tgilbert

Been to Beijing twice now. Stayed in the hutong districts both times and highly recommend it while it lasts. I believe they are being torn down for the 2008 Olympics? Still have not managed to eat Peking Duck in Beijing – what a disappointment. Just never found myself in the right place. Went to the Forbidden City both times but for one reason or another, never got inside. Did manage to climb the Great Wall at Badaling – you’ve gotta do this, it’s awesome. Food in Beijing is fabulous and it snowed for us on the second visit – very special for those of us who normally live in the tropics. But very, very, very cold in winter and they turn off the central heating at the end of January. We slept in everything we had and still froze.

We visited Ha Long Bay in 2002, mid way through a year teaching English in Southern China. We arrived there after a rotten trip to Hanoi and it was a breath of fresh air. We booked our trip through the Kangaroo Cafe in Hanoi and I highly recommend doing it this way. We had a lovely clean and comfortable minibus from Hanoi, a great lunch on the way and a very smooth transfer onto our “junk” for the bay tour.

Our “junk” was a modern replica of the older boats doing the bay trade. It was all polished timber, beautiful dining room, fabulous top deck and a great crew who really looked after us. The sleeping quarters were tiny and airless, but it didn’t matter because most of us dragged mattresses onto the top deck and slept in the “1000 star hotel”.

Our tour of Ha Long Bay took us to some great photo spots, temples and swimming spots. The food on the boat was nothing short of incredible. We enjoyed ourselves thoroughly.

We went to Hanoi on a summer break from teaching English in southern China. Our mistake, I think, was to do it “on the cheap”. If we had gone with a tour group, I think we would have enjoyed it a lot more. My brother visited Hanoi a few months after us, as part of a tour, and loved the place.

Our experience of Hanoi was that it was dirty, difficult to negotiate our way around, full of petty thieves and people trying to extract money from you, and everything closed between 2 and 5 pm.

The brighter side of Hanoi for us was staying in a suite in an old Russian hotel in the old quarter. The room was huge, with a king size bed, spa and balcony. Breakfasts were fantastic. The local streets around the hotel were full of shops selling all kinds of things. Street life in the old quarter was very interesting.

But we were glad to leave for Ha Long Bay.

Jakarta is now a fairly dangerous place, I think, for Westerners. I last visited in about 1998 to see my brother who was living in Bandung. I had been there three or four times on business, but this was my first leisure visit.

Not a place I’d choose to spend a lot of time in, but I did enjoy myself anyway. We walked around a lot of the city, through Merdeka Square and up to the port where we did a canoe tour of the harbor – not recommended if you have a weak stomach or a sensitive nose.

Jarkarta does have some great eating places – I highly recommend then Yum Cha at the Mandarin Oriental hotel.

My family and I lived and worked in Nanning for 12 months in 2002. We taught English at Nanning Foreign Languages School and lived on campus in a teacher apartment. It was a fabulous experience which I’d highly recommend. Before going, we sold virtually all our worldly posessions (kept 8 tea chests at home, took 8 with us). It was refreshing to start with almost nothing and live with just the very basics of life. We had few possessions to weigh us down and we appreciated absolutely everything we had and received.

The people of Nanning are extremely kind and friendly. We travelled everywhere on local buses (1 Yuan per trip) and so we got to spend a lot of time with locals. We also went places with our students, other teachers and the school administrators. Because there are so few foreigners in Nanning (less than 200 when we were there, in a population of 3 million), we were treated like visiting royalty a lot of the time. It really was amazing.

Nanning is just hours from the most beautiful scenery in the world. The Chinese say that Guilin (200 km north) is the most beautiful city in the world. And they say that Yangshuo (half an hour further) is even more beautiful than Guilin. And it’s hard to argue they are wrong. The mountains of Guilin and Yangshuo are picture postcard gorgeous and rise straight up out of the plains into the sky. A lot of the time they are shrouded in mist and they are dotted with small temples.

Nanning itself is a rural commercial centre. Not sophisticated like Shanghai, or bustling like Guangzhou, or even historic like Beijing. It is the creation of the bureaucracy, as the provincial capital was moved here from Guilin by the Communists. Its population is about 3 million.