China

Guilin Day 2

27 Oct , 2016  

Ok, bring on day 2 of our tour! Its difficult waking up without an alarm as I found out this morning. My roomie, K, tried to wake me up, but she’s far too polite and doesn’t insist I actually get up, so the result is that she’s ready for breakfast before I’ve even opened my eyes. I had no idea what the plan was for today; that how good our personal translators are, they tell us nothing.

First off, we stop by a river and do a short bamboo raft canoeing activity. There’s some women dressed in traditional outfits that get on the rafts with us and serenade us down the river. Gotta say, you wouldn’t find Chinese singing on my ipod ever – far too high pitched. They even got us to join in and sing along to the songs. And by ‘we’ I mean anyone who could read Chinese, so not me. The ride didn’t take all that long, but we each got a turn at paddling using the long bamboo stick to steer.

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China

Guilin Day 1

27 Oct , 2016  

I’ve stolen mum’s phone for a few days. Re-learning how to function an iPhone is not ideal, but travelling and seeing wonderful places without being able to save the memories with photos is an unbearable thought. Today is the first proper day of our 4 day (shopping) tour of Guilin, China.

First activity of the day was rice terraces. Didn’t understand any of what the tour guide said in the bus on our way there and by the time we arrived, no one could be bothered remembering any of it, so no translations for us. Well, at least I know I’m somewhere in China. Apparently the rice terraces were up a mountain, so we could either walk (40 mins in the hot sun) or take a cable car, but we had to decide as a whole group. Obviously, the cable car option won. After some time of fluffing around and being confused, we finally took the cable car up. Turns out, the cable car ride was around 30 mins up (pretty sure walking wasn’t even an option – probably would’ve taken days!). Note: don’t trust anything anyone says, even if 2 people supposedly hear the same thing. Had to keep reminding myself not to think about dodgy made-in-China products – I’m SURE this cable car is regularly checked and meets international safety requirements. Definitely. Just keep breathing and don’t look down. The view was amazing! 360 degree views rice terraces flowing down the sides of mountains. Pity they recently got harvested though. Just a few weeks ago they would have been even more amazing to see.

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China

Hong Kong to China

25 Oct , 2016  

A few months ago, mum found out about a cheap shopping tour to China that’s aimed at bringing Chinese people living elsewhere, back to visit their homeland. Basically, for an insanely low price, you get transport, accommodation and a tour of a city. The only catch being that you get taken to a few factories/shops aimed at large tour groups that exist solely to pressure you into buying their products. You are obligated to listen to their sales pitch, but theoretically don’t have to buy anything. I randomly decided to follow my parents and 3 of mum’s friends along on a 6 day trip to Guilin (southern China). Of the 6 of us, only mum and SY spoke Mandarin, the rest of us (dad, myself, W and K) hear the language as angry background noise. The tour group had 21 people total, most of which spoke english and a few others that were tagging along and couldn’t understand margarin either. We spent one night in Hong Kong on the way there.

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Colombia

CouchSurfing 1

5 Dec , 2014  

September 23rd 2014

A few days before we went to Guatape, I had met up with a guy from CouchSurfing called Andres for coffee and had invited Phil to join us. When I mentioned that we were going to Guatape that week, Andres immediately invited us to stay with his parents the night after, as his family home was half way between Guatape and Medellin. He didn’t even check with his parent first but we agreed and the day after staying in Guatape we set about trying to meet up with Andres. More…

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Colombia

Guatape

16 Oct , 2014  

September 22nd 2014

Skipping ahead to 6 days into my stay in Medellin, and Phil and I had decided to go to Guatape. Guatape is a cute little town about 2hrs bus ride away from Medellin. Everyone has been telling me its amazing and not to miss it. I’m not sure how Phil has caught up to me; he stayed 2.5 weeks extra in Bogota to study Spanish and I am yet to stop to take classes so it seems I am just making my way through Colombia incredibly slowly. Anyway, its nice to hang out with someone and not have to do the regular introductions: What’s your name? Where are you from? How long are you travelling for? Where are you going next? Where have you been? Etc It’s starting to get repetitive.

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Colombia

Return to Playa Blanca

10 Oct , 2014  

September 12th to 15th 2014

Round 2 at El Viajero Hostel in Cartagena put me into a room that had a balcony facing the street. Usually I get woken up by the morning sunlight streaming through non existent curtains or doors that don’t quite close properly. This morning I got the Colombian street version of the Lion King’s Circle of Life. One of the ladies selling fruit on the street had one of the most powerful voices I’ve ever heard, unfortunately it was at an inappropriate time of the morning. Imagine the opening vocals of the Circle of Life, and rather than whatever the normal lyrics are, replace them with the words of fruit: “Limoneeeees, Piñaaaa, manzanaaaaaa”. (lemons, pineapple, apple…)

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Colombia

Playa Blanca

18 Sep , 2014  

September 6th to 9th 2014

There’s around 4 ways to get to Playa Blanca; the most common way go to the port near the clock tower and take a speed boat from there. When I asked the hostel reception, they only told me about this way of getting there and wouldn’t provide any useful information on the other 3 routes. Sometimes I feel like everyone here bands together to get the most amount of money out of the tourists; taking a boat from that port incurs an additional 13,500 peso port fee, on top of the 35,000 peso ticket, while none of the other routes are even close to that expensive.

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Colombia

Mud Volcano

11 Sep , 2014  

September 4th 2014

Something about air conditioned rooms here; they can never seem to get the temperature right. The night before last, the room was freezing, then last night, some idiot had set it to 29 degrees and it had been blowing hot air all night. It was cooler outside than inside the room.

Today we decided to go to ‘Volcan de Lodo El Totumo’; a natural mud volcano just outside Cartagena. Once again the staff at this hostel proved useless. We asked the guy last night to leave a note for the morning staff to book us a morning tour. Charnie got up to inquire this morning and they had seen the note and chosen not to do anything about it.

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Colombia

Palomino

11 Sep , 2014  

30th August to 2nd September

When I got back from the Lost City hike I checked back into the hostel I had moved to the day before going. No sooner had I walking into the dorm, I heard someone scream my name. Charnie, a Perth girl I had met in Bogota, had been staying in the 8 bed dorm alone for a few days and was super excited to finally have some company. She had travelled over a year in Europe and had met up with one of her best friends to do 4 months in South America, arriving on the same day as me. Unfortunately though, her friend had met a Russian girl at this hostel and decided that he couldn’t live without her so had ditched Charnie to travel with the Russian, 3 weeks into their 4 month planned trip. How rude. So I convinced her to come chill with me for a few days at the beach in Palomino. I felt that after the hike I was in much need of some relaxing beach time.

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Colombia

Ciudad Perdida

5 Sep , 2014  

The Lost City Trek: 26th to 29th August 2014

Day 1:

I actually wanted to do the trek the following week but when I enquired at the MagicTours office I was told that the indigenous tribes close off the area for 2 weeks for their yearly something or other…lucky I asked! Once again, no one at the hostel had bothered to mention this closure even when I said I was thinking about doing the trek next week.

I tried to be more prepared than normal and started packing for the hike the night before. I’m glad I did because I realised that I had left my only bikini hanging on a tree to dry at the hostel before last. Thankfully, it was only the next town across and they had it in lost property. So in the morning, rather than get picked up by the tour group at my current hostel, I had to taxi to the previous hostel then taxi back to the tour office. We were meant to all meet at the office at 9am but I found myself hanging out there until about 10 because everything moves so slowly here. When we eventually were herded to the bus, I had to run back to get the water bottle I’d somehow forgotten. Not sure how I keep forgetting things.

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