China is another world. Nature doesn’t recognise country boundaries so the terrain was similar, but that’s about it. And now for the differences. Let’s start with the roads:
- Proper asphalt roads (and not just the main highways)
- Central reservation (I haven’t seen one anywhere in Cambodia, Vietnam or Laos) and a dual carriageway
- Road signs (a mix between English- and US-style)
- More cars than motorbikes (a sign of prosperity)
- … leading to traffic jams
- … but also faster speeds
- Tunnels (and they tell you how long they are)
- No pot holes (although sections if the road are still very bumpy)
- People not driving on the wrong side of the road (I’d obviously got used to this as I noticed its absence straight away)
- More aggressive honking
- Lots of different makes of car (whereas there appeared to be only a few breeds in SE Asia, and mainly pickup trucks in Laos)
- And different “tuk-tuks”
And now the other stuff:
- Hieroglyphics (i.e. the written Chinese language; it’s like Chinese to me)
- Concrete houses (no wood)
- More built-up
- Construction workers wear hard hats
- People are fatter
- People wear more modern clothes
- Nobody speaks English (not even a little bit)
- And the trees on the hillside are in lines
Our first toilet stop in China. Can you spot what’s unusual about the door?
Exactly, there isn’t one. Vandalised maybe. But none of the toilets we stopped at had doors. And the toilets were of the squat variety, which surprised me somewhat.
The spoken language is also very different. It sounds very aggressive: the man on the phone in the bus sounded like he was reprimanding someone, but was probably just planning dinner.
We arrived much later than planned in Jinghong: one member of the Aussie group who’d left Luang Namtha with us had had the wrong date put on her visa. She didn’t notice until the immigration officer wouldn’t let her pass. It took a good couple of hours for them to rearrange their plans (she and a teacher had to return to Luang Prabang to get her another visa, and also one for the teacher who’d already entered the country and so would need a new visa to re-enter).
Once we’d arrived, we started walking into town to our hotel from the south bus station:
With a basic map, we just couldn’t work out where we were. Eventually, we asked a couple who indicated we should just take a taxi. The first driver didn’t recognize the hotel. Nor the the second. Nor the third or fourth. Twenty minutes later the young couple saw us still with our backpacks. She came over, called our hotel, hailed a taxi, told him where to go and set us on our way. What a lovely welcome to her country (spoiled slightly by the taxi driver who tried to charge us four times the going rate, but we were on to it).
I’d changed some money at the border. My whizzy app told me that my 75,000 kip were worth 60 yuan. I showed her. She gave me two twenties and two fives. Close but not close enough. I asked for another five which she duly gave me. Result. Or so I thought. It was only when I went to pay for some water later that day that I found out the “fives” were actually 0.5. She’d given me 41.5. She knew I wouldn’t know the difference. It was only £2, but that’s not the point. Not a, great welcome to China (and who puts the number “5” on a note worth “0.5” anyway?). So the couple’s kindness was doubly appreciated and restored my faith in humanity (and the Chinese) somewhat.
At the hotel, we were rather perplexed by the two kits that were between our beds:
Dinner. We ordered some spicy meat and rice with “fried carrot”. You’ve probably now got a mental picture of a plate of fried carrots. If not, take a moment to picture one. When it arrived well after our meal (not unusual), we stared at it. “Is that what we ordered?”
“Dunno.”
Carrots had been mashed, rolled into balls, deep-fried, piled up like profiteroles… and drizzled with chocolate sauce:
Bet you didn’t see that one coming, did ya? Neither did we. We both peered down at it. And then burst out laughing. Paradigm shift.
