Experiencing Technical Difficulties in China

Hi All. I am writing this as an email and have asked my lovely sister Joanne to cut and paste and post this for me on the blog. China is not allowing the access of Blogger, and in some places, I can't get into Yahoo either. Firewalls! I'll also be unable to download photos I think for awhile, but will do so as soon as I get the chance...

As I had done Hong Kong with some luxury, I have decided to do China on the cheap as a backpacker; by staying in dorm hostels, taking smelly overnight buses and spending too many hours on trains. I am trying to see if I can do this amazingly large country without taking any flights (aren't you proud?!) So after Hong Kong, I took the Kowloon-Canton Railway (KCR) to Shenzen, where I met two young lads from England studying medicine, and who had just cycled 1000 miles from Shanghai to Hong Kong for charity! Great to see the young ones doing something productive in life. We were on the strangest bus I had ever seen, with three rows of sleepers and a French movie dubbed in Cantonese for 12 hours. I hung out with these two cyclists, Dave and Chris, who look remarkably like Prince William and Harry, for the next few days in the tourist mecca of Yangshuo, just south of Guilin on the Li River. We met up with another traveller Madeline, and the four of us managed to get in a bamboo rafting trip, a cycle through the countryside, and a mud bath in the Buddha Cave. Yangshuo is a bit of a hippy tourist mecca, and attracts the many sides of Chinese folk to the town. The best was an albino fortune teller who totally had the hots for Madeline, and I just had to get my portrait painted on a t-shirt from a disabled artist. I also, perhaps not too surprisingly, bumped into an American I knew in Cairo four years ago!

I then survived a 26 hour train journey by getting through half of Mao's biography (wow, what a brute), and am now in Chengdu, Sichuan province. Home of one of my favorite Chinese dishes, szechuan shrimp. As I am only here for less than a day, I have managed to get in a Chinese opera (not too bad, great acrobatics and mask-changing stunts), and this morning ventured to the largest Panda breeding centre in the world. The movie highlighting the park announced that "panda breeding is as important to China as sending a man to space".

Today I am embarking on a Yangtze River Cruise. Believe me, it will not be luxurious (no five-star treatment and there are doubts about whether or not there will be anyone else speaking English). My only reason for doing this trip is to the see the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, and to hopefully do some research on the environmental impacts of the dam just for the heck of it. I have been emailling folks to try to get someone from a Canadian NGO I know working there to talk with me, but no luck so far. In any event, the Three Gorges is suppose to be absolutely stunning, and after the dam is finished in 2009, the river from Chongqing may be unpassable. So I am getting there just in time.

More soon from the land of Buddha, fake Rolex's and cool bamboo hats.

From Joanne: I did it!!!