The Bund: Neo Classical architecture but sadly out of bounds

Hong Kong is a hard act to follow and any city would struggle to win my heart after I clearly devoted it elsewhere, so in many ways my opinion of Shanghai probably isn’t fair. Added to that the fact that the Bund, one of China’s most iconic streets, was in the process of being dug up for the 2010 World Expo, and I was bound to be slightly under whelmed.

But don’t get me wrong, on the whole I liked Shanghai. It was busy, yes (but so much more manageable than manic Beijing), and beer was too expensive for us to indulge in any big nights out, but there were some decent sights to behold, even if the Bund was out of bounds.

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A crowded alley full of food and rats

I sit shivering and hunched over, on a tiny stool, big enough only for a kindergarten child. From the tiny table in front of me I clumsily shovel boiled rice into my mouth with chopsticks, occasionally grabbing some sticky lemon chicken. The cramped and crowded alleyway is a hive of activity: groups of Chinese people laughing, shouting, slurping up noodles and slugging bottles of beer, women crying out orders to the food vendors on their outdoor karts, the rumble of traffic and the electric buzzing of lights hanging over my head. Down by my feet, a group of sewer rats brazenly hunt for scraps of food, and from the corner of my eye I spot more rodents crawling over the food waiting to be cooked. I try not to look down at the filth all around me, take another chug of cheap local beer and continue my meal.

Just minutes away, in another world, gourmet restaurants and designer bars line the streets. The beautiful people sip fabulous cocktails and eat haute cuisine in the most salubrious of settings. Just two nights previously, I sat with them, enjoying delicious Italian food over a bottle of fine red wine.

This in Hong Kong, where East doesn’t just meet West, but where the grubby and the gorgeous sit side by side, and where filth and fabulous feed off each other. And to fully appreciate the city, you need to see both sides.

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In case you have been wondering, we have indeed managed to find ourselves some travel buddies and are heading to Tibet tomorrow morning. The plan is to spend one week travelling from Lhasa to Nepal, before embarking on the next, and possibly, final leg of our journey!

Spending New Year surrounded by spectacular scenery

Before we left the UK, I had never heard the word karst. Had someone asked me, I might have suggested that a karst was some type of German sausage.  Yet since we set off ten months ago I have seen more of them than I could reasonably be expected to shake a stick at. Read the rest of this entry »

It is perhaps inevitable that a country as huge as China would have a multitude of personalities: its cultural diversity is almost as varied as its geographical topography. Just as the landscape ranges from desert to glaciers, icy mountains to tropical beaches, so too do its people range from liberal cosmopolitans to traditional Chinese families, from nomadic hill tribes to Muslim goat herds.

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