䷒ 臨 Approaching. Sublimely prosperous and smooth. Favorable to be steadfast and upright. Ends in the eighth month; Misfortune comes.

Pictures will soon be included, and content will be removed, changed, or added.

I had planned for a trip during the summertime for a while. The only plans I had were that I wanted to explore urban areas, and wanted to visit Chengdu. From there, it was completely open.

Before Traveling

After my parents left, I had to find a place to live and store my stuff until I was ready to travel. Luckily for me, Robin and Aga were willing to house me in their apartment for a week, especially since Nik was going to move into their place when they left.

This was a fantastic period of time. We all lived on the 6th floor of a walk-up apartment, braving the heat in our air conditioned room with a great view. We watched the world cup on the CRT TV in the room, played some video games on our phones together, fooled around, cooked, and just had a fun time all living together.

After just over a week of this, I said goodbye to Robin and Aga for the last time, told Nik I’d see him soon, and set off for Wuhan with just my backpack for a train ride down the Yangtze river

Wuhan

On the train trying to pass my time on my phone, I realized something was wrong with my data plan. Outside of Nanjing, I couldn’t connect to the internet on any app besides wechat and my web browser. This was a theme through the rest of a trip – relying on wifi to plan a trip for a day, and hand-drawing maps and navigation in my notebook.

Wuhan was a pretty boring place at first glance. Like Hebei to the east, it’s a transportation hub in the center of the country. Along the Yangtze river, it’s a combination of three old cities and famed for it’s cultural heritage and contains the iconic Yellow Crane Tower which was visited by many scholars throughout China’s history which has plenty of poems written about it. The tower is on a hill that overlooks Wuhan and Hankou across the river, and was a fantastic opportunity to look over the entire city. I wrote a postcard to my family at one of the stalls nearby, but it never made it back home.

I also had some tasty Wuhan food, the most notable being Hot Dry Noodles which is noodles with peanut sauce and some condiments. I had this for breakfast every day I stayed in the city.

The hostel I stayed at was located north of the westernmost subway stop, Optics Valley. The hostel was in a bit of a sketchy area that didn’t have much lighting at night, so if I didn’t catch the bus I’d have to walk north to the hostel in the dark past a lot of prostitutes trying to lure me into their parlors. The hostel itself was besides some farm fields and was quiet besides the occasional dog barking outside the window.

The hostel was south of East Lake which was a park around a large lake which had pagodas, amusement parks, and opportunities to enjoy the scenery.

During the time travelling, I would have some days where I was tired of walking or talking to people and would spend part of the day in a net cafe programming. I did this in every city besides Hong Kong, and Wuhan was the first city I did this in. This was a struggle since not all net bars had passport scanners, and it was law to have identification when using the computers. I found one in Wuhan in a more rural district that didn’t care, and the receptionist used their identity card to let me use it.

I was programming, minding my business, ssh’d into my server on a tmux session and coding when a big guy with a red armband came up to me and shut off my computer. He yelled that I couldn’t have my phone out (other people there were on their phones…) and literally dragged me out. My guess is he thought I was hacking or something.

Chongqing

Continuing along the Yangtze River, I took a fast train towards the city towards misty Sichuan.

Chongqing is a dense, metropolitan city “built on rivers and mountains” that has a seedy reputation. It’s hilly and has trains that will one moment be underground and another be elevated above streets and rivers. Aesthetically, this was the most interesting city to me due to its geography and cityscape. It really tickled that “high-tech low-life” cyberpunk feeling that’s always fascinated me.

My first night after getting to the hostel I had a good dinner of Chongqing Xiaomian and Chongqing beer served in a bowl on the side of the street.

The day after I climbed to the top of the mountain in the middle of the city to E’ling Park which offered a great view of the city, and TestBed 2 which was a nearby art district. After this I went to the Great Hall of the People (different than the one in Beijing!) and on my way there walked through an underground pass which had hundreds of old people playing cards at tables.

I met some kids at the hostel that night that just graduated high school in Chengdu and got some fiery Chongqing hotpot with them. This entailed a broth so spicy my face was flushed red and eating pig brains.

Later on was the World Cup championship game, which I watched with the aforementioned high school graduates and a ex-military German dude who told me about his experiences being hassled by entry agents who mysteriously knew his military status, and played some pool with some Saudi Arabian dudes who were also learning Chinese.

The next day I took a slow train to Chengdu since it’s situated very close to Chongqing.

Chengdu

Chengdu was the most interesting city in my travels. It’s one of the farthest major cities from the west coast and is the center of Sichuan province, known for its pandas, bamboo, and unique cuisine. It’s here that I met many friends, new and old.

The hostel I stayed at first was an international hostel located in the Tibetan district. I met a traveling student from Beijing and her friends, and we had a fun time going to the nearby old street and a bar later to play some dice and have tipsy conversations. It’s always fun to find people I can get a bit drunk with! We later played some Chengdu style Majiang too.

After this, I went to another hostel in the northern part of the city which was full of Chinese people. Here I met some really fun people, like a girl that worked there that I later spent time with in Suzhou almost a half year later, an undercover missionary who played us an impromptu sing-along concert, and some other miscellaneous people who I had dinner with a few times. “China New Hip-Hop” (中国新说唱) was airing at the time and had a few people from Chengdu that were doing well, so it was a good topic of conversation during the time there. We also went to the best restaurant I experienced on my whole trip there, Mingting (明婷饭店), and had the best Mapo Tofu I’ll probably have in my life.

At one point Nik, a great friend of mine from Nanjing who was traveling with a friend, was able to meet up with me and go to this restaurant as well. We also went to the People’s Garden and chatted over some tea at a very quintessentially Chengdu tea house.

From the Chinese hostel I hopped for two days over to a hostel nearby the first one, and met a Finnish guy. We bonded over the shared experience of having to deal with a giant spider in our dorm room larger than my hand, and we got some beers at a craft beer shop together and watched the latest episode of “China New Hip-Hop” on the TV there. After this we went to “Little Bar” (小酒店) that was made famous by the song “Chengdu” by Zhou Lei. This was way too busy and overpriced due to its newfound fame, and a guy outside recommended we go to another bar nearby he worked at. Throwing caution into the wind we went here, and found it to be just what we wanted – Live music, bar dice, cheap drinks, and friendly Chinese people we could chat with.

After this hostel I found another more international hostel which I assume was marketed heavily to foreign tourists, since it was full of foreigners that didn’t speak Chinese. This was a good break from the other Chinese-only hostel, and I had some great times here.

It was here that I met a french girl who was solo traveling as well. She was in the bunk bed under mine and after chatting a bit, we did some sightseeing for a few days. We got up early to see the pandas together, which was fantastic – I was expecting something disappointing given all the hype about the pandas, but they’re hilarious animals and all the sightseers watching them kept cracking up laughing at their antics.

I met some more people downstairs, like a pair of Belgian (if I remember correctly) students at the nearby Sichuan University, an Australian guy, and a Chinese woman with perfect English who had been to Wisconsin before.

These students wanted to go clubbing, and we ended up at a place they recommended. It ended up being an underground electronic music club on the 21st story of an office building. There were foreign workers bartending illegally, Chinese dudes smoking weed in the stairwell, couples making out in dark corners, and a lot of people very obviously on drugs enjoying the music a lot. Right next door to this club on the same floor was a closed club called “NASA,” which I later learned was the premier hip-hop club in Chengdu before it closed according to this article.

This night ended with me trying to find a didi. Everyone else was drunk and upstairs but said they wanted to leave, so I started calling the didi. But as I went downstairs one of them forgot something upstairs and took a while so I had to cancel the ordering of the cab. This made the driver very mad, and he started calling me and swearing at me. It eventually culminated in him sending me a very rude text message: “你换你妈的球” which literally means “You changed, your mom’s balls!” but probably is better translated as “You changed, you motherfucker” where “changed” is what I did when I canceled his didi.

I didn’t want to risk it with didi again so I flagged down a local cab. It was me in the passenger’s seat and three drunk foreigners in the back who didn’t speak Chinese, and this guy’s Mandarin was terrible. Normally I’d chalk it down to not understanding due to my lack of language ability, but this guy’s accent was strong. I told him the subway stop and he didn’t know it, so I gave him my phone with a map. At this he said he couldn’t read the map (那地图我看不懂) so I had to give him step-by-step instructions. My guess based on his speaking style and mannerisms is that he was intellectually disabled and was illiterate, especially since he was taking a long time looking at street signs.

Guangzhou

From here I took a sleeper train to Guangzhou. I loaded up on pirated movies on my phone, charged my power bank, and slept as long as I could. It wasn’t too painful of a ride!

My impression of Guangzhou was on the surface a normal Chinese city, but it was different in that it was Cantonese culture. Adults and older spoke better Cantonese than Mandarin. The food was a lot different, it felt international but with less white people and more Indians/Africans, and was a lot more focused on trade – I offhandedly mentioned to some Indian guys I met at a hostel and had dinner with that I was in the market for a new laptop, and two of them had business cards on hand of people that would be able to get me one!

It was at a riverside hostel here that I spent about a week, and we developed a crew: A guy from Northern Africa that spoke English, Arabic, French, and Mandarin fluently, a quiet local girl that had a major in Business English but didn’t speak much of it, a Chinese dude from Hebei that went to college in Texas, and a Russian that had the best grasp of the English language and western culture that I’ve ever met.

We would spend a lot of nights after sightseeing sitting on the table right outside the hostel, drinking, eating, playing cards, and getting a bit rowdy. At first I thought this would annoy the owner of the hostel, but the hostel was closing in a month so he didn’t really care about much and joined us a few times.

Our group hiked Baiyun Mountain, got dim sum, had a night at a clubbing district, saw a movie (Skyscraper), and -SOMETHING ELSE IM FORGETTING-. I also cooked a meal with a girl that was also staying there, and we went to one of the traditional wet markets nearby. It had every meat and vegetable, including chickens, rabbits, snakes, frogs, and any kind of seafood ready for the slaughter.

I also wandered around the uncountable markets alone: Traditional Chinese medicine, computers, food, CDs, tea, clothes… If you wanted to buy anything wholesale, you could find it.

Shenzhen

Shenzhen is very close to Guangzhou so it was a speedy ride over. The entire pearl river delta was heavily populated, and there weren’t too many points along the ride where I didn’t see development.

The city is very new unlike most other cities in China, with a planned city grid and efficiency public transportation system. I spent a lot of time in the city center wandering through all the electronics shops, which were full of spare parts, used laptops, drones, and miscellaneous electronics.

I stayed in a capsule hotel in Shenzhen which was a fun experience. It was a modern place with some computers I used to keep up on my coding projects, and each capsule had a TV and was a good space to relax in away from the busy city.

It was here that I met up with the Russian lad I met in Guangzhou, and we had a great night at one point eating Sichuan food at an empty restaurant. We talked about our dreams, the poetry he wrote, the fiction I was writing, our respective countries, our time spent online when we were younger, and drank a lot of baijiu and beer. We wandered back and had some street BBQ and in all had a fantastic time.

Hong Kong

Later on the two of us went to Hong Kong together. It was literally a walk over the border from the Shenzhen subway station. The border crossing was uneventful, and they didn’t have a significant security search beyond the typical xray scan you’d see in the subway system.

Hong Kong to me is half China, a fourth English, and a fourth Japan – People were more civilized, there were many more foreigners, and a larger range of food. I didn’t see more than five police officers the whole time, there was no propaganda, no firewall, no residency registration at hotels/hostels, no security checks in the subways, and you couldn’t smoke inside which made it much more pleasant to eat in restaurants.

There were more defined English names for streets, areas, and geographic features. For example, the water separating the land from Hong Kong island is “Victoria Harbor,” where we stayed in the south was “Aberdeen,” and “Central” was the main business district. These weren’t always the names in Cantonese (besides “Victoria Harbor” which in the native language is a transcription) but compared to the mainland it was a lot easier to talk to people that didn’t speak Chinese about locations.

That said, there’s got to be some downsides. Everything was much more expensive. One Hong Kong dollar was about 85% of one Renminbi, but prices were much higher: The average cheap meal was around HK$40-60 and my dingy Chungking Mansions guesthouse room was HK$200, and

The language was Cantonese and English. Out of habit talking to Asian people there I would speak in Mandarin, but there were very few times that people replied with it, typically choosing to switch to English. I only learned a couple words in Cantonese during my four days there:

• m3’gai1: Thank you. Refreshing since it’s used the same way as in America, as in thanks for handing me the food, thanks for the help, etc. This sort of thanking is not as common in China so it fulfilled the part of my brain that missed saying “thanks” so often. It’s also means “excuse me.”
• neh2 hou2: 你好, or “hello”
• dei2 dao1 qin4: How much?

We stayed in a hostel at first on the south end of the island in Aberdeen. It was full of foreigners who were very comfortable, which was a change of pace from the feeling of being an outsider in the mainland. The hostel had a movie theater, fully stocked kitchen, plenty of hang-out spaces, and a bar.

After staying here and spending a lot of money, I checked into the Chungking Mansions, which are infamous for kinda being the new “Kowloon Walled City” (obviously much tamer and less cramped) and was featured in “Chengking Express”. It was built in 1961, and is where a lot of African and Indian immigrants end up. It’s a tall building with lots of shops and guesthouses, and elevators with long long lines. Shops on the first couple of floors sold goods from Africa, India, and others imported from elsewhere. There were constantly long lines at the currency exchanges on the first floor. I stayed in a guest house in block B with no windows or working AC unit, and bargained the price down surprisingly low. The owner of this particular guest house was from Hong Kong and had an Indian wife, and it was interesting hearing them speak their pidgin of Cantonese and whatever Indian language she spoke.

The entire place was grimy, people were trying to sell you hashish or watches at the entryway, and people were dealing drugs or sleeping in the stairwells. I saw a few rats, messes of jerry-rigged wires and pipes, and the “air vents” coated in black grime that ran vertically through the complex looked like they’d never been cleaned since it opened 50+ years ago.

Besides my living situation, it was a combination of solo traveling and traveling with this Russian travel companion. We explored the city north and south of Victoria Harbor, wandered around the streets and marveled at the urban density, and enjoyed food from all cultures: Thai, Japanese, Cantonese diner food, American, and convenience store food.

We saw the ruins of the Kowloon Walled City, some parks and markets, took a ferry across Victoria Harbor, saw a buddhist/chinese folk gathering, and spent some time sharing youtube videos in the hostel theater.

I wish I had more time to spend in this city! It’s huge and has so much to see. But after seeing some Hong Kong movies in the mainland, I was able to recognize a lot of sights from my trip and have a better context for the location.

Shanghai

From Hong Kong I went back to the Shenzhen capsule hotel to spend an uneventful day, then took a sleeper train back to Shanghai. My funds were depleting after Hong Kong and I was ready to get home at this point.

In Shanghai I considered spending a night, but decided to get right back home to Nanjing – after traveling so much I missed the city a ton. I wandered around the city for a few hours and made my way to the Shanghai Railway Station to return to Nanjing.

Back in Nanjing

When I got back in Nanjing, I went to Nik’s house (formally Robin and Aga’s) and he welcomed me with a pot of tea already brewed. What a warm welcome back to Nanjing! I stayed here for a few days, until I ran into a big hurdle which the introductory Yi Jing entry foreshadows: “Misfortune Comes.” More on that next time.

Retrospective and Lessons Learned

Traveling alone is fantastic for a freedom-loving American like me. Nobody else to please, I can change plans on a whim, staying in a city longer than expected or leaving when I’m ready to move on. I can visit things that particularly interest me but others might not care about. But there’s also moments that you wish you could share with other people without just taking pictures, or times eating alone that would be better enjoyed with company. All in all it was a net positive to travel alone, but some of the most memorable times were the moments I spent with other people on the trip.

This trip did wonders for my spoken Chinese – I met many strangers who didn’t speak English, so there were plenty of days where I didn’t speak any significant English and got to learn about the different kinds of Chinese people from different areas of China.

In Guangzhou, I wish I would have tried something exotic like alligator or snake.

Besides Chengdu to an extent, I never felt like I understood local culture too well. I was only in places for a short time and usually would meet other travelers. In other cities like Nanjing, Shanghai, Suzhou, or Wuhu I’ve had a chance to spend time with people that are local to the city. This is a hard thing to accomplish when you’re jumping from place to place and staying in hostels with other travelers, so it’s not much of a regret but more a disappointment.