So, where were we? (China, part 1)

The absence of posts this past month is easily explained: No blogger access in China, thanks to a government still distrustful of its people and dissent. And once you fall out of any habitual rhythm, it can be difficult to get back into the groove. Here's an effort at a slight reboot of the commentary, now that I have some time to type from the comfort of my buddy Matt Bears' apartment in Seoul.

China. Incredible, magnificent, strange. Let's start with the "Great" wall - what an understatement. I have been to the Pyramids, hiked the Inka Trail to Machu Picchu, and walked through the Siq to the Treasury at Petra alone at dawn, but I think our 2-day hike and camping on the Great Wall was the most glorious thing I have done to date. It is a majesty on an entirely different sort of scale, knowing as we did that our 22km trek incorporated only a small portion of the entire wall. How was it ever built, and did the workers who toiled away hundreds of years ago have any sense of the beauty of the structure that was being built for a practical purpose? The enormity, the seemingly endless winding nature of the beast is truly exhilarating. So vast and so bold, it has that rare quality of the other great "wonders" - to embody the very essence of history. Unforgettable days, and memories in pictures (here) that I will treasure.

The city of Beijing itself was a great introduction - from Tianamen Square to the Forbidden City to the Summer Palace, the sites were absolutely flooded with hordes of Chinese tourists, but must be seen nonetheless. Loud and crowded and also hazy with air pollution, Beijing illustrated early the massize size of the country, a constant theme as we moved into its heart and past untold cities of millions upon millions. The continual construction works in the neighbourhood of our hostel - hundreds of workers at all hours and scaffolding everywhere - revealing how far behind the "West" China remains, but also the enormous capacity for work, and toleration of conditions simply unimaginable back home, that exists the people. And, from Tim's random pick-up game of badminton with the waitresses one evening, to the extraordinarily friendly young girls at the hostel reception, and the guys who shared some bottles of Tsingtao with us that they opened with chopsticks, we were really made to feel at home despite the gigantic nature of the city and its foreignness - here are some of the photos from Beijing.

Oh, and at some point I have to mention the food. Surely one of the highlights of the time in China, it was sublime - immensely filling and very satisfying. From the Peking duck to the copious noodles, rice, beef, and dumplings, we often found ourselves skipping a meal or two still full from the previous one.

From Beijing it was down to Xi'an on a highly comfortable night train, mainly to see the famous Terracotta warriors, but that city offered the chance for a great biking tour around the old city walls and also a visit to the Grand Mosque. I really liked the Old Silk Road capital, and the hostel again provided some young Chinese kids who were really helpful in sorting out our tour, onward train travel, and booking us into a Yangtze cruise with the Chinese middle class.

The Terracotta warriors are undoubtedly the highlight, and a miraculous site. So many figures, so incomprehensibly unearthed so recently as to defy credulity. Discovered only in 1974, the excavations continue in the massive pits amidst the tourism - painstaking efforts to relocate, reconstruct, recreate, and to understand what these ancient archaelogical findings mean - then and now. It is an ongoing process as inscrutable as the individual faces on these wondrous clay creations of the ancient past, never meant to be seen, so it is appropriate that some of them seem to sport some type of Mona Lisa-esq smile from beyond the grave. Here are the Xi'an pictures.

As this post grows lengthy, I will pick up the story of the Chinese travels from Chongqing to Shanghai in the next one... To be continued...