I think I can safely say that getting my Visa extended in Chengdu was one of the most convoluted and stressfull things I have gone through whilst in China.
The first step, finding the PSB (the office where you need to go to get the extension) was fairly easy as it is only 5 minutes walk from the hostel. However, things started to go badly once we got there. At first we didn't know what was going on till we were told off for approaching the wrong desks, which was not too bad, so we found the desk were we needed to get the forms from. Unfortunately, the lady who was in charge of that desk was less than friendly - she told us off for filling out the forms in our own pens (apparently you ened to use their pen), then demanded proof of where we were staying and that we had enough money. At one point there I was convinced she was going to kick us out of China as I only had one copy of the reciept from the hostel and she really wanted one each, even though she only needed to photocopy it!
Luckily, the lady at the second desk we went to (once you fill out forms you need to go somewhere else to get them approved) was far more helpful, so I left the PSB office far more hopeful.
Returning to pick them up though seemed to be fairly tricky too - I was expecting to turn up, show my reciept, give them some money and walk away with my passport. But no - I was sent 5 minutes down the road to pay my money to a bank before I cou;d even see my passport! Luckily, getting back it was returned to me, so I am now the owner of a shiny new visa and can stay in the country until my flight out on Friday - quite relieving after all the effort I went to to get it.
Tuesday, 30 March 2010
Friday, 26 March 2010
Working With the Pandas
It seems that I have been rather lax at keeping my blog updates up to date - this of course means that I have been incredibly busy and have a lot to tell you all! Well, that is only partly true. I have been quite busy the past couple of weeks, but mostly that is because I have been at the panda reserve in Bifengxia volunteering with the pandas.
Day to day my job is fairly similar:
7:30 breakfast
8:00 start work and clear out panda enclosures
10:00 feed the pandas (repeat at 11:30)
12:00 lunch
2:00 feed pandas (and again at 3:30)
As you can see, the pandas tend to eat a lot and occasionally have extra activities in the afternoon like panda training - this teaches them certain poses so that they can be easily examined by a vet. We also weigh them every now and again, though this mostly means tempting them onto the scales with panda cake, which is made of bamboo, corn, eggs, rics and a couple of other things.
I have five pandas to look after, Yuan Yuan who is the only boy and who is underweight, Xi Xi who is fairly lazy but really cute too, Zi Xia who was rescued from the wild after being injured in a fight and now can't go back and Tian Tian who is incredibly sweet and likes to spend most of the time outside. My fifth panda arrived on the first afternoon I was there, replacing Yin Pin who had gone into oestrus that morning and was taken to the breeding centre. She's called Na Na and is possibly one of my favorites.
I have also met some amazing people while working at the base, which is just as well as the work with the pandas tends not to take too long so we are left with an awful lot of free time on our hands which we have managed to fill with walks and visits to other towns nearby. The weather has been a bit strange though, as it has gone from snowing to so warm you can sit outside in shorts and tshirts!! I'm hoping that the good weather will last.
It has been an amazing two weeks and I have really enjoyed it. I feel that even though I may not have actually helped saved any pandas I am a lot more informed about them which is quite a nice feeling.
Day to day my job is fairly similar:
7:30 breakfast
8:00 start work and clear out panda enclosures
10:00 feed the pandas (repeat at 11:30)
12:00 lunch
2:00 feed pandas (and again at 3:30)
As you can see, the pandas tend to eat a lot and occasionally have extra activities in the afternoon like panda training - this teaches them certain poses so that they can be easily examined by a vet. We also weigh them every now and again, though this mostly means tempting them onto the scales with panda cake, which is made of bamboo, corn, eggs, rics and a couple of other things.
I have five pandas to look after, Yuan Yuan who is the only boy and who is underweight, Xi Xi who is fairly lazy but really cute too, Zi Xia who was rescued from the wild after being injured in a fight and now can't go back and Tian Tian who is incredibly sweet and likes to spend most of the time outside. My fifth panda arrived on the first afternoon I was there, replacing Yin Pin who had gone into oestrus that morning and was taken to the breeding centre. She's called Na Na and is possibly one of my favorites.
I have also met some amazing people while working at the base, which is just as well as the work with the pandas tends not to take too long so we are left with an awful lot of free time on our hands which we have managed to fill with walks and visits to other towns nearby. The weather has been a bit strange though, as it has gone from snowing to so warm you can sit outside in shorts and tshirts!! I'm hoping that the good weather will last.
It has been an amazing two weeks and I have really enjoyed it. I feel that even though I may not have actually helped saved any pandas I am a lot more informed about them which is quite a nice feeling.
Friday, 19 March 2010
Hiking the Tiger Leaping Gorge
Hiking the Tiger Leaping Gorge took a couple of days to complete. We headed out on the first day in a minibus from the hostel to Qiaotou, a small village near the begiining of the hiking trail. We had a bit of trouble finding the beginning of the trail as, un like England, there are no such things as ordinance survey maps which you can consult to find your way around - in the end we were pointed in the right direction by someone building the road. The trek itself was quite enjoyable, we walked for the first hour or so then headed up the steepest part, the 28 bends, on horseback (I felt a bit ridiculous going up on horseback but seeing the path we would have had to climb didn't feel quite so bad by the end). From the top we walked for a about 4 hours to the hostel.
It was so quiet at the top, we were the only people for miles around seemingly, and we didn't see anyone else walking along the same path as us. Luckily there was only the one path so the lack of map didn't prove to be too problematic. Well, actually that's untrue, we did have a map, but the maps that were available of the area ranged between fairly useless as they only gave you the vaguest idea of what to expect to downright dangerous as they were just inaccuarte enough to confuse you when you were up there. Luckily ours was the former. The scenery was pretty fantastic, ranging from forests to sheer rocks from where we could look down into the gorge and see the rushing river. We stopped for the evening at a lovely hostel with an amazing view over the gorge. We could see the mountains on the other side of the gorge from our bedroom window and also from the toilets!
We started early the next day with a hike down to the bottom of the gorge, fairly hard going compared to the nice gentle walk along the top we had the previous day. For a start the path seemed to be interspersed with numerous waterfalls. Incredibly beautiful, yes. But also, when they actually bisect the path they do make walking rather more difficult when you're trying to negotiate a pool of water, water falling from the cliff face as well as trying not to fall down the rest of the cliff as there was a distinct lack of any safety measures. After negotiating these, a herd of goats, and what felt like a path down the side of a sheer cliff we found ourselves at the bottom of the gorge. It was pretty impressive and definitely worth the trek down.
Getting back out of the gorge though seemed to prove more difficult than the trek itself. Having finally managed to get on a minibus (which we shared with 3 Chinese and an American who we had seen at the hostel overnight and at the bottom of the gorge) we realised just how tricky this journey was going to be. The road that we were taking is in the process of having serious work done on it, but contrary to what I think of as a logical approach, there seems to be a number of different patches being rebuilt along the road. This meant that we needed to change bus a number of times, climbing over roadworks and making our past huge mechanical diggers with dust and small stones flying into our faces. As if this was not difficult enough, there was also the problem of the landslide to contend with - a problem we overcame by running really fast between the stonefalls, one arm across my head to protect myself in case we timed it wrong, while the driver was shouting encouragement in Chinese. Altogether a very different experience, though definitely one I did enjoy.
It was so quiet at the top, we were the only people for miles around seemingly, and we didn't see anyone else walking along the same path as us. Luckily there was only the one path so the lack of map didn't prove to be too problematic. Well, actually that's untrue, we did have a map, but the maps that were available of the area ranged between fairly useless as they only gave you the vaguest idea of what to expect to downright dangerous as they were just inaccuarte enough to confuse you when you were up there. Luckily ours was the former. The scenery was pretty fantastic, ranging from forests to sheer rocks from where we could look down into the gorge and see the rushing river. We stopped for the evening at a lovely hostel with an amazing view over the gorge. We could see the mountains on the other side of the gorge from our bedroom window and also from the toilets!
We started early the next day with a hike down to the bottom of the gorge, fairly hard going compared to the nice gentle walk along the top we had the previous day. For a start the path seemed to be interspersed with numerous waterfalls. Incredibly beautiful, yes. But also, when they actually bisect the path they do make walking rather more difficult when you're trying to negotiate a pool of water, water falling from the cliff face as well as trying not to fall down the rest of the cliff as there was a distinct lack of any safety measures. After negotiating these, a herd of goats, and what felt like a path down the side of a sheer cliff we found ourselves at the bottom of the gorge. It was pretty impressive and definitely worth the trek down.
Getting back out of the gorge though seemed to prove more difficult than the trek itself. Having finally managed to get on a minibus (which we shared with 3 Chinese and an American who we had seen at the hostel overnight and at the bottom of the gorge) we realised just how tricky this journey was going to be. The road that we were taking is in the process of having serious work done on it, but contrary to what I think of as a logical approach, there seems to be a number of different patches being rebuilt along the road. This meant that we needed to change bus a number of times, climbing over roadworks and making our past huge mechanical diggers with dust and small stones flying into our faces. As if this was not difficult enough, there was also the problem of the landslide to contend with - a problem we overcame by running really fast between the stonefalls, one arm across my head to protect myself in case we timed it wrong, while the driver was shouting encouragement in Chinese. Altogether a very different experience, though definitely one I did enjoy.
Monday, 8 March 2010
In the middle of nowhere
I think that it is safe to say that by far my favorite place in China so far has been a tiny little town deep in Yunnan province, called Shaxi. Everywhere else here is either a huge bustling city full of towering skyscrapers, flashing lights and crowds of people bustling about, or kitschy tourist traps that seem to be more designed around attracting tourists and getting money out of them than anything else. And this isn't aimed only at Western tourists, but it seems more at the Chinese themselves as they travel around the country too.
Shaxi, however, was seriously off the beaten track. It took us a day and a half to get there! We even started fairly early with an 8am train leaving Kunming; unfortunately though this ended up taking about 9 hours to reach Xiaguan, from where we needed to get a three hour bus up to Jianchuan, and even that wasn't the end of the journey! However, seeing as we reached Jianchuan at gone 10 pm we decided to stay for the night before tackling the next leg of the journey. In fact, the final minibus there proved relatively easy and also only lasted for one hour.
The town itself is more of a village, there are no buildings taller than about 3 stories, and it has a number of quaint little backstreets to wander. It is even possible to step outside the boundaries and find yourself next to a river in the middle of rice fields. The day we arrived there was a market going on, which attracts people from miles around for fresh fruit and vegetables for the week, with people walking up to 4 hours to reach it from neighbouring villages in the mountains. It was interesting to walk around an actual market that wasn't full of people grabbing you and trying to sell you souvenirs. I think we ended up attracting more attention than I'm used to; I possibly didn't help matters by deciding that I wanted to win a fish in one of the games they were playing in the street (I did in the end, then unsure what to do with it having won it handed it over to a bemused little girl who had been watching).
On one day Ray and I hired bikes to get out of the town and head up the mountain while Helen settled in to explore more of the town - it took a while going up as the incline was fairly steep and we had to take a detour through a small village as they were laying a concrete road part way up the mountain. The views were spectacular, we were the only people around for miles except for the occasional farmer wandering past with mules and we could see the valley floor for miles around mostly just covered with fields with the odd group of buildings cropping up sporadically.
I'm still enjoying the crazy hectic travelling and will soon be heading up Tiger Leaping Gorge which is just outside Lijiang, where I am now for an apparently exhausting but worthwhile two day hike.
Shaxi, however, was seriously off the beaten track. It took us a day and a half to get there! We even started fairly early with an 8am train leaving Kunming; unfortunately though this ended up taking about 9 hours to reach Xiaguan, from where we needed to get a three hour bus up to Jianchuan, and even that wasn't the end of the journey! However, seeing as we reached Jianchuan at gone 10 pm we decided to stay for the night before tackling the next leg of the journey. In fact, the final minibus there proved relatively easy and also only lasted for one hour.
The town itself is more of a village, there are no buildings taller than about 3 stories, and it has a number of quaint little backstreets to wander. It is even possible to step outside the boundaries and find yourself next to a river in the middle of rice fields. The day we arrived there was a market going on, which attracts people from miles around for fresh fruit and vegetables for the week, with people walking up to 4 hours to reach it from neighbouring villages in the mountains. It was interesting to walk around an actual market that wasn't full of people grabbing you and trying to sell you souvenirs. I think we ended up attracting more attention than I'm used to; I possibly didn't help matters by deciding that I wanted to win a fish in one of the games they were playing in the street (I did in the end, then unsure what to do with it having won it handed it over to a bemused little girl who had been watching).
On one day Ray and I hired bikes to get out of the town and head up the mountain while Helen settled in to explore more of the town - it took a while going up as the incline was fairly steep and we had to take a detour through a small village as they were laying a concrete road part way up the mountain. The views were spectacular, we were the only people around for miles except for the occasional farmer wandering past with mules and we could see the valley floor for miles around mostly just covered with fields with the odd group of buildings cropping up sporadically.
I'm still enjoying the crazy hectic travelling and will soon be heading up Tiger Leaping Gorge which is just outside Lijiang, where I am now for an apparently exhausting but worthwhile two day hike.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)