Tiger Leaping Gorge

THERE'S a sense of euphoria that comes with months of travel, I've decided.

Great peaks of complete and utter contentment, serenity and calm in between brief lulls of sometime stress and occasional catastrophe - like when your only bank card expires (!)

But all is well again on a week like this week, in southern China, when the sky is continually blue and you're soaking up one of the most spectacular landscapes in the world, forgetting all sense of time.

Trekking Tiger Leaping Gorge, a two hour drive from Lijiang in the Yunnan province, is an absolute must-do for anybody travelling China. It's a magnificent walk, reaching heights of about 2670m above sea level, with stunning views across craggy cliff faces and upwards to snow-capped mountains, giving way to a continual swoosh of rapids racing through the valley.

It's also a must-do that should be done fairly soon, as the Chinese government is planning to build numerous dams surrounding the gorge for electricity purposes. Waters would rise 1200m, flooding half of the gorge as well as the nearby town, Qiaotou.

(Incidentally, every day during our hike there were mysterious loud cracking explosions, which sounded like rolling thunder, as though some testing was already in place.)

The hike begins at Qiaotou, where we dropped our packs off at the Gorged Tiger Cafe (great name, no?) run by a very eccentric Australian woman - in her 50s, I reckon - who's lived there for about nine years and favours hot pants. She was very helpful, giving us a map and some handy hints, as well as two chocolate and banana muffins, a cup of tea and hot chocolate before we headed off.

It was about lunchtime, the track was hot and dusty. We walked past dry corn fields, stepped paddy fields and great blossoming bushes of marijuana, sprouting wild from the trackside much to the excitement of some backpackers who took to them with shears and plastic bags.

We were feeling upbeat, like hardy backpackers alone on the side of a mountain.

We walked just two hours of the eight-hour hike on our first day, preferring to sit in the sun for the rest of the afternoon, reading books in one of the most delightful courtyards at Naxi Family Guesthouse.

The guesthouse is smack bang in the middle of the path, with open verandahs bordering the courtyard. Dried corn hangs like a picture frame on one side, and vines dotted with purple flowers on another.

About AUD$2.20 gets you a bed with a breathtaking view overlooking the gorge. Less than AUD$1 gets you most dishes on the menu and a mug of green tea to sip on as you think about how lucky you are not to be in Korea! Not to be working! To be travelling! To be so relaxed you can't remember what day it is! And you love it!

Aaaaaah.

The following day we were feeling rather spritely, so we set off early and ended up walking the remaining six-and-a-half hours. The first two hours - up what's called 'the 28 bends' - was a real slog. It simply went straight up, winding through tight corners, with no respite.

Later on the track became narrow at parts, dropping off right beside us. We would head into a green forested section, with dense trees overhead, and then emerge on the steep naked mountainside with sprawling views up and down the gorge.

For lunch we stopped at one of the handful of guesthouses along the way - luxurious hiking, this is - called Tea Horse Guesthouse, where we hungrily downed a dish of stirfried chicken, cucumber, peanuts and chilli, and mixed vegetables with rice.

It was a deliriously happy feeling walking along, feeling quite weightless with no worries or agendas (except that hopefully the Commonwealth Bank had sent out our new visa pin number and bank card!)

After such a glorious two days we decided to stay two nights at the end of the trail, at Sean's Guesthouse, which was directly opposite an enormous, sheer rock face.

It was that feeling of bliss once again. We relaxed. We slept in. We did nothing more than read books, ponder the menu and rub our weary muscles.

A Beijing breakfast

WHOEVER thought of stuffing fried bread in pocket bread for breakfast is one odd bod. Talk about a double whammy fat/carb overload.

Beijingers sure do love their breakfast, though as we discovered the early bird gets the best choice of fried goods.
Not really one I could quite get my head around - the bread inside bread special - but one we happily munched on before hiring bicycles for a lazy shmooze around the "hutong" alleyways in Qianmen, not far from Tiannamen Square, after we returned from Mongolia.

This little breakfast outfit was tres popular with locals bustling past from the nearby market.
They would grab half a dozen, stuff them in a plastic bag and hurry home.

The cooks were a rather solemn pair. The young boy would roll out a thin sheet of dough and dump it in a steel barrel of sizzling oil where it would quickly expand to a golden oily crisp.


The older fellow would then grab a warm unleavened flat bread, rip it open with his hands and stuff a fried bread inside.
Nothing else. That was just it. Carby goodness, no sweetness; just the taste of crispy oil offset by a bowl of warm soy milk.

There's something about huddling on the side of an alleyway - barely enough room for the odd passing truck to squeeze past - and hunkering down on a carby breakfast in the cold wind.

Da Yun Dumpling

Glass noodles with minced pork; cubed tofu with chilli.

I'M dipping into the recesses of my memory - and drafts - to bring you this post from a few weeks ago, at Qingdao.

Unfortunately Beijing has bridled my blogging enthusiasm as no computers can upload photos (no CD outlets or USB ports). Aaaagrh!
Nevertheless, I found these photos in the backlogs and am determined to trudge on.
Plus, this particular eatery was one of our favourites so it's nice that it won't be neglected.

Da Yun Dumpling was a lovely little find about two streets back from the waterfront at Qingdao's main beach.
Their specialty - of course - was dumplings, of which they had about 30 varieties, including such combinations as eggplant and pork, field mushroom and tofu, and spinnach and egg.
They also had a nice array of non-dumpling dishes, with an English menu as well. Oh yes, how we grew to love Da Yun Dumpling.

Homestyle beancurd with garlic, mushrooms and capsicum; pork and eggplant dumplings.

On our first visit we got a little excited and over-ordered, much to the amusement of the staff, I'm sure, as we left half of our food on the table and rolled out of the shop clutching our bellies.

The spinnach and egg dumplings were divine - a touch bland, perhaps, but delicate and moist and generously filled within a thin noodle casing. An interesting discovery was that Chinese serve the water used to steam the dumplings as an accompanying soup. It tasted much like the starchy water leftover from cooking pasta.

Imagine slurping on your cooking water while eating spaghetti. Hmmm, not the best but oddly enough it did the job.

Spinnach and egg dumplings.

Sheets of beancurd with chilli and green capsicum.

One of my favourites was the bean curd strips. Sheets of thin bean curd cut to resemble noodles, then stirfried with chillies and capsicum. The texture itself was intriguing; very dry but nice and light.

Return visits featured stir-fried tofu, glass noodles with mince pork, Sichuan-style chicken with cubed cucumber, carrots and peanuts. Which brings me to boiled peanuts in this country. As a starter it's quite common to get a plate of boiled peanuts - in their shells - and green beans which you pop open.

Boiled peanuts taste so unlike peanuts, I would almost call them a bean. They're served cold, straight from a bucket where they soak in some kind of juicy mixture, which tastes faintly of aniseed. The peanuts expand to become soft and a touch chewy - like an undercooked kidney bean; completely losing their crunch and nuttiness.

Very strange but addictive and lots of fun as the juice spurts everywhere when you crack the shells open. A nice way to waste an hour in the late afternoon, chomping on beany peanuts and drinking Tsingtao on tiny eatery stools down the "hutong" alleyways.

Sichuan-style chicken with cucumber, carrot and peanuts.

Mongolia - part one

MONGOLIA: the land of mutton, yak’s curd biscuits and fermented mare’s milk.

Fodder for a bizarre food blog entry – yes – but how much can one take of mutton, stodgy rice, absurd dough strips parading as noodles and stale bread for lunch?
Exactly 14 days is how long, and not a minute more, I reckon. (On returning from the wilderness we fled to a Korean restaurant in Ulaanbaatar (UB) for dinner, to be comforted by our old staples – bibimbap and kimchi jjigae. Aaaah. Heaven).

A post on Mongol food is sure to be precise. Perhaps I could say it’s all about fatty mutton and end it there.
But then I would be forgetting all the other goodies mentioned above, wouldn’t I?
Because Monoglians are traditionally a nomadic people, they are never in one place long enough to grow fruit or vegetables. While some rice, pasta, and noodles have now been introduced in their diet – especially for families who are no longer nomadic – meals are still based around mutton and also dairy from their livestock. So that includes milk, yogurt and cream from sheep, horses and yaks.

(And yes, I have no idea how they don’t get scurvy.)

Already reeling from a few scary meals in the capital UB before our trip even began, our stomachs were not prepared for an onslaught of mutton.
I’d read stories of nomads feasting on boiled sheep’s parts fished from a bucket for dinner, and while I was willing to have a go, I wasn’t so sure if 14 days of it – and a prolonged bout of traveller’s diarrhoea – was for me.

While meals of not much more than mutton is no doubt the case for many Mongolians, our meals were a slightly watered down version for the tourists, I’m sure. I didn’t mind, and it still gave me enough fodder for that bizarre food blog entry (or three) I was sure to write.

Dried yak's curd biscuits, pictured during our stay in the Gobi desert.

Our first foray into the food of the nomads was with a round of biscuits (not the ones pictured) made from dried yak’s curds, smeared with yak’s butter, and some fermented mare’s milk called “airag”.

Phew. Nothing could prepare the palate. Perhaps I should have been practicing how to accept their offerings graciously and then nibble like a mouse while keeping a smile plastered on my face.
After that first taste the biscuit – though small in size – seemed ginormous. Surely there was no way one person could eat their way through it and survive?

It was hard, dry and curdy – difficult to explain except to say if you left some off milk to dry in the bottom of a carton for a few days and then scraped it up and baked it, you might be halfway there.
But then of course it was yak’s milk, so you really wouldn’t have the full effect.
It was much more edible with a scoop of yak’s butter, which was a slightly sweet grainy brew, halfway between butter and cream – an overbeaten butter, perhaps.

The airag took things to a new level, though some in our group of six quite enjoyed it and had multiple glasses – partly due to the fact that each time they finished their glass, it was re-filled again and again.
Still with a grumbling stomach from UB, I managed only a small sip. It was a thin, watery milk with a sour, slightly fizzy tang that made your lips curl. The locals love it.

A little later was dinner, perhaps the scariest on our trip.
After sitting and staring at us for a while – and after we had made some stammering attempts to communicate with a phrasebook – the very inquisitive Mongolian lady cooked up a big pot of doughy strips with chunks of mutton and a few bits of potato. She also managed to sell us a couple old semi-dried fish caught from the nearby lake.

To call them noodles would be an insult to the Chinese, I think. They appeared to be simply flour and water rolled into a pancake and then chopped into strips to resemble noodles, but had none of the light, slippery texture of noodles. They were heavy and dry and incredibly bland. Each plateful weighed a tonne. It almost made me want some airag to wash it down with.

Lunch in a township was always the same. Keep in mind, everything with mutton.
There was goulash, “beefshteak”, mutton cutlet which was really just the same as beefshteak, a sad-looking wilted cabbage salad, steamed mutton dumplings (“bootz”) and deep-fried mutton pancakes (“kuurshuur”).

But that’s for part two.
I’m just about to run along to another Korean eatery (of which there are a lot of in UB) to quench my muttoned-out, stodgy-carbed-out appetite.

I think from now on I’ll just save the Mongolian food for the blog.

Edit: please check our Flickr badge, located on the right of your screen, for more Mongolia photos.

Beer in a bag

HELLO there! What's Wes laughing about?
Is it that a catheter-like bag of beer filled with froth and a straw poking out the side I see?
I think it is!

At the home of China's most popular brew, Tsingtao, we yesterday discovered beer in a bag.
It had us laughing for about half an hour, scored us a few bemused looks and a thumbs-up from a labourer passing by in his truck.

What isn't there to laugh about when you're drinking beer with a straw from a plastic bag?

Every corner store in Qingdao (the beer is the same name but with the original spelling) has steel kegs out the front and plastic bags nearby.
In the early 1900s Qingdao was under German administration, so Tsingtao is a German beer. The city itself still boasts a German influence - a lot of German architecture and of course, this German beer which, if you don't drink draft, gets served warm. Another reason for Tsingtao in a bag!

About AUD25c gets you a ridiculous pile of froth crowning what looks at first like a wee (ha!) bit of beer (Gramps needed to work on his pouring technique, Wes said) and a chance to test out any catheter jokes.

I like to call this set of photos, Chilling With Our Catheters.