The A-Zone

Ushuaia :: Argentina

Feliz Navidad desde el Fin del mundo

Places: Ushuaia.

Coolest thing I did: Watched a very determined South African turn his dreams of cooking half a lamb into reality..

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The best cooking show in the world: http://www.youtube.com/user/EpicMealTime (Gen Y have been teaching me that there is far more to watch on YouTube than TV).

Once the bus turns it’s back on Andes you find yourself very quickly looking out at flat grassland as far as the eye can see, and you pretty soon see where all that Patagonian lamb and steak you’ve been consuming for the last month comes from. As one fellow Aussie on the bus said aloud, at times you could almost think you were back in Australia, until you look back over your shoulder and remember the ranges of snow capped mountains you just left. Once again in this part of the world the border crossings seem almost pointless, with the same sheep wandering over international borders and no one seeming that fussed if you actually filled out the entry card or not. The trouble with all this is, when the bus you’re on takes 12 hours and the first 10 look like endless flat paddocks then the rural idyll gets dull really fast. Despite a bit of excitement on the heavily rolling car ferry over the Magellan Straight there’s a lot of staring out the window trying to learn Spanish subconsciously through your iPod.

The thing that makes it all worth it is rounding the corner at about hour 11 and seeing the mountains rising up over the end of Argentina part to reveal the gorgeous Lago Fagnano and then you realise you’re back in fairly remote, untamed country. So untamed that the island, Tierra del Fuego (The land of fire) gets it’s name from the fact the natives here used to get around in the nude and required heaps of fires to not freeze to death in the almost Antarctic conditions. They must have seen Europeans show up wearing clothes and must have had a technological leap into not getting frostbite on your rude bits akin to an iPad being dropped into the heart of Medieval England.

So my one and only goal of coming to Ushuaia, which is the last town in Argentina and technically the last on the continent (there’s one further south, Puerto Williams in Chile but apparently that’s one street of grizzled locals) was to have a fixed place to spend Christmas Day with the other orphans I’ve met along the way. The thinking, of course, is what better place to do Christmas than the end of the world, Ushuaia being the place where all those high priced Antarctic cruises old rich people take depart from. I admit to having seen basically none of the town and very little of the surrounds, you know because you should have Christmas off.

I assume the plan had been to try and cook some more European style hot food for lunch on both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, until we saw the BBQ outside. With all the styling of Tower of London torture paraphernalia (you know, all black chains and clinking ratchets to lower the massive black grills up and down) you could tell these people take their BBQ seriously. So we spent an hour or so standing in blinding smoke burning down large chunks of timber into hot coals and then threw a whole load of steaks on. That went so well that we decided to forgo the oven on Christmas Day and BBQ our chooks instead. By that time I’d been demoted to charcoal boy by Doc, or resident South African who did a stellar job on the birds. So good in fact that he stated he would acquire half a lamb on Boxing Day and do it all again. This was a man not to make idle promises, and after 3 days of pretty much nothing but meat I’m starting to wonder if I might need to become a vegetarian for the next 48 hours or so.

One thing we’d been missing since Bariloche was Chimichurri, and oil based herb concoction that makes all meat instantly taste 56% better (that number was determined by years of study at BA’s research universities) and it seems like you can just buy the herbs that make it up in the supermarket and mix the oil in yourself. So we didn’t have it at Christmas, but we dramatically improved the already awesome 4.5kg of lamb that we attempted (and failed) to polish off between six of us. We’ve also been buying wine pretty much by pulling it randomly off the shelf in the supermarket and while Chile was a bit hit and miss I’ve yet to have a bad one in Argentina. A truly enlightened people.

So despite being hung over by two days of drinking I did attempt to get out and climb up to the glacier behind the town on Boxing Day for the view. That turned out to be 7km uphill through the sketchier parts of town, where the wild dogs look a fair bit wilder and defy naming and then up to a chairlift that promptly stopped working at 3:45 in the afternoon, which is fine when you don’t show up at 2:45. So I managed to get most of the way up to see the glacier, through at times heavy rain and howling winds, to see what must have been an awesome view over the town and out over the Beagle Channel to Chile if it had been a clear day. A large part of me thinks I should have stayed in the hostel, which has a nice view over the Beagle Channel as well, only you sit on white leather couches, not walk through the rain.

So due to taking my time to get here via the wilds of Patagonia I’m sitting in the Ushuaia airport waiting for my plane up to Buenos Aires (to an airport with the code EZE, which reminds me of a dead, high-pitched former member of seminal LA rappers NWA) which hasn’t yet even arrived from BA and is about an hour late. Some young American stoners I met in Bariloche refer to this as “being Argentina-ed” which happens a lot. When your bus doesn’t come, or you get searched at random at bus checkpoints, you’ve been Argentinaed, which puts you in the A-Zone. I’ve been promised as I travel the north of the country later on I will spend a whole lot more time there.

So I’ve loved all of Patagonia and the sleeping in tents and whatnot but a big part of me is happy to be heading back to a city again for a few days over New Years. My mate Gerry flies in from Sydney for at least 3 weeks starting tomorrow so it will be good to have a familiar face along the way.

Feliz Navidad a todo el mundo.

Ice, ice baby

Puerto Natales :: Chile

Too cold!

Places: Puerto Natales, El Calafate & El Chalten.

Coolest thing I did: Walked on a glacier, and then later one watched massive chunks of it fall 40m into the water.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: Goldman Sachs, the investment bank, came into possession of a large section of Tierra del Fuego during their normal course of business (ie. repossessing stuff from people who can't pay their debts) and turned it into a conservation zone.

The border between Chile and Argentina runs right down the middle of the Andes mountain range, which with very small interruption runs all the way down the America's spine from Alaska to Cape Horn. This means that there is just as much face-smackingly beautiful scenery to see on the Argentinian side of the line, and that also explains why 50% of my passport is now covered in entry and exit stamps from Chile and Argentina. Seeing as the border crossing is a hut in the middle of a sheep paddock which spans both sides of the frontier I'm not sure why they even bother. Does someone have to come through at night and separate all the Chilean sheep in the paddock from the Argentinian sheep?

So having spent 5 days walking around the cubist landscape that is Torres del Paine it's hard to imagine what more you can see over the border in Argentina, however the short 4 day jaunt to El Calafate and El Chatlen was more than worth it. These two purpose built tourist towns and the southern and northern gateways to the Los Glaciares National Park, which from it's name you can imagine involves a fair amount of glaciers. Despite having just seen a highly impressive glacier on the 5 day trek the big attraction from El Calafate is the ability to go and walk on a much larger one. It's not cheap, but then again, you get to walk on a glacier.

The glacier in question is the Perito Moreno Glacier which has a face rising 40 metres above the water and is, quite ironically, considered fast moving in the glacier world. It's stable, meaning it's face has remained in a constant position, at least since the early 20th century when they started recording these things, and it takes about 400 years for the ice formed at the top to reach the bit tourists see. It's kind of cool to think when you're drinking the melt off the glacier you're drinking water that was put there before the industrial revolution had even happened, so air pollution as we know it today wasn't even invented yet.

People used to walk on Glacier Grey in TdP in the olden days but then a guide fell into a fissure and they put a stop to it. However because Perito mostly moves in the centre it's considered stable enough to have tour groups get strapped up in crampons (spikes for your shoes for laymen like me) and then trudge around for 90 mins. Walking with steel spikes on your shoes up and down fairly steep hills is surprisingly tiring, but well worth the effort. You get to drink water more pure than anything you're ever likely to get out of a bottle, and at the end as an added touch you have a glass of scotch on the rocks, the rocks being from beneath your feet. There's nothing like 50c worth of scotch to make the average Aussie think paying over $100 for a tour was a bargain.

The walking on said glacier was cool, but I also liked the bit later, where you go grab a coffee and walk down a series of balconies to watch the front of the glacier fall to pieces. Massive chunks of ice, sometimes 10 or 20m long drop down and smash into the water to the great delight of all watching. You could trust someone from the tour who happened to be from San Francisco to ask the Al Gore questions, and to this bloke's great disappointment what we were watching was natural, not climate induced. Sometimes I think these people want the world to be ending so they can get angry at everyone for not listening to Al Gore.

El Calafate has the strange distinction of being totally dependant on tourists, yet seeming to be staffed with people who are total arseholes to tourists. Everything seemed like too much trouble. You work in a bar, you expect people to occasionally make you get off your seat and bring them more beer. If you want to get tipped you should really not show open disdain for people who pay your salary. There were exceptions (the hostel staff were uniformly nice, and quite often stoned so perhaps one causes the other) but as a rule: arseholes.

Due to a very tight schedule to make it to Ushuaia by Christmas I had to force my trip to El Chalten and the northern park of the park into two days, with an 8am bus on the first morning, a day of hiking, then an early start the next day for a day of hiking to make the bus back to El Calafate at 6.30pm. However, it was completely worth it.

The reason you go to El Chalten (a town that only started existing in 1985 expressly to service tourists) is to hike up and gaze on the Fitzroy range. Like their siblings in TdP, Cerro Fitzroy and Cerro Torre are an impossible jumble of shards of stone jutting out from glaciers and overlooking impossibly blue lakes. With the weather on the first day being fairly changeable (including a light dusting of snow while waiting by Laguna Torre) we were only afforded glimpses of the three towers on top of Cerro Torre, but I'm now counting my blessings since people have told me the preceding week was even worse. I'm also quite glad of the decision to go back into town at night to sleep in a hostel bed - I don't think I'm mentally prepared to be sleeping in a tent where snow is a possibility right now.

Like El Calafate, El Chalten is another make believe Disney mountain village totally for the tourists, but I found it's tiny size much easier to deal with than it's bigger cousin to the south. My one night there involved a stew (locro) designed with hungry hikers in mind - after all, the menu claims it contains both "cow meat" and "pig meat". How could you go wrong? Add to that it's served in a microbrewery where the staff are nice to the patrons and it was the best experience I'd had eating out in 4 or 5 days.

The contrast with the second day's longer trek couldn't be more stark. It started slightly cloudy but by the time we'd climbed 4 hours to be foot of Mt Fitzroy the weather had cleared and the photos other people who didn't smash their camera on the rocks of TdP took could have been on postcards. Due to time constraints I did a fair bit of running back down to the town, which was kind of cool. There's nothing like a tour group struggling along with their walking poles and heavy packs and seeing you tear right down the mountain past them like they're standing still. I also am quite lucky I didn't smash face first onto the loose rocks a few times, but that's part of the attraction I guess. I also noted many late starting, hung over looking Israelis on that day, which I'm reliably informed was because of Hanukkah celebrations being the night before and them all going crazy at the campsites until 4am.

So besides a two hour stop off for the bus at Punta Arenas I'm on my last day in Chile until June now. I'll kind of miss the packs of wild dogs roaming the streets (I've taking to naming the ones that follow me for more than a block) and the wacky student protests. Nearly every school in the country has it's gate blocked by a wall of spikes formed by the chairs and tables being piled up through the bars, kind of like an angry echidna. Everyone wants a piece of the copper money flowing through the place, with the students quite reasonably expecting some of the royalties to go towards their costly education. However, that seems to be the extent of visible problems in the country. Really Chile has been a very good choice as the starting point of a South American trip, where you can ease yourself in with a functioning country where stuff works, buses generally come on time and there is some tourist infrastructure that appears to have been slightly planned. I'm promised by the time Bolivia and Peru roll around that will all be a distant memory.

This is probably the point where much of the ever shifting group of travel companions I've been moving with at various times since Santiago breaks apart and goes their own way - many are staying down here or going back up the Argentinian side of the Andes when I fly up to Buenos Aires for New Years. I'm quite looking forward to a few days in civilisation again, if nothing else to stop having to remember things because I still don't have a camera. I looked in the photo shop in El Calafate but many of the cameras they have for sale STILL USE FILM. I suspect it might have to wait to BA now.

So now it's just down to Ushuaia for Christmas, not sure what to expect arriving there at 7pm on Christmas Eve but there should be enough of us orphans to make our own fun. Feliz Navidad to all.

PS - I'm feeling pretty pleased with myself, having just taken on the $16 super human sandwich which lists beef as an ingredient twice and won. I may be sick.

Superlative

Puerto Natales :: Chile

NOW I'm in Patagonia.

Places: Puerto Montt (just!), Puerto Eden, Puerto Natales & Torres del Paine.

Coolest thing I did: Watched sunrise over Torres del Paine, which can't really be described in words. I thought all the pictures were Photoshopped, but it was that amazing in real life.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: Beavers are the cane toads of Tierra del Fuego. They were introduced in the 1940s to start a fur industry but then just built dams everywhere, as beavers do.

I try not to tell too many transport stories, because no-one cares you spent 14 hours in a bus station, but the getting-to-the-Navimag story is movie of the week stuff. After spending a fitful night just shy of the Chilean border a lot of things had to go right for us to make it to Puerto Montt in Chile to catch the ferry we'd payed $480 to be on. James (my mate from Perth) has the only working phone so he was calling them all morning to see if there was a delay, but they kept saying it would depart on time at 2pm. It seemed like we couldn't get a ride into Chile the day before because every man and his dog had decided to go that morning - the border crossings were agonisingly slow and we could see the minutes ticking away. We were still 30 mins out of Puerto Montt when 2pm came and went and we were pretty low when we got into town after 48 hours of trying to get there. We called the terminal and the woman confirmed the ferry had sailed so we went do there to discuss refunds.

As soon as they saw us there with our backpacks one woman in the office on her phone to the captain and gibbered at us to run after her in Spanish. She threw the baby seats out of her car and told us to get in then floored it around the dock past fork lifts and shipping containers and got us so we could see the ferry was out of the dock but still in the water. After a tense 5 mins the foreman on the dock motioned us to a dinghy and we could see the ramp at the back of the ferry where they load the trucks on open and 10 mins later we were on board. We managed a round of applause from the assembled passengers watching all this unfold and spent 4 days trading off our minor celebrity status. Our bunks had been given away so we got upgraded to another room with a window with no-one else in it. It's safe to say we learned nothing from this life lesson, as things just got more awesome through lack of planning.

Moving in backpacker circles again you get used to feeling embarrassed about spending money on anything, and lots of people take the overland trip to Patagonia instead of springing for the ferry. I'd say after 4 days of fjords, black and white dolphins, humpback whales and a glacier they get you close enough to feel the freezing cold air off that this is a mistaken way to look at things. The only time you get off is to stop in Puerto Eden, a town of 170 people nestled in a fjord and the rest of the time it's drink beer, look out at the stunning scenery and make new friends.

I liked the fact that with a couple of crucial exceptions you could go to the bridge and watch the captain and crew drive the boat any time you wanted. The captain was a stern looking old bloke, who seemed to be slightly annoyed with the quality of work being done at all times, but some of the other officers spoke passable English and were happy to answer our stupid questions about how the boat worked, or to show us how to chart the course with the GPS. A few people stayed down there while they were trying to get us as close as possible to the face of a glacier named after a pope. Nothing really prepares you for the sky blue colour the sun brings out in a glacier, and now having seen a few I was most impressed with this one.

The day before that was proper, out at sea weather, with the horizon rising and dropping alarmingly out the window. I think by dinner about 3/4 of the passengers were hiding out in bed feeling queasy and the rest of us were standing on the bow trying to get a picture of the nose slamming into the sea to make the biggest splash. I did wonder if I'd get sea sick but drinking cask wine all afternoon in preparation seemed to gird me well.

The Navimag was also a good marshalling point to meet everyone else doing the 5 day 'W' trek of the Torres del Paine national park when you arrive in Puerto Natales. By the time we got off James and I had recruited 4 more for our party and we kept running into more people from the boat all the way around.

The main reason you go to this national park is to see Torres del Paine itself, a cluster of massive granite stacks twisted into an otherworldly shape by glacial forces which sit on a turquoise lake. You can do that in a day, but to really get the most out of the park it's necessary to stay out there for several. There's two options, stay in hostel things called refugios, or to go camping and carry all your food and gear with you (like tents and stoves and whatnot). I've never done this for more than a night before, so we decided a bigger group meant we could share the load a bit and buy more bulk food to carry. Having said that the packs still weigh a ton and you have moments where you and your pack get into tiffs, need some time apart, have harsh words and generally loathe each other.

But it's worth it.

With your own gear you can stay campsites that are in most cases far closer to the stuff you actually came to see. The route we took is the most popular, called the 'W' because you go up into three different valleys that face onto a series of lakes so overhead it looks like it's name. After a massive uphill hike on the first day you get to a campsite that is only 45 mins from the Torres del Paine lookout, meaning you can be up there for sunrise with only a 4am start.

The towers look spectacular enough during the day, but when the sun rises over the ridge opposite and catches the tip of each tower one by one, leaving the rest in shadow, the bits in the sun look like they're glowing. I'd seen the pictures before getting there, and assumed they'd been doctored in some way, but it's something that needs to be seen in real life to have justice done to it.

The other highlights are the Frenchman's valley, which as a treat you climb up without your heavy pack and get to a lookout (well, more a bunch of big shale boulders) which has a 360 degree view of the central valley, with snow capped mountains on each side and a wild river fed by melting snow running down into the lake at the bottom. As an added bonus we saw a large section of ice sheet on one of the mountains collapse into the valley below, which was spectacular, and probably should have worried Al Gore.

So each day you wake up wondering "how do we possibly top yesterday?". The last night we spent at a campsite which has a lookout over 280km of Glacier Grey, which is like nothing I've ever seen before. I'd seen them in Canada, where you walk up them, and I'd seen them from the Navimag and water level, but to just look out over the valley and see brilliant blue ice in all directions is hard to match. You can sit there and watch it for hours, which is good because there's no TV. We cooked up our dinner and sat at the lookout eating it and just watching the sun set. That was so good we got up at a leisurely 5.30am to see it again. The added bonus there was seeing what must have been hundreds of metres of ice beak off the front and crash into the water. For about 10 mins later huge rushes of white water splash out of the front of the glacier, as water rushes around underneath. This being 2011 and not 2006 no-one even mentioned global warming.

It is, however disconcerting to see the treeline where the glacier used to be. The refugio that's closest to the glacier was once right at the face of it, but now a couple of decades or more later it's a good hour's hike to reach the new waterline. Argue all you like about man-made vs. sunspots or aliens but it's hard to look at that and not be concerned the planet is warming. What we do about it is a whole other argument.

So due to more lack of organisation in high season I'm having an enforced rest day as I couldn't get a bus back into Argentina for El Calafate until tomorrow. Which is good as I'm just glad to not have my shoes on and let the one big blister each foot currently is breathe a bit. I feel like I've been running at full speed since I got here, there's so much to do and it's not looking like stopping until at least Christmas.

In a terrible moment I managed to smash my camera on the rocks on day 4 of the trek so all the pictures of me with the glacier exist only on other people's cameras so I'm going to have to spend some time on the first day in Argentina camera shopping. I'm wondering how far my fragments of Spanish will get me there.

Waiting for No Ash Wednesday

Villa la Angostura :: Argentina

Right now, I really should be in Chile.

Places: Bariloche, San Martin de Los Andes & Villa la Angostura.

Coolest thing I did: Shared a hire car around the Seven Lakes route, this time with the added bonus that we could stop the car to take pictures of things. The bus drivers here won't let you do that.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: Not only can you ski here, but these lakes also hide a population crazed by chocolate.

So having knocked yourself out for 48 hours on spectacular alpine scenery the best thing it seems you can do is try and top it with more spectacular alpine scenery. This being a country full of wilderness and nothing there are certain parts that it's certainly easier to see with your own car, and I'm finding it's also rather easy to find groups of people hiring cars for this very reason who are happy to share them with you if you kick in for the costs. So with no inkling I'd actually be doing it that morning, I spent my second full day in Bariloche in a car being driven the scenic route to San Martin de Los Andes.

The best section is totally unpaved dirt road that winds it's way around several lakes with ample stops to view the sights. This had the added benefit of our driver for the early afternoon being Michela of Berlin, a young lady who seems to have absorbed scarily good driving skills by virtue of working for Mercedes Benz back home. There was a fair amount of sideways action around some of the corners, probably to the point I should have been holding notes and yelling out "hard right!" & "break". I'd like to think I'd have made an excellent rally navigator, except for my slow reaction time and terrible eyesight.

We'd decided to go for a swim in the lake at San Martin, because that was the end of the road, but with us being followed by the ever present ash cloud from Puyehue we thought it best to get into one of the earlier ones. The big benefit of this is there was only four of us to share it with the geese (downside being you have to wade through gooseshit to get to the water). I was the first to wade out to my knees and due to the settling of ash in the lake I felt it better to simply dive all the way in and keep swimming or treading water. Man, that water was cold. There being ladies involved I was too stubborn to admit I was freezing to death so I kept going for about 5 or so mins before wading back out, trying to look manly as I noticeably shivered. I think I was breathing so hard because my lungs had shrunk to the size of peas.

San Martin feels a lot like somewhere like Vail or Aspen translated into Spanish. There may have been a real, working town under there once, but it's not been converted into a fairly tale village in the mountains, again with the requisite beautiful lake to back onto. I'll remember that place for two things: ice cream and people learning karate in the board walk. The Argies seem to have far superior ice cream technology to the rest of us, with flavours that defy logic. Why would you have White Wine & Egg White ice cream? Who knows but it doesn't taste half bad. I also tend to think that because these guys haven't yet found a way to make lamb or steak flavoured ice cream means that it simply defies the laws of physics. I can't believe people who love meat and ice cream this much haven't tried to splice the two yet. Maybe there's people working on this in labs in Buenos Aires as we speak.

Today's update comes hard on the heels of the last, mostly because today has been a wee bit of a disaster. Due to our nonchalant habit of buying tickets at the last minute we've been bitten badly by all the buses going back into Chile today being full. That wouldn't be an issue, except there's a $480 ferry ride we should be checking in for starting 9am tomorrow over in Puerto Montt and that's about a 6 hour bus ride away, and our bus is now leaving here at 8.35am that day. The ferry sails at 2pm if everything goes 100% right so we should arrive in town with 15 mins to make that. Fingers crossed.

It's not come without trying hard to make amends for this. We took a bus to the closest town to the border, Villa la Angostura in the hope we could either get onto a bus which someone hadn't made it for in Bariloche or failing that hitch hike into Chile. With hindsight doing this on a public holiday was making it very hard for ourselves, as there seemed to be zero trucks or people in town with Chilean plates but none the less we did stand on the side of the road for about 4 hours until the border closed. The sign evolution tells a story. We started with "Chile". Simple enough, but then we added "Osorno", which is the first town in Chile. After that wasn't catching us any, we added "Por favor", to be polite. Towards the end of the day we thought "Tengo dinero" (I have money) was a nice touch, to make sure no-one thought we were some kind of free-loading backpackers, but all to no avail. So now we're on plan B, which is to go as early as we can and hope the ferry is delayed in leaving. Next time I'm writing this will either be me having spent 4 days on the fjords or me having been chastised with a $480 lesson on buying your bus tickets early in peak season.

Right now, I'm trying to be philosophical about it, but it's not been helped by Puyehue, which picked today to ramp up it's ash spewing a notch or three. It feels like I smoked 3 or 4 packs of cigarettes by standing by the side of the road and breathing the air. I also think we're getting noticed by people, sitting out having a beer to celebrate a day well fucked up people were all greeting us. My Spanish is not good enough to know if this is a very friendly town or whether we've become local celebrities, known for politely wanting to go to Chile and having money.

You're climbing what?

Bariloche :: Argentina

Apparently you can go about your business without being worried there's a volcano spewing ash on the horizon.

Places: Valdivia & Bariloche.

Coolest thing I did: I would have said the Patagonian lamb if you'd asked me two dinners ago, but the Bife de Chorizo cut of steak cooked by the Argies is how God has his steak done.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The Germans were very big in South America after World War II. Apparently a lot of the Nazi hunters did very well around the Argentinian Lakes District. On the plus side, they taught the locals how to brew good beer.

Valdivia became a totally different place when the rain stopped. I woke up to bright blue skies on the second day and spent hours walking the foreshore of the three rivers that join up in and around the town. It might have been made even more pleasant if I hadn't been nursing the hangover from hell.

Why was I so hung over? One word: Kuntsmann. The brewery for this fine range of beers lies over a couple of bridges, a short taxi ride away from the middle of town and being rather enlightened they stay open until midnight, so if you show up in town in the afternoon after a long bus ride you can still go at dinner time. We started with a shot of all 10 beers they had on tap (including a rather nice blueberry one they only do at the brewery) and then decided to do pretty much the whole lot again in 1/2 litres. The staff were very kindly to people doing this, even though most of our translation had to be done by the one barman that spoke good English. Strangely enough we assumed he was Irish, being the first red haired Latino I've ever seen.

The brewery struck me as the kind of place people bring their kids to run riot on a Saturday while Mum and Dad smash a few litres of beer in peace and quiet. My favourite souvenir was a 5 litre jug with a sealed lid (kind of like the old Grolsh bottles for those who lived in Europe) that they fill up directly from the tap for you to take home. Saw quite a few of those go home with people. They even managed to make sure we got a taxi back into town when they closed up at midnight. However, instead of going home, which would have been sensible we decided to go hit the nightclubs.

It seems like we've been in Chile for telethon season, but they take their Teleton very seriously. People advertise it by writing the dates on the back of their car windows and while we were sitting there in the Irish pub at about 1am the crowd was going nuts and cheering every time they announced how much money had been made. Like the rest of the country it appears that telethons start late and finish late. I'm not sure how much they made, because we decided to keep moving clubs. I lost track of my mate James at one point and went home, only to find out he'd been in the DJ booth communicating with the DJ completely using Google translate. The DJ was apparently very bored, which I guess is what happens when you play the same club every week in a small town.

The next movement was to Bariloche, including the first of many border crossings for the trip. The road passes right in the path of Puyehue, which those in the Southern Hemisphere will remember as the scourge of air travel from Sydney to Capetown about 18 months ago. Well it's spewing loads of ash again, and when we we through it was all piled up next to the road like snow. The story we're being told is this time it only disrupted air traffic as far away as Uruguay but it did spend most of yesterday afternoon blocking out the sun here, so there might be more to tell of that story yet.

The bus ride from Valdivia to Bariloche is simply amazing, following the side of Nahuel Huapi lake, which is serious ski country in winter and a flawless alpine lake in summer, surrounded by the head wrecking jagged peaks that seem to dominate this part of the world.

So when in Bariloche you're pretty much here to ski in winter or climb things in summer. We took a day hike up around the main ski hill, Cerro Cathedral which shields a turquoise lake in a valley about 3 and a bit hike hours up. Nestled in that valley is Refugio Frey, a small bunch of huts that people sleep in when they're doing more serious hiking up in the mountains for days, and if you're like most of us you'll have lunch at and go home. It's hard to describe the setting without resorting to cliches, you'll just have to wait for the pictures. There's a certain serenity to sitting there with your feet in the crystal clear water pondering stone towers shaped like ice crystals made out of rock. While I was doing this a group of 3 blokes from Colorado found their way into the valley, and it turns out their entire reason for being up there was to spend a whole week climbing these sheer stone walls. Part of me kind of longed to have that kind of focus when I go on these trips. I kind of get edgy when I've been in the same place for 2 or 3 days.

Arse sliding

Valdivia :: Chile

Where else can you climb a volcano and expect half a cow on a BBQ when you get home?

Places: Pucon & Valdivia.

Coolest thing I did: Spent 4 and a half hours climbing a volcano and then sliding back down it on the snow in about 30 mins.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: There is a wine grape here called Carmenere that came from France but has been extinct there for 150 years or so and now only exists in Chile.

Now I feel like I'm on holiday. Even though Pucon turned out to be a small alpine town that totally exists to cater to the tourists it was probably the highlight of Chile thus far. The day we got off the night bus was under a perfect blue sky and you could see the snow covered cone of the Villarica volcano at the end of the street, complete with billowing funnel of smoke. It seriously looks like one of those volcanoes that you draw as a kid, a cone with a flat top and smoke coming out, a kind of Platonic form of volcanoes, and pretty soon you discover the number one reason everyone is in town is to climb it.

You also discover pretty soon that these people are not mucking around. You get up at 6am to start the climb and you pretty much have to take all their equipment, including down to the boots unless you've prepared and brought serious shoes yourself. When you open your pack and see spikes, several layers of waterproof gear and an ice pick you know you're not in for a leisurely climb. It's about 5 hours from the car park to the crater but 4 hours of that is through snow on a slope that they use for a black run when the volcano hosts a ski resort in winter. There is also an option to skip the first hour by taking a chairlift up, but out of our group of 12 the 5 youngest and stupidest men decided that would be cheating and decided to walk up that bit too. Funnily enough, once the first one said he'd climb it my man brain took over and I had to as well.

So I've been up volcanoes before, but I've never climbed a snow covered mountain ever and it is really hard going. I did manage to keep up with the front runners the whole way (marathon training may still be paying dividends) but by the time we reached the top I was really feeling the lack of exercise since September. Having said that the views in every direction were amazing, you can see several other volcanoes in each direction and have a lovely photo to take over the town of Pucon with the lake it rests on. That alone would have been worth it, but the ride down made me think I'd nearly have done it all again the next day.

One of the things they put in your pack I've christened the arse slider, because I can't remember what the Spanish name for it was. It's basically a bum sized hard plastic seat with a handle on the front which goes between your legs and you simply point both your feet to the ground and let gravity do the rest. You end up soaked to the bum and with a heap of snow in your face but it's heaps of fun.

The only way you could top that was this kid from Colorado who climbed up with us carrying a rented snowboard. I had jokingly said to the guide it would be awesome to ride a board down and he was quite serious when he said they'd rent me one if I carried it up myself. One look over the East face of the mountain (we slid down the much shallower North face, but the snow was far too messy to board down) told me I'm nowhere near a good enough boarder to have taken that on. This guy just disappeared and I don't think he touched either edge into the snow for a good 100 or 200m directly down. Maybe next time.

So how do you top that? Well the next day the call was made to try hydrospeed, which is the stupidest name for a sport ever. Basically you take these massive fat foam body boards with arm holes cut into them and go down rapids. You know, because doing that in a boat doesn't get you close enough to submerged rocks with your face. We had a very good guide who was good at showing us the right way to go to not end up underwater and despite a little bit of bashing each other over the head with the boards and kicking each other in the fact with our fins it's also never feels at all dangerous. Everyone ended the hour and a half with a massive grin on their face and I would strongly recommend it as an activity if you're ever anywhere with a river fed by melting snow. The water should have been freezing, even in a wetsuit but you're moving so much you hardly feel it.

So while most parts of Chile I've been travelling in are known for their seafood the Chileans like nothing better than a good BBQ, or Asado as I've found out they're called. For the first time in years I've actually fallen back in love with hostel life again and last night's Adsdo was a big contributor to that. I ended up in a place called El Refugio, run by a Dutch guy that's never going back and the atmosphere in the place was such that everyone felt at home and there was always a big group to share a litre of beer or just talk crap with. We invited a few of the travelling companions that have been picked up along the way who were staying in other places in Pucon and they all said they felt a different vibe. I suppose these days most of the hostel kids spend all their time on Facebook at nights so it's good to have that family feel hostels used to have before wifi. Sorry, grumpy old backpacker rant over.

So an asado is a BBQ cooked over charcoal and the staples are Chorizo hotdogs and big slide of beef simply cut into inch thick strips and handed around. Add to that we'd all chipped in for enough beer and wine to keep us going from about 7pm to midnight and it made for a messy night. I think that one night alone furnished the travelling group with quite a few recruits for Christmas at the bottom of the world, which looks like the current plan.

So a short, hungover bus ride has me sitting in Valdivia, and unfortunately due to it chucking it down rain outside I'm sitting inside writing this. I've had a constant travel companion who I met on the way from the airport to the hostel in Santiago from Perth, James who has been happy enough to let me dictate travel plans thus far, but he easily talked me into stopping off here to drink at the Kuntsmann brewery, which so far has been easily one of the better beers I've sampled in Chile. That's on tonight so at least if the weather ends up repeating itself tomorrow I can spent some quality time sleeping. After that it's over the boarder for the first sneaky trip into Argentina to Bariloche, which I'm still yet to hear a bad word about.

If the beer is called Kuntsmann it might also explain why everyone in this room seems to be speaking German. And is on Facebooking on their computers and ignoring each other.

As a side note I met this guy in Pucon who has been riding his motorcycle from Toronto to Tierra del Fuego (via Alaska for the hell of it). Check out the website as it's truly an awesome feat.

Whose house?!?

Valparaiso :: Chile

Pablo's House!
"I am familiar with the works of Pablo Neruda" - Bart Simpson

Places: Santiago, Valparaiso & Quintay.

Coolest thing I did: Wandered the old streets of Valparaiso's hills, where it seems like every space is a blank canvas.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: Back in the olden days, I'm guessing sometime before they invented TV, you could become a national hero AND be loaded at the same time, just for being a poet.

So the grand Sudamerica tour starts in the Chilean capital of Santiago, which even after a few days doesn't feel like it's crammed to the gills with tourist sites. It's fairly easy to get a few under your belt in the first 48 hours (even with massive jetlag) and then you don't feel like you're slacking off when you're sitting out on the footpath tables on Pio Nono in Barrio Bellavista, where the student bars will see you a litre of beer for $3, or $4 if you go to one of the posh ones that use glasses rather than plastic cups. The feeling I got from Santiago is it was a far better city to just hang about in than to be a hard core tourist - which was a nice gentle start to 6 months of mangling the Spanish language.

Walking around Santiago's main centre you get the feeling that there was a country here once, with a colonial history that's just been totally overshadowed by the 1973 coup organised by one General Augusto Pinochet. You can't see inside the presidential place, mostly because the President lives there, but that was also the site of the overthrow of a bloke called Salvador Allende, who was elected president, but also a communist, which back during the cold war was a fairly good way to end up in a coup. The army shelled the presidential palace, Pinochet took over with material support from the CIA, Allende ended up dead from suspicious suicide and Chile got the kind of repression you only really get from a right-wing military dictatorship. The weirdest result of the coup is the fact booze is really cheap and books are really expensive in Chile, even to this day. It does explain everyone's really impressive alcohol tolerance.

One thing worth at least seeing for it's total wrongness in the commercial downtown of Santiago is Cafe con piernas, which seems to be a stand up coffee bar where businessmen and old blokes with nothing better to do but read the paper all day are served coffee by girls in short skirts and high heels. I can imagine back in the day there was just one of these places, with someone's sister serving coffee with her ankles showing and then a kind of hemline arm's race ensured so now the girls where something that could best be described as "a thick belt". I can imagine the longevity of a place like that in Sydney's CBD.

Santiago has two hills with parks on top of them that you climb to get a view over the city, which is a nice thing to do on a day when the smog isn't too thick. The one to do is Cerro San Cristobal, which has the bonus of being much higher and having a statue of the Virgin Mary at the top to be photographed next to. In my first the hell with you, Lonely Planet moment of the trip (I expect many more) it seems like going the back way to take the cable car doesn't work since the cable car stopped working about 2 years ago. I did climb up for a couple of hours, passing wrecked looking cyclists riding up and being side-swiped by wild eyed cyclists tearing it down the other way. The easy way up would have been to take the funicular which left from about a block from where I was staying, but who does it the easy way? I was lucky with how far I could see, and it seems like Santiago is a massively flat city, except for the few places massive hills with nothing built on them punch through.

Really, the best thing to do in Santiago is to go between cafes and wander the streets of Lastarria & Bella Artes and spend the nights tearing up the bars and night clubs. My big Friday night out ended up being so massive that the next day when I walked past the bar we started in the staff shook my hands and I had no idea who most of them were. I have vague recollections of being a nightclub at some point and woke up at 2pm on Saturday, which I blame on the jetlag. This is a object lesson in why you don't help a new mate you met on the plane over from Oz polish off 3/4 of a litre of duty free Bombay Saph before going out if you want total recall of the rest of the evening. G&Ts are apparently very good for fending off malaria I'm told, but I suspect more research will be required.

It might help if I ever lost my mind and decided to drink the chocolate milk coloured water of Santiago's main water way ("does this taste like cholera to you?"), which always seems to be flowing at a high pressure trickle. Perhaps that's why they've made the most logical use of a river running through the city, which is to put a park along it and then separate that park from the river with 3 lanes of traffic on each bank.

The segue between the towns of Santiago and Valparaiso are going to be the two houses of the poet Pablo Neruda, which I didn't think would be worth doing but both turned out to be highly awesome. The one in Santiago, called La Chascona after his mistresses' messy hair was kind of sprawling compound, where he could house 3 bars, a library and a study that I suspect used to have a view over all of Santiago before the high-rise came in. I like the sound of Neruda, who besides being knee deep in wives and mistresses over the years also had a few real jobs, like ambassador to Colombia and France. I'm not sure if poets could afford to have several massive houses in most countries back then, but I reckon most of them don't do that well now. Actually, he probably would have been a rapper these days so the houses would probably have been even bigger. It would also have more bling, but it's probably kind of hard to top having a Nobel Prize for Literature sitting out on your coffee table.

The house in Valparaiso sits near the top of one of the town's many massive hills you have to walk up to see anything interesting but has a view that would be priceless these days. It's modelled on a lighthouse, with lots of glass facing out to the Pacific on each side and each view is even better than the last. His study was on the very top floor, where he liked to spend his time not writing poems by using his binoculars to look for women sunbathing naked on their roofs. Apparently was common enough for him to do it all the time.

Valparaiso is a town to which earthquakes haven't been kind, which reminds you that Chile sits on the same ring of fire as New Zealand and Japan, except with more volcanoes. The flat part of the town down near the water has been recast with a grid and tends to look a bit down at heel and like Santiago has more than enough stray dogs wandering the streets. I've taken to naming them, and my record so far is a pack of six following me around. That time I only named the natural leader.

You could almost be put off by that part of town, except for the fact that it's either a back breaking climb or a ride on an antique funicular lift to reach the winding streets they've packed on to the hills, which has been converted almost entirely to an open air art gallery. It seems like it's cool to paint a mural on pretty much any flat surface and you can spend hours picking up where someone has painted a green woman in art deco, spray painted a stencil of Kurt Cobain or outlined light blue children escaping from the wall of a school. The layout of the streets is totally dictated by the geography, with sheer drops and steep climbs at the end of streets giving a view to the houses crawling over the next hill, or even better right out to the Pacific horizon. The town looks a bit like an Escher painting at times, and it may not be the kind of place you'd enjoy if you suffered a bit from Vertigo, but there's nothing like sitting on a terrace looking out over a sheer cliff to the port where the fish you're eating was landed that morning.

After an offer to split the hire car costs I spent yesterday between trying to learn about Chilean wine by going to vinyards on a Monday and eating fish in the tiny village of Quintay. The wineries we went to didn't seem all that interested in tourists, which struck me as strange, and wanted a fair bit of money for a fairly small sampling of their wines. We took one tour, of an organic winery, where they seem to try and make the grapes taste better via mumbo jumbo and magic. I assumed organic meant "we don't use fertiliser", not "we make our compost from herbs we bury along ley lines so they gain extra power from the earth". It was nutty. I liked the big commercial wineries wine better, but even then they seemed uninterested in us - it seems like it's just better for them to get bus loads of people on a weekend and not worry about people who show up in their car. It would have helped if any of the wine had been better than the Chilean stuff we've been buying in the supermarket at random, but it could also be because my science poisoned mind won't appreciate terroir based on the fact the peasants used to bury their grandmothers in the field where the grapes grown now.

I liked Quintay on the way back, we sat in a restaurant by the sea and ate seafood while watching some kid do very well at not stacking it into the massive rocks the waves he was body boarding on were crashing into. We also realised we'd be a 50/50 chance of making it back to the highway with the petrol we had remaining so we thought it best to ask in town. Apparently Senor Israel was the dude. You just keep asking people on the street for directions and pretty soon you come to Senor Israel's house, out the back of which he keeps 5 litre jugs of unleaded you can buy for 150% mark up. No wonder he seemed like such a happy old chap.

So this is me killing time before I get on a 12 hour overnight bus to Pucon, which is apparently the Queenstown of Chile.

Plankers

Sydney :: Australia

Australia as a foreign country

Places: Perth, Exmouth, Denham, Monkey Mia & Coral Bay

Coolest thing I did: While swimming with the whalesharks is the big drawcard I actually think I liked swimming with the Manta Rays better. They move slower.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: You can pretty much drive as fast as you want in WA. We were getting overtaken doing like 130km/h on the highway.

We'll start with the postcards - Ningaloo Reef exceeded all my expectations. Situated 1200ish kms north of Perth is a couple of hundred kms of fringing reef which feels almost untouched when compared to the crush you can sometimes feel diving off Cairns or Townsville. There isn't much tourist infrastructure on the peninsula yet and that makes it feel a remoteness you can't get anywhere on the East Coast of Australia anymore. You come up here for the experience of swimming with the whalesharks, but there's just so much more than that to it - if it swam in the water I probably saw it over the course of a week. One day we were out diving and we saw humpback whales tracking along at about the same speed as the boat. On that same day dolphins decided to come right up to the hull and swim along with the boat as we charged out to the reef, as if it's something they do all the the time. You have to keep reminding yourself amidst all this blue sky and 29 degree days that it's the middle of winter.

The plan had always been to spend as much time diving out on the reef as possible, but on arrival it became obvious that the record highs of the Aussie dollar aren't doing very much for tourism in this part of the world. We only managed to get out diving on two separate days in the whole week, mostly because they have trouble filling up a dive boat at the moment. The plus side of that of course is you're going to be pretty sure there isn't going to be the kind of underwater traffic jams you get lining up for the Blue Hole in Egypt or diving off the pontoons in Cairns. Of the diving my favorite was the Navy Pier, which added to my limited diving on man-made structures and gave me my first night dive. I really have to get around to getting that Advanced license one of these days.

The Navy Pier is an accident of history. During the Cold War the Yanks decided that Exmouth would be a good place to put VHF antennae so they could communicate with their nuclear subs out in the Indian Ocean. Being Yanks, they also decided they should build these antennae (which are stories tall) in Texas and ship them out to Australia, but Exmouth being pretty remote they also had to dig a channel 14m deep and build a pier to unload them on. About 40 years later the reef has grown over it and it's become a favorite haunt of Grey Nurse Sharks and Wobbegongs. What's very unique about it is the fact you can drive right up to the pier in a minibus, get geared up and jump right in. Everything you want to see is quite shallow and 50 mins later you climb up a ladder like getting out of a swimming pool. All these massive diagonal struts are covered in new life and diving it by torchlight on the second dive added another interesting aspect to it all. Highly recommended.

The main reason anyone comes to Exmouth in winter is for the whalesharks, these big placid filter feeders who can be seen in several other places, but nowhere with the clock regularity of Exmouth between March and July. You can't dive with them, for the simple fact that they don't sit still very long, and you're only ever going to see them on the surface when they're hoovering up krill. When they dive, they dive deep and fast so being at 10m or so would be fairly useless anyway. It's quite a production as it is. You get on boats that go cruising around the reef waiting for light aircraft to spot the sharks and tell them where they are heading. This is possible because on a good day there's like 20m visibility under water and the things are massive - the biggest one we swam with was clocked at 6m long. You get geared up for snorkeling then the boat drops you off in front of where the whaleshark is heading and you kind of let it pass you and try your hardest to swim along after them. And it's not easy, they move at some speed and have a habit of turning at random however they do let you get within a few metres of them and you get a feel for just how big they are. I felt sorry for the flabbergasted backpackers we kept meeting who simply couldn't afford to do it while they were there, it was one of the highlights of the trip for sure.

Manta Rays are the other big beast you snorkel with off the back of a boat, and that was much easier to deal with due to it being far less popular. The same light aircraft tell you where they are going to be, but instead of charging along at top speed the mantas tend to just swim down a few metres and do backflips while they are feeding so you get to see right down into them as they do it. They truly are miracles of form following function, they just seem to open up like big sacks and stuff themselves with krill or whatever it is they are eating. Unlike the whalesharks there aren't that many rules around following them around so you can generally swim out there until you run out of energy.

On the peninsula the last town we stayed in was Coral Bay, which is pretty much a single street which faces onto what may well be the most attractive beach I've seen anywhere in this country, and I've seen a few. It's a long flat beach which is protected from fishing, meaning you can walk right down to the water, plug into your snorkeling gear and then drop off 3m or so into the water and then there's about 1km of reef right there. I saw turtles and sharks right off the beach, which is pretty rare anywhere else in the world. One day I was actually lucky enough to see a stingray swimming around in about half a foot of water while I was walking along the beach. There's so much life up there you don't even need to be in the water to see it apparently.

Fishing is a big deal in mid-WA and it seems to be the big dividing line between the "tourists" (ie, anyone who can't butcher their own roo) and the rest. Due to the massive amounts of money sloshing around over there most people seemed to be in a massive 4WD towing a huge fishing boat and were genuinely puzzled as to why anyone would be in this part of the world without either. More that one old grizzled man told us they remember a time not very long ago when Coral Bay was a bunch of shacks on the beach and they had wanted it to stay that way. Apparently because Coral has now got a hotel, a hostel and a few shops, which seemed to be a sign that the whole thing was now overdeveloped and ruined. I wonder what they'd make of Bondi. I mean when your town is like 80% caravan park by surface area it's hardly the Gold Coast.

The Western Austalians were an interesting bunch - it truly does feel like a different, far more prosperous country over there. Denham is the town you stay in when you go down to Monkey Mia to see the dolphins feeding on the beach, and it's a lovely one street town facing Shark Bay, however it knows it's target market. It's got a boat ramp about every couple of hundred metres and brand new covered sinks for cleaning all those fish you just spent all day catching. Our neighbours in the motel were an extended clan of mining types from Karratha down on holiday to do some fishing and driving around in 4WDs. One look at the rental car (a Lancer, which after a 500km drive south from Exmouth had collected some kind of little bird in the grill) and we pretty much dropped heavily in the estimates of all the menfolk. With hindsight there is a lot of Shark Bay you can't see in a normal car, but they were more perplexed by how we were going to go fishing without a boat. The womenfolk, however, seemed OK with us, though the matriarch of the clans rambling story about how she never understood how e-tags work after her one trip to Sydney pretty clearly illustrated we're a different race from them.

On a pretty perfect morning we drove the 20-odd kms from Denham to Monkey Mia to see where the dolphins come in to feed and though I'd seen it before on TV, there's nothing like dolphins swimming right up to you in knee deep water because they're hungry. The rangers are pretty controlled in how many fish they are allowed to give out so there's a bit of jostling to get in a spot where you get to be one of the lucky few. I tended to get annoyed when old people got to do it instead of little kids - you had your life already, let the kiddies get some memories to carry with them forever.

Grey nomads are probably 90% of the tourist population in this part of the world, quite a few of them put their names and place of origin on the back of their caravans, quite often with a UHF frequency for a CB radio - I guess so you can talk to them. Mark however decided that UHF 14 was the pensioner swingers channel, but kind of backtracked when he followed that thought through to it's logical conclusion.

When we first got to Denham we met probably the world's most depressed German barmaid in the pub, who seemed to not like much about Denham but had been living there inexplicably for 2 weeks. Her answer to the question of "sum up WA in one world" was "fine". Which doesn't sound too bad until she clarified it with "fine if I smoke, fine if I drink outside, fine if I...". She told us about Wild Wednesday, the big karaoke night when the whole town goes a bit nuts. Our neighbours decided to meet us down there and when the good folk of Karratha go out they don't muck around. I was driving first the next day so I stuck to beer but Mark allowed him to get into rounds of Jagerbombs with them, however they don't seem to have Red Bull in WA, so they used Monster energy drink instead, which is the pleasant colour of radioactive wee. By the time dozens Oz rock classics had been mangled there was dancing on the pool table (including the spectacle of one bird smashing her head on the overhead lights) and eventually planking. I don't know what it is with bogans and planking, but they get drunk and then it's plank, plank, plank. At one point they were lying face down in stacks on the pool table. Something to behold and I'm not holding my breath of seeing that in the Ivy any time soon. Unfortunately my night was a big overshadowed by becoming the target of the only creepy gay German in the village, who we later dubbed Klaus von Arserape. I'd have been OK with talking to him if his breath didn't smell like he'd been recently brushing his teeth with dog poo. Kind of got me down a bit.

The only advice I'd have for anyone traveling in this part of the world is to make sure you're wallet is fully loaded - nothing in WA is cheap. Petrol is $1.80 a litre, fish and chips from the takeway is about $20 and we foolishly bought two pints of non-generic beer which turned out to be $23. I don't know how the backpackers do it these days, we did see a few of them but mostly they seemed to be hiding out in the hostel just in case they were tempted by a $9 ice cream or something.

Though we didn't spend much time in Perth on this trip I did find it interesting to return there after more than a decade away. I used to go visit for work during the mid-90s slump in the mining industry and it felt like a dozy little town. It certainly isn't that any longer. While the mining industry has done nothing to bring down the price of a box of cereal it's certainly spruced Perth up a bit. The Subiaco hotel now has tablecloths (!) but you can still find that bogan spirit if you look a bit. After downing a few mega expensive pints while watching the sun set from the balcony of the Cottesloe Beach hotel on our last night, we decided to duck into the far more packed Ocean Beach Hotel to see how the Sunday night before a public holiday was shaping up (Foundation Day, which didn't actually seem to involve women wearing too much makeup). While we were there one of the big questions in ex-pat London life was answered - why does the Walkabout chain of Australian pubs not actually look like any pubs in Australia? We found out that it does, and the Ocean Beach is it's model. That same feeling of complete feralness the Walkabouts is alive and well in WA, but even then I couldn't quite make the connection until I saw a couple of plastic pint glasses submerged in vomit in the bathroom sink. Makes you want to sing the national anthem, really.

I think the Perthverts and other WAians found us a strange as we found them, with our lack of 4WD and fishing boats and our flinching at $9.50 pints of Draft. WA really is a foreign country, but a lovable one.

431km/hr

Sydney :: Australia

Bigger, faster!

Places: Shanghai & Hong Kong

Coolest thing I did: Ate a steak while looking down on The Bund and then made my way back to the hotel one flash bar at a time.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The Shanghai race track is set in the shape of the Chinese character 'Shang'. This apparently means "above" or "ascend" but I can't confirm that, or that it even looks like a 'Shang'. I wouldn't know a 'Shang' if it bit me.

While the breakneck pace that China is currently growing at is probably more evident in places like Chongqing and Shenzhen, Shanghai is the face of modern China that the government would most like you to see. A work colleague of mine tells me he was in Shanghai in the late 1980s and if you looked across the Huangpu River at night all you saw was complete darkness. It was only in 1990 that the government christened Pudong a Special Economic Zone and started a rapid urbanisation that is probably one of the most spectacular in history. While the skyline looks much like a random collection of signature skyscrapers were dropped at random it's still an amazing sight, even for those of us that have been to places like New York and Tokyo. Manhattan wasn't a swamp in 1990.

Much of my knowledge of Shanghai comes from J.G. Ballard's Empire of the Sun, his basically autobiographical novel about coming of age in a Japanese prison camp in the city during WWII. The Bund was the location for the start of the book, he watches the Japanese takeover of Shanghai start from a room under the green pyramid roof of the Peace Hotel, which is currently under renovation. During Shanghai's last big boom in the inter-war period neo-classical and art deco hotels and banks were thrown up along the waterfront, the Bund of the time attempting to give the Americans a run for their money in skyscrapers per square mile. Starting with the development of Pudong over the river there has been a boom in buying up and renovating these old buildings, filling them with posh bars, Michelin star-ed restaurants and luxury brand boutiques. As foreign money made it's way into mainland China it used Shanghai as it's beachhead and you can be sure the ex-pats present saw the opportunity to convert that particular Western nostalgia for old stone buildings into cash, something that doesn't seem to appeal to the Chinese, who want everything flashy and new.

My favourite building on the Bund was the old headquarters of the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank, who were forced out when the communists came out on top during China's last civil war and are now more popularly known as HSBC. It's a huge domed place, flanked on each side by bronze lions but the best part of it is inside. It's currently occupied by the Pudong Development Bank who forbid you to take photos inside, but as you walk in the door and look up to the inside of the dome you see a mosaic that reflect the opulence of the time they were created. It's made up of allegorical depictions of the signs of the zodiac and the key cities of the British Empire, and like the lions outside only dodged complete destruction during the Cultural Revolution by sheer luck. The architect managed to convince the Red Guards to cover the mosaics rather than chip them out, preserving them in the process. The lions outside were taken away by the Japanese during the war to be melted down for munitions but by luck that never happened. They lived in the basement of the Shanghai Comedy Troupe for the next 40 years before they were handed over to the Shanghai Museum.

Taking the train through the transit tunnel under the river, with it's epilepsy inducing light show takes you to a different world, as you blink back into the daylight under Shanghai's first modern landmark, the futuristic Oriental Pearl Tower. Futuristic, that is, if you think the future will look like communist party functionaries thought it would look like in 1990. Much like a rocket ship, apparently. The last "tallest" building to be completed over in Pudong was the Shanghai World Financial Centre, which looks like any other big square skyscraper except it's got a big square hole in the middle of the top 5 or 6 floors. This is the one you want to go up and look out over the city from, and it's from that height you realise that the Bund is a very small historical crust on the edge of a massive metropolis of high rise punctuated by basketball courts. The residential blocks, with their faux-tile roofs look like they are made of lego.

The Astor House hotel was the first Western run hotel in all of Shanghai, and had Charlie Chaplin and Albert Einstein amongst it's past guests. It also happens to be close to original condition, meaning it's probably the closest you can afford to stay to the Bund. I imagine it's only a matter of time before it becomes something far more flash, but it is nice to stay somewhere with that original old world charm. It's also a handy stumble from the last bar on the Bund at the end of a heavy Friday night. I hear.

While the superlative parts of the city line either side of the Huangpu River, the part of Shanghai that makes you think it could actually be lived in by an ex-pat is the former French Concession. During the 1800s, when lots of Europeans were getting rich by selling the Chinese Opium, many of the European powers were given land around the growing port to settle. The French, being the French, made all these crazy laws about only having buildings as tall as the road out front was wide, planting trees along the footpath in a wacky attempt to recreate Paris in China. The legacy of this, combined with several decades of communist apathy towards property development is a quite liveable quarter of the city. This is where you'll find the bars you want to drink in, the places you'll want to eat and if you're in to that kind of thing, places you can buy stuff that won't make you a billboard for Prada. Get in quick, because they're trying to change this as quickly as possible.

The Lonely Planet was almost uselessly out of date in Shanghai, the whole place is a construction site and changing so fast that practically all the advice it gives on shops, watering holes and places to stay is out of date, even if it was only published 12 months earlier. Whole shopping centres are missing, being replaced by holes in the ground that will soon be bigger, flasher shopping centres. If the city had a texture it would be concrete dust. You see building sites, still using bamboo as scaffolding that house construction workers on-site in temporary blocks of high-rise demountables. Apparently urban China is sucking workers out of the countryside and putting them to work on all these project, and I guess if you come from a farm you can't exactly afford to pay rent.

The big excitement around town was the fact that Shanghai was less than two weeks from starting it's 6 month stint of hosting the World Expo. Even now I still have no idea what the World Expo is, but large sections of prime river front south of the Bund has been bulldozed for it. I was able to work out that it was going to be the most ecologically sound World Expo ever (tops!), and that it's mascot was a blue blob not unlike Gumby, but I still don't know what it's all about. But everyone was very excited about it.

For me, nothing sums up Shanghai better than the Maglev train that takes you out to the airport. It's the only train of it's kind in the world, because the Germans who developed the technology were convinced it wasn't safe enough to run in Germany. It only covers 30km, from a very hard to reach spot out behind the skyscrapers of Pudong, but it covers that 30km at 431km/hr. How do I know it goes that fast? When you sit on the train there's actually a display that shows you how fast the train is going at the time. Like most of the people I tried to act like I travelled on trains that go at the same speed as jet aircraft all the time, however when it was at top speed you saw everyone pressed against their seats, looking over at each other with looks on their faces like "yeah, this is pretty cool".

I had enough preconceptions about what I thought China would be like, and thought I was prepared for the crowds and the growth, but both of them exceeded all expectations. You have no idea how 1.3bn people rub together until you actually experience, and you don't know what 10% GDP growth a year looks like until you see coal fired power stations as far as the eye can see. I've never been to India, but I suspect that even they don't have the sheer scale to effect the entire world like China do. During the recent financial crisis Australia spent $4bn to stimulate the economy. China spent that on train tracks alone. What I didn't expect, and I admit I only saw big cities and the richer Eastern areas, but there doesn't seem to be as big a percentage of the population living in abject poverty as all the other places I've visited in Asia.

After Japan I was convinced I'd seen the future, but I now get the feeling that what I saw there was what us Westerners would like a future Asian country to look like. I now get the feeling that China represents what the future actually will look like. Japan is a midget compared to China. Like it or not, China is about to help us dig everything that lies under ground level up and turn it into skyscrapers and high speed trains. It's worth visiting simply for the reason that at some point in all our lifetimes this country is going to affect everyone else on the planet.

Landing back in Hong Kong was kind of like returning to the normal world. You get a contrast with the segregation between the rich and the ex-pats and everyone else that exists within Shanghai with the relative mixing that exists in HK. Riding up the big outdoor escalator to the mid-levels and seeing people out on a Sunday night eating and drinking alfresco you realise that just wouldn't happen in Shanghai. You get dazzled by all the history and the rapid change and you forget that you're looking at a country where people have as much freedom as they do in Cuba. If something is going to derail China, it's going to be when all those new middle class Chinese I kept seeing want to have some say in how their country is being run. I'd prefer to be able to have a beer and talk smack about my rulers right out in the street, where it should be done.

The Dice Game

Shanghai :: PRC(Note: published late due to GFWoC issues)

Climbing the only mountain the weather would allow. Stupid snow.

Places: Qingdao, Laoshan, Hangzhou & Shanghai

Coolest thing I did: Rode a bike the whole circumference of the West Lake in Hangzhou in one lazy day.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: People buy beer right across the street from the factory in Qingdao and take it away in plastic shopping bags. You'd *really* want to check it for holes first.

Back in the 19th century it became apparent that if you wanted to be a proper European colonial power you really had to have a city somewhere in China to call your own. The British had recently won a war to force the Chinese to buy their drugs through Shanghai and got Hong Kong as a bonus. The French & Russians had stakes in Shanghai and even Portugal (PORTUGAL!) had a colony in Macau. A recently unified Germany seemed to think they were getting a short deal in Asia and decided they wanted in on China. So they rocked into a little town called Qingdao and took it over with that Teutonic military single mindedness the rest of Europe was going to struggle with during the following century.

The Germans being the Germans decided that they needed some beer around the place and seeing as the Chinese really didn't do beer they started a brewery. They named it using the town's Western spelling, and with that Tsingtao was born. Now the Chinese love their beer, and if you've ever been to a Chinese restaurant on planet Earth you've probably tried it too. It's inoffensive, it's about 4 1/2% ABV and it's pretty much available everywhere in China. What's not to love?

The thing that I recall most about the Tsingtao brewery (on the appropriately named Beer Street) is they have a Siemens motor that's over 100 years old that still runs that used to be used to mix the mash. Apparently Siemens discovered this not too long ago and offered to buy it from the brewery for over $1m USD but the request was denied. I can see why the Germans would want it, it's hard to get advertising of reliable engineering better than that.

The town of Qingdao still retains some of it's colonial past, but like most of the cities in China that's rapidly being overshadowed by multi-lane roads and high rise. At least in Qingdao much of the original German buildings have been left alone and have decided to start a new town further along the coast. You have to pass through all this to get to Laoshan, the most properly Chinese looking mountainscape I managed to climb on the whole trip. Its what you expect Chinese mountains to look like, with large expanses of limestone jutting out of the forest and temples dotted around the place. Due to the unexpected cold snap that accompanied the whole trip the attempt to climb other sacred mountains in China was foiled twice by there being a foot of snow on the summit but this one allowed itself to be climbed.

Laoshan is famous in China for being one of the early homes of Taoism and pretty much all the holy sites are Tao-related in some way. The very highest point that can be reached using the trails is home to a temple built around the cave of a Taoist hermit who used to live in a cave there and on a less misty day you might have been able to see all the way down to the sea from there, but it was still impressive. The cave is still there but I imagine if you were a recluse you'd have been annoyed by all the monks hanging around your cave and building a temple there, so I assume said hermit has moved on quite some time ago.

At the base of the mountain is a Temple which apparently translates to The Purity Palace, which is like a Taoist Disneyland. It's ying-yang signs and statues of Lao Tzu (he of the Tao Te Ching) all over the place and seems quite popular with the Chinese tourists. My favourite thing there was the young Kung Fu team that were out stretching before practise. It was just like they were a football team or something, warming up in their tracksuit pants and the old grumpy coach watching over them like he'd never seen such laziness and poor flexibility in all his years of coaching. I liked to imagine him having a broad Australian accent "You're kicking like a bunch of poofters! You call that tiger style? I've seen better kicking from my grandmother, you bunch of girls!".

The strangest thing about Qingdao was the weddings. Walking along the many beaches set aside for swimming (you know this because they are labelled "Swimming Beach No. 1", "Swimming Beach No. 2" and so on. Got to love that communist marketing prowess) you might notice a young couple and their photographer having their wedding pictures taken. Then you see another. And Another. There must be something about having your pictures taken on the beaches and rocky outcrops on Qingdao, because there are people doing it everywhere. It's also freezing cold. So you see the brides wearing hoodies backwards to protect their exposed shoulders between photos, and quite often they are wearing jeans under their dresses. They also seem to be rentals as most of the grooms are wearing suits that were already out of fashion in 1972. Either that or Chinese retro fashion is a decade or so behind our retro fashion.

The train trip between Qingdao and Shanghai (on the way to Hangzhou) was the longest of the whole journey and it had everything you eventually come to know and love from Chinese train journeys. There's always an argument about the placement of luggage, always, and one of the best thing about the Chinese people is these arguments usually result in pushing and shoving. I guess when you live with 1.3bn people you give up any hope of having a private disagreement so you'd best embrace it with all your might. The other thing is you get a close quarters how the Chinese babies go about their business. Pretty early on you notice that most toddlers in China wear pants with a bit split from front to back between the legs and no nappies. Apparently if the baby needs to evacuate anything down there the parents simply hold their legs apart and away they go, be it in the park, into the gutter, wherever. On the train this becomes quite urgent if the baby starts, so you get to skip the ever present toilet queue if you are carrying a baby that has already started to push one out.

Besides their obvious superior speed to trains in Australia, Chinese trains are blessed with flowing hot water in every carriage. If you want tea or pot noodles, it's right there. Why doesn't everyone do that? In yet more proof the Chinese have no issue with capitalism the best selling item on the train platforms was pot noodles, I guess to people who hadn't planned ahead for a 10 hour train journey and had been looking at the hot water tap going "if only...".

Hangzhou was like travelling forward in time when compared to practically everywhere else in China so far, including Beijing. Everything is geared towards getting as many tourists to look at it's lovely West Lake as possible, and it shows in things being very clean and working. It was like you'd accidentally gotten of the train in Japan or something. They don't only have bikes for rent, but they have bikes for rent with a proximity swipe card that comes out of a kiosk that runs on solar power. It's like the future, just like Japan.

West lake is as attractive as you would expect, cut along the edges by causeways that allow little arched bridges to be built and give boats somewhere to moor and allow their captains to harass tourists for a trip. As had become the norm the attempts to get white people into the boats were fairly lazy, seeing as most of the captains had English that extended to "boat". The big money was obviously in getting the fatter looking Chinese people into your boat, yet another example of how the new Chinese middle classes are spending their new found money at home, due to the fact they can't get out of the place. We had a lazy day of cycling around the lake, visiting temples and pagodas and generally enjoying the ambiance with about 1.5m of our closest friends.

If you are a woman the done thing would appear to be to go to Hangzhou, get dressed up to the nines and get your picture taken reaching up into a cherry blossom tree in a provocative style. My guess is it only happens in cherry blossom season, but I have no hard data to disprove that.

At the far end of the lake from the town is the Leifeng Pagoda, the town's most famous though only reconstructed in 2002. To show just how up-to-date they are, the pagoda now has a set of escalators to get you right up to the base of it. This apparently didn't just amuse us, most of the Chinese tourists needed a picture riding up it as well. The Leifeng Pagoda is famous because of the Legend of White Snake, which apparently has nothing to do with the 80s rock band. It's the timeless story of Bai SuZhen, a demon who dreams of turning into a goddess by doing good deeds, her human beau Xu Xian who forgets her existence on his return to the human world (which is basic science, really) and a sorcerer FaHai who reckons demons are rubbish and should be destroyed. You know the one. Apparently Bai scares Xu to death by revealing her true self, then brings him back to life with magic herbs but then when everything looks tops FaHai comes along and imprisons Bai in the pagoda for all eternity. The Chinese just love a happy ending.

For me the best spot to view the lake was from one of the hilltops that surround it. If nothing else most of the masses can't be bothered with the whole climb so you get an occasional glimpse of that rarest of commodities in China: a little bit of time without being in line of sight of another human being.

While we had expected Qingdao to be THE place in China for drinking beer, however it was far too early in the season for the tourists to be reaching it. Instead they seemed to be holidaying, and drinking, in Hangzhou. Due to the lack of Mandarin we never managed to find out why they are all out drinking, but beer is what they drink and they do it totally at the mercy of a dice game I could not for the life of me work out. It's so popular the bars provide special shelves under the tables to hold cups and dice but it's inexplicable. Everyone shakes their dice, bluff a bit, look at their dice sneakily, look at each others dice, quite often shake again and repeat. At some point someone will feign disgust and everyone else will cheer and the loser (I assume they are the loser) drinks beer. This goes on all night and everyone ends up drunk and happy. This is probably due to the fact you can buy an entire plastic keg and have it at the table so you can pour your own beer without having to resort to going to the bar or talking to waiters. You also have to plan in several unit lots as to how much more beer you plan to drink. Which many people seemed to be failing to judge.

Hangzhou has been a Western tourist destination in China for as long as there have been Western tourists. Literally. Hangzhou's first visitor from the West was Marco Polo, who like what he saw and went as far as to say it was the most premium of all cities he saw on his travels. The Chinese like this story so much they put a statue of him near the lake and didn't tear it down during the darkest days of communism. However the inscription is in English and most Chinese people walk past it without looking twice.

For all my complaints about getting around without speaking a bit of Mandarin, imagine how hard it would have been for Marco. There wasn't a Lonely Planet back then, there weren't even maps! It's also unlikely they had picture menus at the restaurants.

Peking Duck

Beijing :: PRC(Note: published late due to GFWoC issues)

Replacing history with a concrete facsimile of history, one block at a time.

Places: Beijing & Mutianyu

Coolest thing I did: Not only walked and climbed along the Great Wall of China but also rode a wheeled toboggan back down to the car park, like those ones at Jambaroo.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The Chinese followed the Soviets lead and decided to preserve their glorious leader under glass in the middle of town. It's a pity Mao isn't as in good shape as Lenin these days, perhaps Russian mortuary technology is more advanced.

When you live in the capital of modern China you face such dangers as uncross-able roads and air that could only be described as viscous. Back a few hundred years ago the big issue was Mongols. Horse back mounted barbarian archers running about the place looting and pillaging makes going about your daily business difficult, and despite a few attempts at building defences to keep the buggers out by about 1600AD it was getting beyond a joke. So how do you keep out Mongols? You build a bloody great long wall along the north border of your country. Did it work? Well, all I can say is the whole time I was in China I wasn't harassed even once by Mongols, so I guess the proof is there.

The Great Wall of China. What can you say about it that people don't already know? It's very photogenic, slithering along the mountain tops and as a result, you've probably already seen pictures of it. It's really long, it's got turrets and watch towers and, as we've already discussed, it's the most effective anti-Mongol defence system ever devised by man. Like most really famous things, it's covered with large Americans panting their way up and down it, and for some unfathomable reason, lots of French people too. It's very steep in places and walking along the wall was probably the best work-out I got the whole time I was away. I liked the bits that haven't yet been restored, with trees growing out of the top of the wall, but for sensible reasons you aren't really supposed to walk along those bits. You know, in case you break the wall or fall off it.

The Great Wall was the only thing we visited by tour, however it was a pretty casual tour. There was only three of us so we went with a driver who spoke no English except the names of NBA basketball teams and players and a guide who spoke quite good English but didn't really waste our time with all that guiding nonsense. We drove out to the section at Mutianyu, which as a chair lift to take you up to the wall itself and, more importantly, wheel toboggans on a metal track, like at Jambaroo Recreation Park to take you back down to the car park. There's nothing like taking a historical relic and turning it into an amusement park ride.

Beijing itself bears the scars of a city that has recently hosted an Olympics, with everything having recently been demolished and replaced with the kinds of streets that project the image the hosting city wants the world to see. The traditional alleys that surrounded the Forbidden City in the middle of Beijing, the hutongs have mostly been razed to make way for straight, wide streets and the process seems to show no signs of abating. Some of the old streets have been kept for the tourists, with the people being moved out to live in high rise further out and the houses being turned into shops. It's given the whole place an inhuman scale, the stories of everyone getting around by bike replaced by the facts on the ground, with the car firmly in control of central Beijing now.

The most visible legacy of the Games in 2008 is the Birds Nest stadium, a short subway ride from the middle of town. Having been to a few things out at Homebush I can say without a doubt that the stadium built for the Sydney Olympics is dull and uninspiring when compared to Beijing's. At every angle, from both inside and out, the criss-crossing girders make the Birds Nest a much more interesting building to look at. Right across the road is the Water Cube, the pool used for the games which is basically a big cube textured with a blue honeycomb pattern, which is also an impressive building. I take it the Chinese looked at Sydney and went "we can top that", and in both cases they did.

The strangest thing at the old Olympic site was without a doubt the wax museum of the Secretaries General, past and present of the Olympic movement. Why anyone would want their picture taken with a lifelike statue of Jacques Rogge or Juan Antonio Samaranch is beyond me, but it's still got Chinese people lining up for a photo.

There are touts in Beijing, which we hadn't seen anywhere else in China, but they really don't put in much effort when compared to their Egyptian or South East Asian counterparts. I amused them all greatly by waiting until they'd walked right up to me and then putting on the big left foot step and running away at top speed. They thought it was hilarious and forgot they were supposed to be selling me kites.

The various Emperors maintained a couple of residences in Beijing, the Forbidden City right smack bang in the middle and the Summer Palace, a fairly arduous subway ride away. Both are oversized and impressive and take half a day to get around. The Summer Palace is set on a lake that was resized at great effort by a whole load of Chinese peasants and has an impressive view of all of Beijing, mostly because Beijing is really flat. I can just imagine the Emperor standing on his terrace, looking out over the city and saying things like "I got a crook stomach from some dumplings from that place in district 7, go burn district 7 to the ground", and then being able to see it was being done.

The Forbidden City is known as such because back in the day you couldn't get in there unless you were the Emperor or part of his entourage of ministers, concubines and the like. You don't really get a feeling for the size of the place walking around it, that's better done by looking down on it from the pagoda at the top of Jingshan Park, preferably at sunset. That gives you a view of the whole thing in one sitting, and out over Tienanmen Square to the the immediate south of the palace. However walking through Fob City from the North Gate has you going against the general flow of traffic and makes the whole thing a lot easier - especially if you, like us went a bit silly in the bars Sanlitun the night before and weren't in the mood for fighting with the crowd.

If you're like me, and you're too young to really remember the Cold War and spent your very formative years growing up during the collapse of communism and wondering what the whole fuss was about, then Tienanmen Square only really conjures up one image, that crucial moment when the Chinese Government discovered how bad a look it is to drive tanks over student protesters. Funnily enough there is absolutely no indication that ever happened, the same government having mastered projecting the image they want overseas in the meantime while keeping complete control over what the local populace get to see and hear. The north border of the square is dominated by the south gate of Fob City, the quite wonderfully named Gate of Heavenly Peace, and the massive poster of Chairman Mao hanging over it, and right in the middle is the mausoleum that holds big Mao's earthly remains.

Visiting Mao's body, which is out on display under glass is an experience so full of irony that I can only assume the Chinese have an Alanis Morissette view of irony. On your way into the mausoleum you have to pass a stall selling bunches of flowers to put in front of the Chairman's grave, which look suspiciously like they're being gathered up and being resold. Then, on the way out there is so much Mao-based merchandise you have to wonder how a man that spent his entire life trying to drive capitalism and all it's works out of his country would make of it all.

At some time in the past everyone in the West called Beijing 'Peking', for some reason involving French Missionaries I don't quite understand. As a legacy of this the most famous food that comes out of the mean streets of Beijing is Peking Duck. I had two shots at eating this while in town, once at the 5 storey Duck megaplex owned by the oldest chain in the city, Quan Ju De and once from the more modern interpretation at the Da Dong Restaurant. While I did enjoy eating in a place that allowed you to pay extra to pick your own duck, I don't know if the extra condiments and, more importantly, the extra lean duck was the way to go. I liked eating the crispy skin dipped in sugar and the option of more than just Hoisin sauce and spring onions in your pancake but the authenticity of feeling your arteries harden due to the high fat content that may have made Quan Ju De's a better duck overall. You want to lose weight? Peking duck might not be the food for you.

Due to an unusually long time spent in Beijing, as opposed to every where else I stay in China, I had time to spend an afternoon seeing what people do in the park on a lazy Saturday afternoon. The park surrounding the Temple of Heaven seems to be the place to hang out if you've got nothing else to do. There's people in their 70s kicking around a shuttlecock (and doing it far better than most young people at home would), people singing in big groups and lots of people playing that Chinese instrument with one string that makes all songs sound sad. Even Twist-n-Shout would come out sad. Every time I went past one I wanted to say "play us a happy song!" but realised it probably can't be done. My favourite was the old bloke with a long brush doing calligraphy on the footpath in water. There's nothing that says you're in it for the transient art than the fact the mark you've just made on the world is going to evaporate in the next few minutes.

That's something you notice about the Chinese in general: they tend to get out of the house a lot and socialise. I guess because up until now they've lived in such tiny spaces that getting out into the street and chatting with the neighbours saves your sanity a little. We saw numerous groups of people practising dancing and playing instruments in the streets all over the country, with varying level of talent and skill, but you do feel like it kind of beats TV. Especially if all that's on is communist propaganda and basketball.

Beijing was also the first place since the Hong Kong Sevens that going out and drinking with the kids was an option. The bar district of Sanlitun looks unpromising on the surface, with the first spot you see a long string of bars with what can only be described as bad Chinese karaoke. It's not until you drop back into the narrow streets behind the Sanlitun Village (which looks a lot like it's been transplanted from California - same shops and all) you start to find bars with cheap beers and a comfortable mix of ex-pats & Chinese students. What I like most about drinking in China is the fact they never take the bottles away after you finish. If you, like most of the Chinese kids, decide to stay at the same table all night it's possible to see how drunk you are in 3D.

As happening as Sanlitun was on a Saturday night I built up a bit more of a soft spot for the redeveloped hutong just north of the hotel, Nan Luo Gu Xiang (or NLGX). For some inexplicable reason you can drive cars down it, meaning on a Saturday afternoon it's rammed solid each time a taxi tries to make it's way down, but it's full of food you recognise, little bars that wouldn't look out of place anywhere else in the world and has a fairly high proportion of young Beijingers, as opposed to white people. It's a fair bit more low-key than Sanlitun but it doesn't look as planned, which is a nice change where absolutely everything in the country actually is planned. It was the place we became acquainted with Chinese hipster fashion, which strangely enough seems to involve wearing big black geeky glasses with no glass in them. You get the nerd factor without the crazy side-effect of actually being able to see any better.

Something that I never quite got about China was the need for Chinese people to have their picture taken with you. I was quite chuffed the first time it happened, when I got my picture taken with a whole group of Chinese school girls, but it became a strangely common occurrence. I had my picture taken with husbands, wives, grandparents, kids, whole families, everyone you could possibly think of. I can only imagine how many times I've been tagged on Chinese Facebook as 'lanky looking white bloke'.