Kazhes pierakstu burtnīca

Sekošu Lienes ieteikumam - dokumentēšu sīkas atmiņā palikušas epizodes no Ķīnas, kurām neatrodas vieta garajos aprakstos.

I`m giving up - I can`t force myself to complete the China travel diaries, as honestly it seems that there`s not much point to it - writing doesn`t go very smoothly and I have to force myself to complete each sentence. I`ll probably write a short summary to Ardalan (my penpal in Iran), but as for the rest of the story - if there happened to be someone reading my description, Liene`s one in her blog is much more readable and much more fun than mine. I usually consider myself a rather good documentary writer, but this time I feel myself that I`m failing and I`m not so sure that I want to fail more. I suppose it`d be much more fun for myself to go on with the China drawings/comics than writing about whom we saw in Fenghuang and how did a squished tapeworm taste. So - for now on - I`m switching back to writing in Latvian. It was certainly a useful practice to write in English for a while, but - if I`m getting no kicks from it, I guess I`ve proven my point (if there was one), and - that`s it.

When you tell your friends that you`re going to Zhangjiajie, their normal reaction is: Where? And then you start explaining about the amazing hanging cliffs that probably inspired James Cameron to create the wondrous world of Pandora and how the Chinese even renamed one of these cliffs as “Avatar Cliff”. And then they get it. But what they don`t get is, what it takes to get to the world where the magical blueskinned catlike creatures don`t really live.

To be honest, I had expected much more from a bullet train. I had never ridden one and all my previous experience with trains of this kind had to do with the song of such title by “Sparks” where the train is called “immaculate”. The Guangzhou-Changsha express was by no means immaculate – it`s interior was inferior to regular trains that I had ridden in Europe, and the speed wasn`t breathtaking either – it never went over 310km/h, and I didn`t feel that it was fast at all. Of course, my bitching in the previous sentences doesn`t necessarily mean that there was anything wrong with the train – it just wasn`t a life changing experience as I had thought it would be. In the seats next to us sat an English family with two teenage kids who were complaining about the food, the daughter was outraged by a milkshake that was purchased at a McDonalds and when the father got a call from someone inviting them to a feast, none of them seemed very happy. We were meanwhile feeding on wassabi flavored peas and enjoying the fact that we were leaving Guangzhou behind, as that city hadn`t impressed us much.

Everything changed from the moment when stepped onto Chinese mainland. The area around the Shenzhen railway station was a total mess, with huge crowds of people seemingly lacking any purpose of movement, with hordes of Chinese carrying heavy bags and moving towards the Hong Kong border, with annoying taxi drivers advertising their services.

We had been worrying about what clothes we should take on the trip – with the temperature in Riga at around 5-10C, in Hong Kong at around 30C and in other locations on our route at who knows what, we finally ended up with each taking a couple of sweaters and lots of summer clothes. It later proved that our choice was rather wise.

A trip to China is something quite unlike a regular vacation somewhere in Europe, one has to keep lots of different things in mind, in order for it to go smoothly. Thus in this description I will try not only to document our daily events, but also point out some underwater stones that a traveler should be able to foresee.