Unfortunately we didn’t get too far before one of the sidecar bikes had a spark plug problem. A lot of sputtering, loud backfiring and a new spark plug later and we were on the road again heading south through the Qinling Mountains. Once you can get over the first peak and down the other side most of the tourist traffic is lost and you’re on your own through the twistys.

While the mountains were no problem for the big 750cc sidecar bikes, they posed a bit of a problem for me on a weighed down 125cc bike. So on the steep inclines I actually kicked Jiafei off to sit on the jump seat of a sidecar bike so I could make it up the hill! She didn’t like that too much, but it beats walking!

There was, of course, our fair share of rain and cold weather as we cruised along though southern Shaanxi. But I must say, the new jacket I got just before the trip shed the water nicely and kept me pretty warm. The cold rain pelting my face did finally lead me to buy a helmet on the third day, and after having it on for a few kilometers I didn’t know why I hadn’t gotten one earlier!

As we road along the small highways we passed village after village and whenever we stopped they were simply amazed to see not only one foreigner but many foreigners. The big sidecar bikes drew particular attention and a lot of talk because of their loud rumbling and their history in the Chinese military from way back when. Either way, nearly all of the attention was good attention, people were just interested. They wanted to know where we were from, what we were doing, and why we were doing it. Many Chinese don’t quite understand the concept of a road-trip yet, vehicles are still something that’s used out of necessity rather than as a pleasure vehicle. In fact, when I told some of my students about our planned trip they simply asked “Why don’t you just take a train?” Well that’d kind of defeat the purpose. I explained to them that the whole point is the journey, we didn’t really care where we went or where we stayed at night, just that it was a nice drive and there were things to see.

There was definitely things to see. Southern Shaanxi and Gansu are both beautiful areas which haven’t been ruined by urbanization. There are villages and relatively clear air, clear skies, and a slow pace of life.

Of course, a trip wouldn’t be a trip without a few breakdowns or wipeouts. We had our fair share of those, but mostly they resulted in bruised elbows, bruised egos, and a slightly busted up, but quite fixable or rideable bikes.

After 1100+ kilometers and 5 days of riding at least six hours per day, we were thrilled to be back home. But not for too long. We’ve got another plan in the works for a spring time outing!

For the next 5 days we spent time exploring, relaxing by the beach, and drinking cheap beers (1L 7% Alc. Redhorse!). I took an afternoon opportunity to go on a refresher dive excursion. I didn’t realize it had been more than 7 years since I last went diving and got my PADI Open Water certificate. Most of what I needed to do came back pretty quick, but the nervousness still warranted the refresher. Diving can be dangerous, certainly don’t want to go out there unprepared. It was great being able to dive in warm water, and see many colorful fish and reefs. I’m now very excited for my next trip down to Thailand so I can do more diving!

After an enjoyable 5 days in Alona Beach we headed back to Cebu for a night before our flight back to Shenzhen, and eventually Xi’an. The last night in Cebu was cool, a couple guys we met at the Cebu Guesthouse asked us to go out to a club with them, and we’ll just say that ended up being nearly an all night event despite our morning flight out of Cebu. But hey, we’re on vacation, sleep on the plane and sleep when you’re dead.

Overall it was a great trip and I’m glad I went there, but of course, I’m always happy to get back to Xi’an.

Our first stop on the trip was actually Hong Kong for a day, a place I’ve written about before. We made sure to see all the important stuff, or at least what we could see over the course of 24 hours before going to the airport for our flight to Manila.

Upon arriving in Manila we really just played it by ear as far as finding a place to stay, asked the lady at the tourism counter (who was fantastically helpful) to call a hostel or two for us, but they were unfortunately booked up. Eventually she found us a decent enough hotel in Ermita (a district of Manila) near most of the famous areas. We had 4 days to hangout in Manila, and to be honest, 2 would have been plenty. A fair share of drinking and exploring the city was certainly done. But in all reality there just isn’t a lot to see in Manila. There’s no beaches, just harbors and dirty water, a couple okay parks, people all over the street asking me if I want to change money or kids begging for money. When nighttime comes around the kids go home and the hawkers start accosting people (especially foreigners) to buy Cialis, Viagra, other drugs and of course, get hookers. If I had to make a generalization I’d say Manila is only good for shopping (lots of western stores there and the world’s 4th largest mall) and cheap whores. The food isn’t great, it’s polluted and pretty “eh”.

Four days later we were able to get out of Manila to Cebu via Cebu Pacific, a pretty decent airline with very cheap flights. I was under the impression that there were actually beaches in Cebu, yeah, not so much. We did however, see the cool sites, like Fort San Pedro and Magellan’s Cross. Apparently in the past, many explorers had come through the area bringing Christianity as well as modernized (for the 1500s anyway) the area.  Ryan and I stayed at the Cebu Hostel and met some pretty cool people; a couple Brits, one of them biking from the UK to China and then around southeast Asia, another was a pretty free-spirited Chengdu girl who was down in the area to do some scuba diving. I had a pretty good conversation with the Chengdu-ren in Chinese which I was pretty happy about being able to do! She recommended that we take a ferry out to Panglao island where there was a nice village, beaches, diving, etc. Too bad she was on her way back home instead of out to Alona Beach. But we’d certainly take her advice.

Shortly after I arrived in Shanghai, I felt kinda like I was home again. My phone worked, the street food smelled like stuff I knew, there wasn’t 10 7-11s on every street, I could buy things I liked again. It felt good. Later that evening I picked up Marina from the airport, as she had come to join me on my holiday.

Our first stop on the holiday tour was in Xitang “water town”, which is kinda like a Chinese Venice, Italy. With a river running through the middle, the city offered a great display in the evenings with hanging lanterns, floating candles, and romantic boat rides. Xitang isn’t really one of the “see things, do things” kinda places, it was more of a “sit on a porch, drinking beer and reading a book all afternoon” place; and the latter is precisely what we did.

Second stop on the tour was in the city of Shanghai. Shanghai, is full of high-end shopping, great eats, and beautiful sights. We spent a few days in Shanghai taking in the sights such as the area along the water full of huge, European-style buildings from the early 1900’s, commonly called The Bund. We also checked out the Science and Technology museum, did a little shopping, including checking out the newly-opened Apple store in Shanghai.

We also took a day to go to the Shanghai 2010 World Expo. The Expo itself was pretty crazy; the amount of people would pretty much blow you away. Many of the pavilions we wanted to see were swamped with 3 hour lines, Saudi Arabia had a line that was apparently 8 hours long! We were only spending one day at the expo and didn’t care to wait in line in the heat, so we only went to countries with short or no lines involved. Fortunately this included lots of little countries I’ve never been to, countries with great food, and great booze! Most larger countries also had restaurants outside their pavilions where you could have a local snack or brew. Wonderful.

Last stop on our trip, due in part to the giant beer festival and cheap last minute flight tickets, was Qingdao. In fact, it turned out that Qingdao was probably the best part of the entire trip. The beaches were beautiful, and the ocean air really cut down on the smog in the city. Not to mention everyone I met was really really friendly. I don’t think I could actually live there because it was too humid, in fact, my washed clothing never really dried, it just equalized with the humidity outside. But it is a great city. Marina and I enjoyed long walks and barbecues on the beach, and the most famous beer festival in all of China. The beer festival was great, but unfortunately it was way too expensive, 100 RMB for a liter of beer is a little extreme.

Finally it came time to head home, so Marina flew back to Taiyuan to spend some time with her parents before going to school, and I flew back to Xi’an where I’m now located at a new school and a new apartment, but that’s for another time. 

The following day I took a train to Hualien, a city on the east coast of Taiwan, and famous for it’s sights, surfing, and beach-town atmosphere. Upon arriving and stepping out of the train station, I knew it was true. The park in front of the train station, lined with fruit stands, locals cruising around on their scooters in shorts and flip-flops, and the smell of salty ocean air, told me; “this, this is a paradise”.

I quickly got to my hostel for a quick break and lunch before heading out to rent a scooter. The scooter rental was absurdly easy, they asked me “have you ever ridden a scooter before?” I lied and said yes. I mean, I’ve ridden motorcycle many times, I own one! But I had not actually ridden a scooter before, so once they gave me a quick once over on the features I was on my own. Riding a little 100cc scooter like that is kind of like driving an automatic car after you’ve been driving a manual for years. In the car, when you switch to an automatic you feel like you should be doing something with your left-foot and right-hand (other than changing the radio station), it just feels too easy. The scooter was the same thing, no clutch, no shifting gears, no foot break, just a throttle and front/back brakes. It was easy, yeah, but the whole time I felt like  I should’ve been doing something more than wringing the neck of this poor little 100cc engine.

The area around Hualien is pretty famous for it’s scenic highways 9 and 11, north and south respectively, along the east coast of the island. As well as one of the most beautiful areas on the entire island, Taroko Gorge, on HWY 8, NW of Hualien. The first day out I rode down past Jici Beach, one of the most famous surfing spots along the east coast, unfortunately the weather was a little cool and there weren’t many surfers out. The ride however, was fantastic, so many twisty turns, great scenery, good weather, and roads devoid of any major traffic. I like to think of it as Taiwan’s Pacific Coast Highway (similar to California’s PCH), I was smiling the rest of the day.

The 2nd day out I woke up early and took HWY 9 up to the Cingshui cliffs, the views were fantastic but the drive wasn’t as nice and relaxing since HWY 9 was filled with big trucks and cars driving towards Taipei and I was spending my time dodging them while driving through tiny tunnels. Later in the day I cruised over to HWY 8 and drove about halfway through Taroko Gorge. I now know why everyone wants to go there, it really is very beautiful, and the roads through it are all very nice. Perfect for riding a two-wheeled vehicle through. I saw other guys on their motorcycles and instantly became envious that I only had 100cc under me, but then I saw a bus and was glad I wasn’t on that.

Hualien was probably the best and most exciting part of my trip to Taiwan, despite only being two days of my 32 day trip. 21 of those days were literally the same thing day in and day out which you can read about in my previous post. I saw other things in Taipei of course, like the Taipei Zoo, Taiwan 101, night markets and temples. I even made a few friends at the summer camp, with whom I was fortunate enough to hangout with in Taipei and have some beers. Overall I’d say it was a good trip and well worth it, I made a decent amount of money since I didn’t have to pay much to get to Taiwan, and I had free room and board for 3/4ths of my stay here. Just wish I had more time to go down south near Kaohsiung. Unfortunately I can’t easily come back to Taiwan for at least one year, why you ask? Well I made a mistake scheduling my flight tickets and scheduled my trip for 32 days, but Americans only get a 30 day landing visa. Meaning I overstayed my visa by two days. Resulting in a $NT 2000 ($63 USD) fine and a restriction of no free landing visas for one year from today. So unless I want to pay for a visitor visa, I can’t come back for a year, oops. I tried to correct the problem ahead of time but it would’ve cost me more to change my flight than to pay the fine. Oh well.

I’ll come back one day Taiwan, just not for another year. See my pictures here.

The days are long, and start at 6-something with a shower; dancing warm-up follows at 7:20, then breakfast, classroom teaching, activities, and situational teaching. Next is lunch, more situational teaching, activities including chants and dancing and acting (being somewhat of an actor is helpful here). Dinner comes next at around 6 PM, followed by a meeting and then followed by an activity of some sort like dancing, or games, then there’s night snack before kids get ready for bed. By 10:00 PM all the kids are in their rooms and presumably in bed (of course they aren’t really, they’re watching TV quietly till midnight I’m sure). That gives the teachers and teaching assistants time to shower, relax and take care of their own business. If I actually went to bed at 10 like the kids did, I probably would be so tired, but like that would actually happen. I don’t think I’ve gone to sleep before midnight here, usually 12:30 – 1:00 AM.

To my surprise, the camp is actually still run by Taiwanese, and not an American (or other English speaking native), which baffles me. But, my guess is it comes down to money. A Taiwanese person will probably do it for a lot less than a foreigner would want to be paid. Coming here I see all kinds of ways I think the camp could be improved, like teaching materials (some are pretty bad), more western food (maybe it’s too expensive, they don’t know how to make it, or the kids wouldn’t eat it), and of course, logic. There’s something that the Asian culture seems to lack sometimes, and that’s logic. We could give the teachers and other staff rooms before the students, and allow them to stay there the entire 3 weeks instead of playing musical rooms every weekend. Yeah, it’s not a big deal to move rooms in a hotel, but why? It’s just a pain in the ass and makes everyone annoyed. We could also take care of business items before sitting down in the cafeteria and then wasting 15 minutes while all the food gets cold. Most importantly, I’m gonna be very angry next time someone comes to ask me to check out of my room at 9:00 AM on my day off, I want to sleep and there are 30 other empty rooms you can clean and rent to guests, kindly fuck off. This time I was only annoyed and told them “no, I’m sleeping, maybe lunch time”, next time I won’t be so nice.

Overall, I don’t mind it. It’s good experience, Taiwan is nice, I’ve made some new friends, the kids love me, I get paid decently and while I’m here at camp I don’t really have to spend a dime. So while It might not be ideal, it’s not bad at all.

It all started with getting my visa, which will allow me to come back to China after my month-long stint in Taiwan. I was able to get all my papers in order for that, or so I thought, but when I went to my visa appointment I was told that my new school, Xi’an International University (XAIU) was unable to get my Foreign Expert Card on time, so it would be submitted late. This led to my visa maybe being ready by Friday (the day that I leave), well that just leaves one other thing until the last minute.

I still need to be paid by SUST, desposit that money in the bank, submit my grade sheets, make sure everything is moved out of my apartment, move a good portion of my stuff to XAIU, leave a few things in my colleague’s apartment, and finally say good bye to quite a few people before going to the airport. It all sounded easily doable, but when the visa office, and the financial office at SUST decide to delay until Friday afternoon, things start to get a bit stressful.

Fortunately, everything seemed to workout, albeit with a lot of stress involved. There was a constant drizzle falling from the sky as I arrived at the Xianyang airport, a couple hours before my flight. I hoped this wouldn’t delay my flight too much, waiting for your flight for 45 minutes is already boring enough. Well, once again, a stroke of bad luck, my flight to Shanghai was delayed for 6 hours! Instead of leaving at 8:00 PM, we left at nearly 2:00 AM! I was sorta lucky that I had an all night layover in Shanghai, otherwise every other flight would have been messed up. On the plus side, Shanghai Airlines handed out 200 RMB to every passenger on that flight to Shanghai to apologize for the lengthy delay, bringing my flight ticket down to only 480 RMB (~$70)! You’d never seen an American airline company handing out cash like that!

Upon arrival in Shanghai at nearly 4:00 AM, I was welcomed to an empty airport. I looked for the airport hotel I had heard about, a decent and relatively cheap hotel right in the airport, which I would have gladly paid for the night for, if I had arrived at 9:30 PM when I was expected to. But now it was 4:00 AM and I had about 5 hours before I should grab a quick breakfast and be on my way to the gate for my next flight. So I simply asked the hotel for their hourly rate (a very common thing in China), and was told that they could only rent me a room if I paid the full night price of 500 RMB. We argued for a bit, me telling them that the night was nearly over and I wouldn’t pay 100 RMB per hour for a hotel room, them telling me that they “couldn’t” and that hourly room rates didn’t start until 9:00 AM. Often in China, getting what you want just takes a little bit of work by convincing them they can do what you want. Well this couple front desk attendants were particularly obstonant, resulting in a loss. I made them an offer of money, they could have made some money off of me, but instead the refused to budge and I said fine, I can spend a few hours surfing the internet in 24 hour Burger King.

When checking in for my flight from Shanghai > Hong Kong > Taipei, I was told that I would have to be quick because technically my flight tickets were against their rules of at least a 70 minute layover between flights. My layover between Hong Kong to Taipei was 60 minutes. This wouldn’t have been so bad if flights could leave on time, but Shanghai to Hong Kong was delayed by 45 minutes, I was sure I wouldn’t have enough time to make it onto my flight to Taipei. So I consulted with the agents at my gate, they did a little searching and told me that all the flights to Taipei were full so I would have to wait until I arrived in Hong Kong and possibly fly standby. Not a great option considering I’m supposed to be picked up at the airport, but perhaps my only option. Upon arriving in Hong Kong I hurried off the plane, prepared to find a departues board and start sprinting towards my gate. To my surprise I found a young and tiny Asian woman holding a board with Burkle/ShanePaul on it. “That’s me”, I told her. She then told me, we’ve got 15 minutes to get to the other side of the terminal, we’ll have to run. So this ticket agent takes off running in her heeled shoes, I could keep up, but damn if I wasn’t impressed, she was no slouch in her ticket agent outfit. We arrived at the check-in counter just in time for me to check-in to my flight, though they informed me that more than likely the gap was too short for my luggage to get on the plane so I’d have to check with the lost luggage counter in Taipei. Fantastic, that was just icing on the cake.

The flight to Taipei was very nice, and despite being the absolute last peson to check-in for the flight, I still had a good aisle seat rather than the terrible, middle-of-the-row seats. The A330 was actually pretty comfortable and had nice video-on-demand screens, unfortunately the flight was too short to finish the movie I had been watching. Upon arriving in Taipei and getting my 30 day visa I went to look for my luggage. The luggage was coming up from, what was presumably the basement, like a magical geyser spitting out gray and black boxes instead of water. There on the conveyor belt was a wooden board with English words on it,

“MISSED LUGGAGE CONNECTION

BURKLE/SHANEPAUL”

This confirmed that my luggage hadn’t made it on the plane, so I went to have a chat with the luggage service counter. They asked me to fill out a form or two, and they then took down my information. Then they asked “where are you staying?”, to which I replied, “I really don’t know”. A couple phone calls later and they had most of the information they’d need. The friendly luggage agent then asked me to check the carousel one more time for my bag, just to make sure. I strode to the carousel  expecting to see boxes of every shape, size and color, but nothing belonging to me. Lo and behold, the 2nd bag I see, looks an awful lot like mine, a quick weight check and glance over and I know it’s mine. All the fuss for nothing, my bag is right here!

Despite the time-crunch, it seemed that my flight from Hong Kong to Taipei had been successful all the way around.

So why am I leaving? Where am I going?

Well the first portion of my summer plan is Taiwan. At the recommendation of a colleague, I’ll be taking a summer camp position with American Language Village for about 4 weeks in Taipei, Taiwan. I’m pretty excited about this because I’ve heard good things about teaching in Taiwan, and how the atmosphere and nightlife is “the way China should be”. I don’t know if these things are true, but I figure 4 weeks is enough time to find out for myself. Also, I think I’ll be more comfortable in Taiwan than any other asian countries (besides China), because they too speak Mandarin and use almost the same writing style (albeit traditional instead of the Chinese simplified hanzi). So I’ll be able to speak a bit, read a few things, and that means a lot. After the summer camp concludes, I’ll have another 5 days or so to travel wherever I care to, so hopefully I’ll be able to see the southern end of the island as well.

When I return to mainland China I plan to meet up with Marina in Shanghai, and see one of the most famous Chinese cities, that I’ve never been to. I’m especially looking forward to attending the Shanghai 2010 World Expo and seeing the amazing pavillions built just for the expo. Hopefully I can avoid standing in lines for multiple hours! From Shanghai we’ll see a few other things in the area, perhaps Nanjing, Yangshuo, Guilin, and other places in the southeast of China; before heading back to, what I’ve referred to as “home” for the last 10 months, Xi’an.

Next school year I’ll be starting a position at Xi’an International University, in the southwest part of Xi’an. This school is not really any better than SUST, in fact, students would tell me it’s not as good of a school (as far as rankings are concerned). But a good school for them doesn’t necessarily mean a good school for me. The main reason I decided to move to XAIU is that there are Chinese classes available to the foreign teachers. This is what I’ve wanted, I want to study Chinese, I want to be much better, and I want to read better. But without an organized class, it’s difficult to simply learn on my own, no matter how much help I have from friends. I just need some structure to go along with it, at least until I’m a bit more fluent. The school does have a better location in Xi’an, and much nicer teacher apartments, but those were simply icing on the cake. I’m making this move to continue experiencing new things, and to further my own education.

I never realized how hard it would be to meet up with people without having mobile phones. Upon arriving in Seoul I couldn’t contact anyone unless I found a wifi  hotspot. No phone service and no one to call. Fortunately, my travel buddies and I are rather tech savvy, and carry smartphones around with us, allowing us to email each other or leave messages on Google Voice. That made meeting up in the airport extremely easy.

After meeting up with Cody and Dan, we went looking for somewhere to eat. Dan, being pretty hungover needed to stop a few times to vomit, so in the meanwhile Cody and I could figure out where the hell we were trying to go. Upon arriving at our intended station (which we pretty much just picked because it was a big transfer station, and no other reason) we found a nice seafood shop just outside the subway entrance. It was something I’d never experienced before, they put our shoes in tiny little shoe lockers, we sat on the floor at foot-high tables, and then it hit me. How do I order? I know absolutely no Korean. At least in Chinese I can ask for a few things and read a few things on the menu. Here I’m screwed. Fortunately, world-traveler Dan took charge and pointed to something on the menu, guess we were eating whatever that was.

The brought us the food, it was octopus…. cold octopus….. cold, still moving octopus. The tentacles on the plate just squirmed like they were desperately trying to stick to anything they could find. The nice waitress, motioned to us to dip them in the Kimchi (spicy) sauce and vinegar mix and just eat them. We did, and honestly, they tasted pretty good! Though I did have strange thoughts going through my mind about this semi-alive creature inside my stomach. But I assured myself that my stomach acid would kill it pretty quickly, at least I hoped so.

Wandering around Seoul involved a lot of getting lost, eating random food of which we had no idea what it was, and buying booze from the 7-11. After spending most of the first day looking for a place to stay and then settling on a crappy hotel, we finally found a nice place to stay. The Open Guesthouse was run by some pretty cool guys, and they were more than willing to help us get around, and set up a DMZ tour for us. The three of us were happy to have found the place. There was always things going on around there; drinking on the back patio, korean barbecue in the evening, and a korean TV drama shooting on location during the day!

The first couple days involved mostly sight seeing, Namsam Park, the North Seoul Tower, and a half day at the Korean DMZ (the area between North and South Korea).

The DMZ was probably the most interesting part of the trip, it was the closest that I’ll probably ever be to North Korea unless I somehow manage to make a trip there, which I’ve heard can be a challenge. It was so close I could see it with my own unaided eyes, and with the help of binoculars I could see North Korean soldiers and vehicles on the border. Knowing how secretive the North Koreans are, it was very cool. During the trip it became pretty clear that South Koreans seem to think and hope that the two countries will be reunited sooner than later, they’ve built train stations, and border crossing stations all over, and they simply sit there, empty and unused except for tourists to visit. The tour also included a tunnel which was evidenced, by drill bit marks, to be dug by the North more than 20 years ago as a way to invade the south. The north of course denied them, and then says they were mining for coal. Too bad the area doesn’t contain any coal.

While the DMZ was very cool, it was a little more touristy than I had anticipated, but I shouldn’t complain, it seems that everyone I talked to about going to Korea asked me “are you going to go to the DMZ?” So apparently it’s a popular destination.

I will say there were some things I really enjoyed about Seoul:

• the bar and club district was pretty awesome, especially just chilling out and drinking beer in front of the 7-11, that’s entertaining in itself
• the bars and clubs were actually open all night, and the nightlife on the streets didn’t die out by 12:00AM like it seems to here in Xi’an
• it’s easier to find the western stuff one might miss, but that’s probably due to the presence of the US military base in Seoul
• Korean girls are beautiful (however, I don’t think they’re anymore beautiful than Chinese girls, they just dress sexier because Seoul is very westernized)

As great as the vacations are, I’m always happy to be back in Xi’an where I really feel at home. See more pictures of the trip here.