All Good Things Must Come to an End

Goodbye, loyal blog-readers! Tomorrow we begin our multi-day journey home (via Hong Kong & LA, where we're spending a few nights and seeing some friends).

It's been the trip of a lifetime! And for the trip awards...We agree that our Favorite Activity was probably the Machu Picchu trek, way back in Peru (with the Nile cruise coming in a close second); the Most Different/Interesting Country was India (and the Best Food although Turkey deserves an honorable mention for the Iskender Kebab); the Pleasant Surprise award goes to China; Most Insane City goes to Cairo; and Most Memorable Sight goes to....yes, you guessed it...the surprise barefoot TEMPLE FULL OF RATS in India!

Thanks for following along on our round-the-world adventure. Happy holidays & we'll see you soon!

Foiled!

This is as close as we got to the Great Wall today...(don't worry, that's not our van). We tried to go to the Great Wall today to do a 8K hike, but when we were almost there, our guide decided that it would not be possible to make it there and hike, due to the weather.

Beijing!

After 72 hours in bed (I like to say it was SARS but Jeff and Chinese TV ads remind me that SARS has been eradicated, so I guess it was just a nasty cold), I am back! We overnight trained it to Beijing, and today we vistited Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City, and some of the Olympic venues (which were indeed very cool). There's a nice layer of smog hanging over the city, which makes for dim photos, but here's a shot from the Square, note Mao's portrait in the center.

Anyone for a game of street ping pong? (Cousin Scott beware, I haven't actually been traveling around the world for the past three months, but have been attending an intensive ping pong camp to hone my skills for the annual holiday competition. This kid is 8-and-under province champion and I beat him 21-15.)

We are now in Pingyao, China, southwest of Beijing. We arrived this morning (Dec. 5) to a biting chill... a cold front came through NE China last night and it is FREEZING. Even the locals seem unsettled by the weather. Pingyao is an historic merchant town and now a popular tourist destination for the Chinese (though not so much in this weather). The old city wall and moat are still intact, and inside the city walls Pingyao is well preserved with old buildings lacking the in-your-face commercialism that we've seen elsewhere in China... no bootleg North Face jackets or Lacoste shirts here. Krista is very sick, but hopefully the combination of western pharmaceuticals and Chinese herbal remedies will have her feeling better by the time we're off for Beijing in a few days.

The famous Terracotta Warriors in Xi'an. This is a shot from one part of a tomb from a maniacal Chinese emperor from 2000 years ago... To make sure he would be protected in the afterlife, he hhad his minions spend 40 years creating an army thousands strong of terracotta warriors to surround the tomb where he would be buried. Apparently no two warriors are the same. Soon after he died, his tomb and many of the terracotta warriors were destroyed, then left dormant until the 1970's when Chinese farmers pulled up some fragments of the tomb when drilling a well.

Krista in the dining car on the highest railway on Earth... we were traveling above 15,000 feet for most of the first day on the train from Lhasa, Tibet to Xi'an China. It was a 36 hour journey in total with beautiful mountain scenery... very enjoyable, except we shared a sleeping compartment with a very ill woman who got Krista incredibly sick (hence I have been called in off the bench as back-up blogger).

Yaks

The yak is the king of Tibet. Yak meat, yak butter, yak milk, yak yarn, yak bone jewelry...I even had spaghetti with meat (yak) sauce. Although you may not think of Buddhists as carnivores, out of necessity, Tibetan Buddhists have traditionally eaten yak meat. Here is one pretty guy amongst the prayer flags at the Ganden monestary near Lhasa.

The Modern Monk

Visiting the monestaries, we were able to see a little bit of the daily life of the monks. Yes, they make food, pray, read...but we also saw one monk chatting away on his cell phone while giving blessings to the foreheads of the pilgrims.

We spent the day touring a couple of monestaries and the Dalai Lama's former summer palace. Oh, the odor of burning yak butter! So subtle, yet so memorable...I think I am beginning to smell like melted yak butter.

Monks on the roof of a temple, measuring gold that will be used to paint the temple.

You can see a prayer wheelin the left hand of the second pilgrim.

You can see a prayer wheelin the left hand of the second pilgrim.

Not that kind of Pilgrim

There are very few other western tourists here, as only fools like us decide to go to Tibet in December. However, there are many religious pilgrims who have made their way to Lhasa to visit the palaces and temples, bringing with them vats of melted yak butter, which they pour into containers inside holding wicks to create candles. Some carry prayer beads and prayer wheels, which they spin, chanting, while they circle the temples and palaces in a clockwise manner (clockwise for Buddhists, counter clockwise for the Bon, Tibet's native religion). The particularly devout prostrate themselves (see photo for people in various stages of laying down before the temple) before the temple OR if you are really intense, you make the pilgrimage from your village by taking 3 steps, prostrating, (and slidng some extra feet with knee pads, a long apron, and wooden pads on your hands for protection) and then continuing on in this manner til you get where you're going. We saw a fair number of people doing this yesterday. They looked really really tired.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving from Tibet! We arrived in Lhasa yesterday, and spent the day getting used to the altitude (it's about 12,000 feet here and we were struggling a little). We have eaten yak dumplings and checked out the Dalai Lama's (former) winter palace (see photo), the center of Tibetan Buddhism for about 500 years. The Dalai Lama now resides in Daramsala, India, as he fled Tibet in 1959. The palace contains photos and depictions of the Dalai Lamas prior to the present one, but none of the present one, as it is apparently illegal to even possess his photo.

It's cold. Our hotel restaurant is on the roof (convenient in summer, ill conceived this time of year) and we wore hats and gloves to breakfast, where the marmalade and butter were frozen.

There were red pandas too...poor red pandas don't get the attention that the giant black and white guys get. Apparently they are more closely related to racoons than the giant pandas.

Panda-monium

Today we went to the Panda Breeding Center, near Chengdu. We saw probably 30 or more pandas, of various ages (including a nursery where about 8 3-4 month old babies were being raised. The babies couldn't walk yet, they just sort of flopped around and looked adorable). We were lucky to get there in the morning to catch them at feeding time, and some of the one year olds were pretty playful. Not this gal...

Some local delicacies

My tummy growled when I saw these pig snouts hanging on a bamboo rod. It was hard to turn them down, along with other local delicacies which include fried dried rat meat and stuffed snails.
Never fear...we will not go hungry. The dumplings are delicious and we have even located pork buns, aka baozi, aka hom bao, my favorite treat!

We went into a cave called the Water Cave (famous for the chance to go mud bathing and swimming, although in the chilly weather we only went knee high) and at our guide's insistence, crawled through a 5 meter gap in the rocks that was a pretty tight squeeze. After crawling through first on my belly I did not think Jeff would be able to make it, but here he emerges, victorious!!

We spent the day today hiking, biking & spelunking in the countryside, outside of Yangshuo. We opted not to get the tandem bike, which was a mistake, in retrospect!