. I think Tim’s pretty glad really, because he’s become totally fed-up of the constant spitting. We even have marble spittoons provided in the corridors of the hotel for people to hock up their lungs as they stroll past. Personally I feel like this land of the dragon has been a hell of an experience, positive overall, with a couple of negative undertones here and there. We’ve done Shanghai, Beijing and Xi`an, plus visited Nanning and passed through Guangzhou – that’s enough for anyone to get a feel for the country. We’ve met lovely people, and we’ve met complete kn*bheads. And we’ve had lots and lots of delicious food and drink, which doesn’t seem to have done any lasting damage, no matter how spicy. We said today that we’d like to have got out into the rural areas a bit more, but that pretty much goes for every country we’ve been to, New Zealand aside. Yep, if you want to experience the ways of the east, you can’t go far wrong with China - just bring some earplugs to mask the sound of the phlegming and keep your elbows extra bony to help you barge your way to the front of the queue.

Next queue we’ll be in is to get on the plane to Nepal…

Friday, 30/11/2012 – 169 A.D.

Up at 04:00, out at 05:00, that was us today. We’d pre-booked a taxi to take us the half hour drive to the airport, but we had to wake up the poor sleeping girl at the reception desk to check out. She may have tried to charge us the higher room rate as revenge, but I’ll put it down to her being sleepy. Xi`an airport was pretty quiet that morning as we went through the usual procedures for getting on a plane. There was an amusing moment just before check-in when we were all queued up and then the stewardness went and sat at a different seat, which meant the line had to shift one desk over. Immediately some cheeky chappy came bombing along from out of nowhere with suitcase in tow in a desperate attempt to jump the queue. Tim is never great first thing in the morning (though neither am I) and he practically leant in the guy’s ear to loudly exclaim, “Ahem-ahem!” I had to laugh as the guy was sent packing back to the end of the line where he belonged.

Our ultimate destination was to reach Kathmandu, capital city of Nepal, where we would be staying four nights. But there ain’t that many places that fly direct to Kathmandu, so first we had to board an internal Chinese flight to the city of Kunming – yet another place that I had never heard of until recently, yet by most country’s standards it’s a virtual metropolis. Our two hour flight from Xi`an to Kunming was uneventful, almost like catching a bus really. Normally people can get a bit anxious about going through the strict airport security procedures, but because we’ve had bags and bits scanned several times a day every day while being in China, we no longer bat an eyelid. Like I said earlier, you won’t get any trouble from the authorities as a tourist in China, it’s just the permanent residents who seem to get the hard end of the stick!

Kunming is a city in the south west of China with what felt like a decent climate, for the brief amount of time I was out in the open air. We only had a few hours to lay over and it was all we could do to order a meal from a hamburger chain whose name we will never know, and play a few games of cards with a fresh deck that we discovered discarded nearby. Our original cards have been used that much that pretty much every one of them is marked!

Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Weeks ago when we booked our flight to Nepal we were able to look online and choose which seats we wanted. It would be my turn for the window seat, but apart from that we had no real preference, so just picked whatever looked okay – 46A and 46B on the left side of the plane. It was only weeks later, i.e. yesterday, when after doing some research we realised that when flying to Nepal you get the fantastic views if you sit on the RIGHT side of the plane. B*gger! Plus the sun is not quite so bright and frying you to a crisp, meaning you have to pull down the shutters on the both the windows and get no view whatsoever! Still, after a while the plane did a bit of a hard-left manoeuvre and we were able to at least get some vaguely decent snaps…

So, what do we know about Nepal? It’s a third world country with the Himalayas in its backyard. The population is 90% Hindu with most of the remainder being Buddhist, which represents its geographical location halfway between India and Tibet. Kathmandu is the capital city, Pokhara is another town, and that’s about it for me in terms of known locations. I won’t be climbing Everest while I’m here, but I may get to go on a one day trek. Coincidentally, Kathmandua has a quaint little airport with factual signs greeting you as you arrive, such as stating that the country does indeed have the highest mountain in the world, and also the smallest person in the world. You lives and learns, eh?

I found there to be one big problem with Kathmandua airport – it is quaint and little. Roughly translated as there’s a system in place for passengers which works badly at best. The problem is that virtually everyone entering the country has to buy a visa (remember them???) but fortunately you can buy them on arrival at the airport. Although convenient, this is a double-edged sword because it means that pretty much everyone who gets off the planes needs to get themselves a visa. If several planes have arrived, there are several loads of passengers clogging up the system. We already knew it was 25 US dollars for a visa (some people hadn’t bothered researching it), so we had our money ready, along with the passport photo, and it didn’t take long to fill out the application. But then it all went wrong. You had to queue up to pay your visa fee at one desk, then instead of moving to the next desk to get your visa, you had to move to the end of a different line and queue up for that second desk. I am probably making an already-complicated process sound even more complicated to you, but suffice to say that because most visa-seekers were milling around like guppy fish at feeding time, the process took a lot longer than expected.

I blame the huge amount of Western travellers in the airport, but then I usually blame Western travellers for everything. After being in China for two weeks and barely getting a sniff of another European, to see so many in one place was both startling and disappointing, No longer do I feel like the lone star English warrior braving a strange land alone (albeit with brother by my side), now I’m just another one of the travelling herd again. The only consolation is that none of this lot have come here for fish and chips in the sunshine, they’ve come to trek. And getting back to my original point, I didn’t mind waiting in the lines so much, but my concern was that I couldn’t get to my luggage until I had been though immigration control with visa in place. After 45 minutes standing in line, I was starting to wonder whether my luggage would still be there when I finally got through…

…it wasn’t.

Well, it wasn’t beside conveyor belt 1 where the luggage from Kunming was supposed to have ended up. Fortunately it was sitting patiently besides conveyor 2 and I was able to unclench. Lost luggage is one of those things that you often hear about, but so far it’s one of the few things that has not happened to me on my travels, and I kinda rather it didn’t! Besides, when we tried to walk away with our bags an attendant came running up to make sure we had the correct tags for them on our boarding pass, so fair play to quaint little Kathmandu airport.

Our hotel had sent someone to pick us up at the airport, free of charge. That was nice. I felt a bit bad that we’d kept them waiting for so long, though I supposed they must be used to delays for people getting visas. And so, upon leaving the terminal building for the first time on this trip I saw someone holding a tatty piece of paper with my name scrawled upon it in red felt pen. This is how the stars must feel! There were two blokes there and they each grabbed our big bags and took them off across the car park. All part of the service, I guess. Not really. We arrived at a ropey-looking saloon car with driver already inside. The guy who greeted me said that this guy would drive us to the hotel and that I personally should sit in the front sit. Erm, okay. Then they loaded our luggage into the boot and held open the passenger door for the following:

“James, we work here at the airport and we work for tips.”

In my mind I thought three things:

            - ‘Already they are hustling me!’

            - ‘He wants a tip for holding up some paper and carrying a bag a few metres!’

            - ‘I am hungry and tired. He is not getting a tip.’

I said a load of stuff about how I didn’t have any local money and could they direct me to the ATM.  He said that I could pay in my own currency and it would be fine. Bear in mind that he is still holding the door to the car open, yet the driver has already started the engine and the vehicle is moving. Eventually the hustler realises that I am a hard-headed git who isn’t going to cave and he lets go of the door. The driver seems a bit more merry, until he goes straight into a traffic jam heading up a hill, beside the type of street that looks like the Apocalypse has already been and gone. For the best part of an hour we are there climbing that hill, moving a millimetre a minute. I ask the driver is this is normal, he says that it is. It has not taken me long to realise that everything I read about Nepal is true. You can’t get angry with this sort of stuff, just have to sit back and accept it. That way you might even smile, maybe even enjoy it!

The roads are chaotic here. We’ve seen such traffic madness in Cambodia and similar such places, but here you really do need nerves of steel and the patience of a saint to get down the road. Even after the traffic jam subsides our driver pulls the kind of manoeuvres that would make the Dukes of Hazzard shrink away in fear. The guy drives down streets that even I couldn’t fit down when I’m walking side-on! Come the end of the ride, I’m that thankful for him getting us here that I even give him a tip. Okay, so it’s Chinese money (he’s not getting US dollars, I need them), but it’s a decent amount whereas the exchange rate is concerned (one English pound goes a long way here). I just hope he knows someone who can change it for him!

The Peak Point Hotel is on the bottom ride hand corner of Thamel – an area in the centre of Nepal where all of the backpackers and tourists stay. It’s an area with plenty of charm, but unfortunately the hotel doesn’t have a great deal of that, though the staff are certainly friendly. In fact, the manager hassles us from the start about sitting down and discussing possible trekking trips, but all we want to do is kick back in our room and unload our gear The manager gets a minion to show us to our place on the fourth floor, but upon entering we see something we haven’t come across since Melbourne – a double bed. Due to some sort of complication that is not delved too deeply into, it seems we have to take the double bed tonight, then tomorrow we’ll be moved to a twin room for the next three nights. We aren’t in a mood to argue and simply agree to the terms, but we insist that we do need twin beds after tonight – the days of us lying so close together were supposedly finished in Australasia!

[Our room, literally two minutes after stepping foot inside.]

[The highly dangerous "balcony", lacking any kind of safety precautions (or view).]

The room is supposed to be a “deluxe double”, but there’s nothing deluxe about it. The walls are peeling, the phone doesn’t work and there are none of those little soaps and shampoos that we’ve come to depend upon. Oh well, everything looks better after a meal and a beer, so we headed out into downtown Thamel, ending up at a place that we’d researched on Tripadvisor. The Roadhouse Café wasn’t too bad – a little more expensive than we’d normally go for – but that’s First Night Syndrome for you. Most of the streets are pitch black when there is no traffic along them, so last thing we want to do is scout around for somewhere in the darkness. Speaking of which, we had read that Kathmandu is prone to regular black-outs, and no sooner had my ham and pineapple pizza arrived than all of the lights in the cafe went out. For some reason, the largely foreign crowd that made up the clientele whooped and cheered, though they shut up once the emergency lights came on a minute later and I could see what I was eating.

Walking back along the streets I was nearly taken out in a collision from the side by a bloke whizzing past on a bike. I’m going to have to be even more careful than normal – Nepal is a crazy place, Kathmandu being the insane heart of that crazy place! Back at the hotel we watched the lights go through the occasional brown out, but the power remained on until we switched off for the night. Nepal really is a land of adventure, even though the greatest adventure for me tonight would be sharing a bed with my brother again after such a long time!