Five Seven One

When in Beijing it is of course obligatory to visit the Great Wall of China. We hired a private guide to pick us up at our hotel and take us to a less traveled area of the wall located in the Hebei province. The drive was about an hour and half to the Jinshanling section, which we were told had less tourists. This turned out to be completely true, as we saw maybe a total of ten other travelers during the day we spent there. The Jinshanling section was of particular interest to us because there are sections that are both restored and not restored, so we were able to see what toll the past four hundred years had taken on this massive structure.

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We only spent four days in Hong Kong. We found it to be like many large cosmopolitan cities. Some of the highlights were afternoon tea at the Peninsula Hotel, which is Hong Kong’s oldest hotel, and a trip to the nearby Po Lin Monastery to see the Tin Tan Buddha. I think the most memorable site though, was while walking to the Hong Kong Zoological and Botanical Gardens, we came across a black cobra eating a frog on the sidewalk.

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Nothing could have prepared me for the scale of Beijing. I feel that usually I can get a fairly good scope of a city I am going to visit by looking at a map. We would pick a destination that we though would be a 15 minute walk and end up trekking for an hour. This wasn’t helped by the Chinese industrious proclivity for wall building.

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Umphang is located in North Western Thailand along the Myanmar border, and is home to Karen, Thai, Shan and other minority ethnic tribes. To get to Umphang you fly into the town of Mae Sot and take the 164km winding road through the Thanon Thongchai Mountain Range. This road is the only access from Thailand, there is another road that will take you to Myanmar, but to enter the country you have to leave your passports at the border.

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In the north west of Vietnam, near the Chinese border, high in the Hoang Lien Son mountain range you will find the town of Sapa. To get there we took the overnight train from Hanoi. The ride was rough and noisy, but we were fairly comfortable in our private sleeping car. Near dawn we awoke and gazed out the window at the villages along the train tracks leading into Lao Cai. For a brief moment we caught a glimpse of a child that couldn’t have been more than three climbing down a ten food garden wall naked and seemingly unsupervised. I couldn’t help but think how hearty such an upbringing would make a person.

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