Have you ever tried to travel in China without a guidebook? I don't recommend it. Traveling in China made me feel like I had no idea what was going on around me...ever, and not having a guide book just made it worse. When Rachel and I crossed over the border from Vietnam to China our guidebook was confiscated. Apparently it is against Chinese law to have a map that does not include Taiwan as part of China. One would think that a person writing a China guidebook would be aware of this rule and make the map in the book legal, so you could actaully use it in China. The man who took it away was very nice and polite about it, and even gave us an address where we could look for a new one in our first destination, Kunming. After an entire day of searching we determined that there was not a single China guidebook in English in the entire city of Kunming, so we were forced to travel China without one. This proved to be quite task.. but it did make for quite an adventure. China is a very strange place, maybe the strangest place I have ever been. I guess a country where the government has such control over everything and the cultural revolution in the recent past is bound to be quite "different". It is things like a little kid peeing on the floor of the sink room on the train, smoking on the buses, and not being able to open up the BBC webpage that made China feel a little strange.

We spent most of our time in China in the Yunnan province which has a high number of ethnic minorities and mountains (The Jade Snow Mountains hold the most southernly glaciers in the Northern hemisphere). It is located pretty close to Tibet, and the trekking reminded me a lot of Nepal (pretty much spectacular). Our first day in Lijiang (the jumping off point for the Tiger Leaping Gorge trek) we decided to go on a bike ride. We followed a bike rental sign to someone's house and saw they had a tandam bike for rent. Nevermind the fact that neither of us had ever been on a tandam, busy, steep Chinese streets is just as good a place as any to try it, right? Well after the initial start, going down a big hill only to discover our brakes were not so functional ( I was sure we were going to crash and burn) we started to get the hang of it. Once we got out of town it was really nice, riding around taking in the scenic views of huge mountains. We took the tandam offroading through small villages, which improved our tandam skills quickly. At our guesthouse Mama's Naxi (the above pic is us with "mama" who takes care of you and makes you eat huge Chinese style dinners) we met Barb and Jon from Canada, who are Ian and Col's twins so ofcourse we loved them. The four of us went on an excursion up to the mountains and took a tram up to Yak Meadow. It was a bit cloudy, but beautiful nevertheless. I was so happy to be up in the mountains and we even experienced a small flurry of snow. There was a sign on the Chinese style "hiking trail" which is really a boardwalk, that said "please do not trample the grass". We figured that us walking on the tundra was not really "trampling the grass', so we snuck off and took an exploratory hike. The next day we left for the 3 day Tiger Leaping Gorge trek with Barb and Jon. The Gorge in incredible, even though we had a little bit of rain(maybe it was karma from trampling on the grass). The river runs below 6,000 meter peaks at an elevation of about 1,600 meters. From the river you look up at sheer cliffs and down on the narliest rapids I have ever seen. We also came across the really precarious toilet pictured above whose contents run straight down to the river. Once again we felt lucky to have visited here when we did because they are planning on damning the river shortly ruining the most scenic spots. We ended our time in China with a 41 hour train ride in the middle bunks of a hard sleeper. Sanwiched between buisness men below, and drunk teenage boys above. Without enough room to sit up on my bunk, I slept A LOT!! For about 60 cents at one of the stops we purchased a ceramic bowl filled rice, veggies, meat and eggs. When we finished eating, we asked the buisness men below us what we were supposed to do with the bowl. He pointed at the garbage can...is that for real, a disposable ceramic bowl???? In Beijing we went to the Great Wall and did the touristy thing, including the cheezy pictures...and thats about all I have to say about that. We also tried these candy coated cranberries, a beijing specialty(picture above) because this man insisted on buying them for us to sample. They were quite tasty. I tried to get a haircut in China which was a bad plan, I ended up with the "Chinese mullet" which is short curly hair on top and straight longer hair in the back, it is pretty horrid so I now own a blowdryer and am forced to straighten my hair.