Hanno's blog

After Hong Kong, we left the south of China and went on to the capital Beijing (北京). The first days we stayed at a very helpful couchsurfer, later we switched to a Hostel again. That was kind of difficult. In China, not all Hotels are allowed to take foreigners - they need a special license for that. We knew that before, but we never found it to be a problem - at all other places we never went into a Hotel that rejected us. My impression is this rule is only enforced in the capital. Many Hotels are booked out at the moment and we had an unplesant experience with the Drum Tower Hostel: We got a confirmation per email the day before that they have a free room for us. When we got there, there was no free room. When we showed them the email, one of the Hostel's staff laughed at us. We didn't find this very funny.

We were in Beijing during the birthday of the chinese communist party (CCP). We didn't notice that much of it, except a big monument on Tian'anmen square (天安门广场).

We had some trouble with our next travelling steps, which I'll write up in detail in one of the next blog entries.

Pictures from Beijing

After staying on Hainan island, we went on to Hong Kong (香港). The main reason for that was a visa issue. A chinese tourist visa usually allows a stay for 30 days and we were nearing that 30 day periode. However, we had a double-entry visa which is valid for two entries with 30 days each. It would have been possible to request an extension of the stay for more than 30 days, but that would've taken several days we had to stay at the same place. So it was easier to just leave the country and come back at some point.

Although Hong Kong is officially part of China, it has its own migration and border system, its own currency (the Hong Kong Dollar) and going to Hong Kong from China is like going to another country. Hong Kong itself requires no visa for EU citizens for up to 90 days.

It was terribly difficult to get any accomodation. All Hotels we found were far beyond what we were willing to pay. In the end, for the first night we payed 350 HK$ (around 30 €) for a room without a window in a small hostel. The hostel was located in a big building called Mirador Mansion near Tsim Sha Tsui (尖沙咀) station which was full of mini-hostels, most of them only with a couple of rooms. However, most of them were booked out. Luckily, for the next day we found a room in the same building for 300 HK$ which was much better and had a window (where we could see the swimming pool on top of the next building, part of the Holiday Inn hotel, which was one of those we found far too expensive).

In general I can say that although Hong Kong is somehow part of China, many things there are completely different. It feels much more like a western city. It has a lot of foreigners, many of them from India - which was good for us, because we could easily get vegetarian food in Indian restaurants. Also noteworthy is that English is the official second language in Hong Kong, so communication was much easier.

Hong Kong pictures (as always, not uploaded yet)

Being a vegetarian was a special challenge on our trip. It was difficult in Russia, where the food plan often enough was reduced to pizza margherita and pancakes. It was even more difficult in China, where the idea of having any food without meat seems to be widely unknown and the choice was often enough reduced to french fries from american fast food companies.

But there was also a surprise: It was absolutely no problem in Mongolia - in sharp contrast to everything I've read before. Traditional mongolian food is very meat-oriented. But Ulaanbaatar has a density of vegetarian and vegan restaurants definitely higher than in Berlin. And even the little border town Zaamin-Üüd has a vegetarian café. Unlike one may expect, I never had the impression that they were primarily focussed to tourists. We even once were in a vegetarian restaurant in Ulaanbaatar that had only a mongolian menu without any english translation.

Most of those restaurants seem to be somewhat related to the "spiritual leader" Supreme Master Ching Hai. I don't know that much about her and her group, so I can't judge how problematic I find that (though I'm always sceptical both about leaders and about esoteric groups). Their arguments for veganism are mainly about the greenhouse gas emissions and climate change effects from meat productions, which is absolutely correct, but sadly their stated numbers are just wrong.

Hainan (海南) Island is the southmost point of China and has a tropical climate. It has some tourist-oriented cities with beaches and many coconut trees. We stayed some days in Haikou (海口) and Sanya (三亚).

Hainan also has some of China's rainforests. We made a trip to Yanoda rainforest park (呀诺达雨林). It was quite interesting, though somewhat unexpected: The trips to this rainforest are very organized - you never walk really in the forest, only on prepared wood-ways and the whole thing is more park-like and you're guided through it.

As I already wrote, we didn't manage to take the ferry and got to Haikou (and later to Sanya) by train - however, there is no bridge, so the train is put on a ship. Sadly, it wasn't possible to leave the train during that time. On our way back, it was somewhat difficult to get a ticket, as we left on the day after the typhoon - and all the people who planned to leave the day before either on the ferry or on a train also tried to get tickets so we had to queue for four hours.

Pictures from Hainan island
Pictures from Yanoda rainforest

While going on to the south of China, we had a short stop in Guangzhou (广州). It is the third largest city in the country and the center of the cantonese part of China. At this time of the year, the climate in Guangzhou is very extreme, which we suddenly experienced when we left the train: Very hot and very humid.

Our original plan was to take the ferry to Haikou (海口) on Hainan (海南) island, but that failed because we were unable to find the ferry. First a taxi driver told us that the ferry doesn't exist at all. We then tried to find it at Huangpu port like it's statet on various internet pages, but there was no ferry and nobody could tell us anything useful about it. The information about Huangpu port you can find online (both place and days/times) is probably outdated. Although we didn't take the ferry at the end, if you find this information helpful to my best knowledge this should be correct (information from Haikou port and tourist information):
Haikou (海口) Xiuying (秀英港) port to Guangzhou Shazaidao port - starting from 2nd of every month every three days, 14:00
Guangzhou Shazaidao port to Haikou (海口) Xiuying (秀英港) port - starting from 3rd of every month every three days, 16:00
Price per person: ¥ 130 / ¥ 180 / ¥ 220 / ¥ 260 / ¥ 300 / ¥ 450 (room with more than 16 / 8-16 / 8 / 4 / 2 / 2 beds). Trip takes approximately 19 hours.

We also didn't take the ferry for our way back, as I already wrote, a typhoon stopped us from doing so.

On our unplanned one day stop in Guangzhou, we visited the Yuexi park (越秀公园). It is the largest urban park in China and it was a nice opportunity to see the tropical plant life in that area.

Guangzhou pictures (not many)
Guangzhou Yuexi park pictures

Due to current events, I'm abandoning the chronological order of my trip reports. You have probably read about the floods currently in China.

We are currently in Haikou on Hainan Island in the south of China. Our plan was to take the ferry to Guangzhou today but all ferry services are cancelled due to the Typhoon Haima. You can follow its way on this japanese webpage.

So we are trapped and our Hotel will have us as guests some days more.

Sidenote: I had hoped to get informed about such dangers by the travelling information from the foreign ministry of Germany. But it doesn't even mention the Typhoon and Flood at all. The UK information was a bit more helpful.

Update: We've long left the typhoon area and nothing happened to us, I just didn't have the time to complete further blog entries.

I promised before that I'll present a cheaper way than the international train to get from Ulaanbaatar on to China. But after doing it and all its obstacles, I'm not sure if I'd suggest it any more.

Taking the normal train route on the transmongolian train, the way from Ulaanbaatar to any place in China is quite expensive. Our hostel offered us a train ticket to Jining (濟寧市) or Datong (大同市) for about 140 $. It would've probably been a bit cheaper at the train station, but still it's quite expensive.

Some people in the Hostel told us about a cheap alternative: Taking a local train to the border town Zamyn-Üüd (Замын-Үүд), then going with a Jeep through the border and then using a bus from Erenhot (二连浩特, also called Erlian) to Hohhot (呼和浩特, ᠬᠥᠬᠡᠬᠣᠲᠠ). However, it turned out that it wasn't that simple.

The ticket for the local train to the border costed 10.000 ₮ (about 7 €) for a hardsleeper. But it came with an unplesant surprise: They sell more "hardsleeper" tickets than there are hardsleepers in the train. So having a hardsleeper ticket with a reservation number does not mean that you have your sleeper for sure. For every two sleepers, three tickets are sold. We ended up having the lower beds and we could use them, but regularly people were sitting at the foot end of our sleepers.

We wanted to go on from Zamyn-Üüd to Erenhot and were confronted with the next unplesant surprise: It was the first of June - international childrens day - and that's a national holiday in Mongolia and the border check is closed. So we were stuck in Zamyn-Üüd for a day longer.

In the evening, we saw the local way of "waste treatment": They just burned it openly. Mongolia is a country which has a lot of problems with air pollution (this is especially a problem of the capital city Ulaanbaatar, but I doubt it's much different there) - it would probably be easy to do this at least a bit better.

The next day, we went on with a jeep to the chinese border town Erenhot. In the end, we payed 10.000 ₮ (about 7 €) per Person plus a small fee at the chinese border I payed with a dollar due to the lack of any chinese or mongolian money.

There's not so much to say about Erenhot - the city is very fond of Dinosaurs (because some were found nearby in the Gobi desert) and has a couple of Dinosaur monuments.

Now with that mysterious bus - I read on several places in the Internet that there exists a bus line between Erenhot and Hohhot, however none of them had anything to say where this bus departs, where you can buy a ticket or where you can find any information at all. It also turned out that communication here was a much bigger problem than thought - I think we didn't meet a single english-speaking person at all. So we ended up using a train to Hohhot, which was also quite cheap and comfortable.

We went to Hohhot not because of anything interesting there, it was just a stop to go on, as there aren't many options for further travelling from Erenhot. It turned out the People's Park there was quite nice and it was our first experience with a bigger chinese city. Afterwards, we went on to the south of China.

Pictures from Zamyn-Üüd
Pictures from Erenhot
Pictures from Hohhot

Ever since I heared that it's possible to take a train from Москва́ (Moscow) as far as 北京 (Beijing), I knew that one day I wanted to do that trip. Today is that day. I'll head off for a trip on the landway to China.

Beside finishing my studies, the last months were filled with preparations for the trip. Getting a proper bag, deciding what to take and what not, vaccinations and getting all the Visa ready - which was the most tiring part, maybe I'll write in detail about that later.

I hope I'll find time to write some blogposts and post pictures (you'll find them here as soon as I made some).

In Diskussionen über unseriösen Journalismus neige ich dazu, die These zu vertreten, dass BILD und Co. allerhöchstens besonders auffällig, aber keinesfalls einmalig in ihrer Art und Weise der Berichterstattung sind.

Kleines Beispiel von heute: Die tagesschau macht eine Umfrage. Fragestellung:
Peking will stärker gegen die Fälschung von Markenprodukten vorgehen und das geistige Eigentum besser schützen. Wir wollen von Ihnen wissen: Glauben Sie den Absichtsbekundungen aus China?

Sowas nennt man, wie man mal im Deutschunterricht gelernt haben sollte (und was üblicherweise Lehrer nicht davon abhält, sowas in Prüfungsfragen zu betreiben) Suggestivfragen. Die grundsätzliche Haltung, nämlich dass geistiges Eigentum besser geschützt werden sollte, wird als unumstößliche Tatsache dargestellt. Die Fragestellung ist bereits so formuliert, dass dies Fakt sei und nicht als etwas, wozu man möglicherweise eine abweichende Meinung haben könnte.

Ja, wirklich. Findige Chinesen haben Disneyland kopiert. Hat Stil, kreative Fortsetzung von Lessigs außeinandersetzung um »Steamboat Willie«.