Chapter I: The Great Chinese Building Boom - Xining, China

April 21 - that's the day I boarded a plane for the mainland.  The trip to Western China would take about 7 hours worth of travel from Taipei to Shanghai, Shanghai to Lanzhou and then Lanzhou by bus to Xining, the largest city in the Western Chinese province of Qinghai.  Our tour consists of 21 Taiwanese citizens - I am by far the youngest.  I am accompanied by my dad and my 2nd uncle.  


Landing in Lanzhou, we're rushed off to dinner where we were treated to Huang He (Yellow River brand) beer.  As a beer lover, I wouldn't say that this would top any list of beers I would ask for even if it was the only option at a restaurant.  Unfortunately, this beer appears multiple times as we travelled through Western China.

Horses are a big part of Western Chinese culture.  Here's a statue of a horse outside Lanzhou airport.

Xining (pronounced She-ning), has a history going back 2100 years and was a pivotal part of the Silk Road.  It also has the notoriety of being the 2nd worst air polluted cities in China (even worse than Beijing).  And it's pretty clear why it gets this distinction - when you stare out at the horizon in the morning, you can barely make out the skyline.


The reason we're in Xining is two fold.  The first, is for the attraction of the city itself.  Western China's landscapes have been carved out by thousands of years of wind, sand and water erosion.  The scenery is as if they were painted on canvas; awe-inspiring, breathtaking views that no camera could capture with justice (more on that later in this post).  The second reason, was for pure health reasons.  In venturing to Tibet, which at it's lowest point is still around 2500KM above sea level, one must adjust slowly to the altitude or suffer the consequences.  Our tour guide's plan was to adjust us to the altitude by going through China, climbing higher and higher as we head into Tibet.


The city is an odd place - a construction boom is visible everywhere you go, the number of cranes seem to outnumber the number of vehicles on the street, and that says something for a place that is in a constant traffic jam.  The building boom is a symbol of China's wealth and ability to mobilize a workforce to build houses for ghosts.  Why I say that is that when you pass by completed buildings, there are no occupants.  One would think that with the population of China, it wouldn't be hard to find occupants for these dwellings.  Well, not when the large majority of the population of Western China lives below the poverty line and each of these places cost more than any amount of money one of these people would earn in a lifetime.  The apartment blocks are cookie cutter and a throwback to 1970s Russian Communist architecture.  If you disagree, let me show you some exhibits.

How inspiring...it's like a GAP commercial for buildings.

All these buildings are done...and empty.

Xining is also the cultural merging of three main groups - the majority Han Chinese, the minority Muslim Chinese and the even smaller minority Tibetans that are relegated to the outskirts of the cities.  The groups live a strange co-existance.  Observing out the bus window, the groups stuck with their own kind, no mixing or intermingling.  Store signs are all in Simplified Chinese, with certain stores displaying Arabic or Tibetan, depending on which minority group owned that store.


Our tour guide is named Bai Ling (like the infamous Chinese movie actress, who tried to break out into North American cinema, but only ended up on Celebrity Rehab).  She is a spritely girl, who is only 22 years old - a veteran in the Chinese tour guide industry.  She started in the tourism industry when she was 16 - gotta give it to the Chinese for putting their youth to work ASAP.  She's incredibly informative, patient and speaks Mandarin without a sharp mainlander accent.  She takes us to three key sights near Xining:


- Guide (pronounced Gwei De) National Geological Park
- Bird Island Sanctuary
- Xining's highest point at 3820KMs above sea level


Guide National Geological Park was recently made a national heritage site in 1997.  The park is surrounded by walls of rock and clay, carved and chiseled by centuries of wind, water and sand erosion.  Everywhere you turned, there was a photo opportunity.  In fact, I wished I had more time to set up a chair, and aisle, a canvas and a paint set, and have a day to sit, sip a cup of tea and paint like it was my job.  In the centre of the park sits a green lake with a pagoda that serves as a museum for the Guide area.  As an interesting sidenote, the 2011 World Rock Climbing championships were held here.  I'll let the photos speak for themselves.

The hiking trail through the park.

The green lake with the Pagoda Museum.

Lone tree in the park.

Bird Island Sanctuary is located near Qinghai Lake, one of the largest lakes in Asia (about 16 times the size of Singapore), was another pitstop in our two days near Xining.  While there is a stunning view of the lake, and an island that is populated by Comurant birds that use it for nesting, there wasn't much to see and we were back on the bus within 1/2 hour.  Nonetheless, there are some cool pictures.

Qinghai Lake

Me with Comurant Island in the background.

Finally, we went to the highest point in Xining, about 3820KM above sea level.  Tibetans actually come to this spot and throw prayers papers out the windows, I know this because our bus was peppered with a healthy dose of these prayer papers as we drove up to the lookout point.  This lookout is only accessible by one road, which is fine, until there's a car accident.  We experienced this as a truck made too sharp of a turn at a high speed and resulted in a 4 1/2 hour jam on both sides.  It was quite the spectacle - the police standing around not doing anything, Chinese drivers doing what all Chinese do in a crowded situation by trying to force their way to the front, and maintenance workers focused more on their smoke breaks than getting the truck off the road.  Here are some photos:

Truck down.

Everyone just standing around.

Everyone is just trying to squeeze to the front.

Mountains from lookout point.

My dad doing his best "I Dream of Jeannie" impression at 3820KM above sea level.

China was certainly a test of my patience.  Smoking was acceptable indoors, common courtesy was left by the wayside, lining up was unheard of (people just rushed) and well, spitting, excuse me, horking, was acceptable sidewalk behaviour.  My tolerance for the Chinese was working itself up to a point when I had to remind myself that I am a guest in their home and that I have to grin and bear it.  This was my first test in a long series of trials and challenges set up to try my patience.  Add to that the beginning of a cold, this short visit to Xining was proving to not be the best first impression of China.  My dad also shared this view - while he's travelled to the mainland several times on trips before, he has have very few nice things to say about Chinese tourists.  And boy, were we about to encounter the motherload when venturing to Lhasa.


I also shared some small moments of bonding with my dad over photography (probably the very few moments before we started getting nitpicky with each other's photography skills).  He still doesn't understand why I have to take jumping photos whereever I go.


As for the song that helped me on this leg of the journey, for this leg of the journey, I picked "Human" by The Killers.  Not only did their music video, shot in Nevada, look like the landscape of Guide, but the lyrics covered some of the questions I was asking myself during this first part of the trip including:


"Close your eyes, clear your heart, cut the cord."
"Will your system be alright, when you dream of home tonight?"
"I'm on my knees, looking for the answer.  Are we human?  Or are we dancer?"


Now there are a lot of interpretations of this song's lyrics from a discourse regarding if we are still what we think we are as organic living beings or programmed by technology "dancers" to the argument that none of it makes any sense at all.  The way that this song spoke to me, besides having a wicked ass melody for long road trips, is to go and find your escape from what has made you complacent in life.  Are we meant to just live a life or are we meant to experience through actions ("the dance") all our own?  Letting go of expectations, wiping out pre-concieved notions and embracing what you're there to experience should be the mantra of any traveller and I was struggling to find that while starting off my journey.  In fact, there was a sense of homesickness when I encountered my first squat toilet in a restuarant in Xining, and I hadn't even experienced the worst of it.  If I wanted to make the best of my trip, I needed to change my attitude quickly, and this song was a great reminder of that.

Next, I'll take you on my 24 hour ride on the Lhasa Express.  Train travel - it's fun once.  You'll likely never want to do it again.

Introduction to Volume I - Tibet, China - Patience is a Virtue AKA 7 Days (x2) in Tibet

I've never been to mainland China ever in my life.  The fact that I have not stepped foot on my ancestral homeland for over 28 years of my life had always bugged me, especially since my brother got to go before I did.  It isn't a competitive thing with my brother, it's just that he's never liked to travel and the fact that he got to go somewhere before I did, irked me.  Okay, maybe it is a competitive thing.

My brother, grandmother and grandmother's brother's son (Uncle Once Removed?) in 2006.
See how he's so cool and non-chalant about being in Shanghai?  Grrr... (PS - Alex, I'm just kidding)

When I decided to quit my job, I called my dad to let him know that I wanted to spend some time in Taiwan.  He informed me that him and 20 of his traveling companions (yes, they have a tourist group that always travel to the mainland together) wanted to go to Tibet, and asked if I wanted to come.  I don't think there was a second of thought between the time I read the line, "Did you want to come?" and typing in the words, "Fuck yea, I do."  Please note, my dad then returned with an email that said: "What is this 'fuck'?"

The two sides of my family have two very different relationships with the mainland.  First my mom's side of the family.  My grandfather and grandmother were both staunch Shanghainese.  Their accents and their switching of Mandarin Chinese into Shanghainese during conversations gave their background away to anyone familiar with China.  My grandfather, from what I understand, grew up orphaned; my grandmother, was forced to leave elementary school very early to help her family earn income by sewing garments.  They married, had my uncle, and escaped to Taiwan during the Chinese Civil War, where they had my aunt, then my mom.  

Above is a picture of my grandmother and my great aunt (her younger sister).
In 2006, they met for the first time since 1949, when my grandmother was exiled to Taiwan and the remainder of her family was stuck on the mainland with the Communists.  I cannot imagine not seeing my brother for almost 60 years. This is what war does to families.

My dad's side of the family originally came from Fujian province in China.  Their ancestors had moved across the Taiwan strait centuries ago and had become the 2nd group of native Taiwanese (after the aboriginal groups) to settle on the island - think of them as the Pilgrim equivalents of Asia.  They lived through Japanese occupation of the island.  Surprisingly, most elderly Taiwanese you encounter have fond memories of the Japanese as the Japanese were responsible for building a lot of the infrastructure and educational institutions on the island.  This exposed a generation of Taiwanese (my grandparent's generation) to higher education, which planted the seeds of the importance of being educated in future Taiwanese generations.  This second group of Taiwanese did not harbour the same feelings for the Kuomingtang government that landed in 1949 (the 3rd group) - the divisions between the two groups led to the current state of Taiwanese politics, with the 2nd group making up the Independence Green party movement and the 3rd group supporting the KMT government and longing for reunification with the mainland.

With these roots, I had always been curious to see what it was like on the Mainland, having been to Taiwan so many times in my 20s.  Some preconceived notions had already formed including:

- there's going to be a lot of people (this turned out to be very true)
- it's going to be dirty and unsanitary (this was mostly driven by my dad's paranoia and my own OCD tendencies)
- there's going to be a lot of pollution (this was true in the Chinese cities, but less so in Tibet, however, the effects of climate change were quite visible)
- people had no issues with displaying bodily functions (yea - this was sadly true)

Now before I move on in my blog, I know that there will be those people offended that I refer to Tibet as separate from China.  I can see how it can be as offensive to the Chinese as if outsiders started calling Quebec a separate country when referring to Canada.  Please understand that it is just easier to reference Tibet as Tibet, and not as Tibet, China and that nothing should be taken as a political statement.

Our fourteen trip in China and Tibet took us through to both ends of the socio-economic spectrum.  We first saw a city in Western China called Xining - a city going through a growth spurt like every other city in the Chinese interior.  Hundreds of buildings were being constructed, and infrastructure projects dotted the landscape.  The city and the Qinghai region is also the intersection of three cultures - the dominant Han Chinese, the minority Muslim Chinese and then the Tibetan, who dwell on the outskirts of the city.  Outside of Xining, the landscape is the main tourist attractions - years of soil, wind and water erosion have carved the mountain sides and the red clay terrain into works of art.

Near Xining, China - At Gui-de National Geological Park.  The wind and sand have carved the red clay terrain into any artist's canvas inspiration.

From Xining, we headed towards Lhasa on an overnight train called the Lhasa Express.  This train has two main lines - the Beijing -> Lhasa line and the Shanghai -> Lhasa line.  Both mainly serve the thousands of migrant workers who go to the big cities to look for work, then there is the small minority of travellers who want to experience life on the train.  My main lesson here was that while it was nice to experience once, it inspires you to work hard and earn the money for a plane ticket.  There's really nothing romantic about train travel - especially using a squat toilet on a moving train (more on that in my Lhasa Express blog post).

We arrived in Lhasa on Wednesday, April 25 but it seemed like any weekend, as the pace of life in Tibet is so laid back.  It has to be - any activity that requires you to take copious amount of oxygen would likely result in you fainting at this altitude.  I'll admit, I had trouble at some points - and I'm in pretty good shape.

Lhasa, like the rest of Tibet was magical.  Faith and spirituality was everywhere - devout Buddhists were everywhere and like the Vatican, they made their pilgrimage to this, one of the holiest places in Buddhism and showed their devotion through filling temple coffers with renminbis (China's currency) and praying along the 3 km prayer route around Lhasa.  Devotees were on their knees, crawling and praying on this route - my dad's only thought here was - "wow, that's so unsanitary."

Near Jongkar Temple - Devotees repeated this prayer action 1,000 times a day.  Stand, Kneel, Hands & Head to the Ground and repeat.  

We ventured out of Lhasa for about a week, going to cities like Gyangtse, Shigatse, Gonggar, Dingri and Everest Base Camp (on the Tibet side).  Like Xining, the landscape was the tourist attraction here.  I don't know how many photos I have of mountains, lakes, rivers, flowers - it was a nature explosion on my SD card.  Most of them had to be deleted as the 4x4 we were in wasn't great at helping the focus on my camera.  Bad roads, fast speeds, altitude adjustment and a head cold did not make for a happy Terence for a couple of days, and my only cure was to stare out the window and appreciate what it was I was looking at.

Near Gonggar, Tibet - A picture like it was a painting.

We ended our trip in Shanghai, China, the economic heart of China.  A city like no other I've seen in the world.  It's like a New York that sprang up overnight, in fact, it was.  Going to the birthplace of my mother's parents was surreal - it felt like my grandmother was with me, guiding me through the city as if she was saying, "Oh my, this city has changed."

This trip to Tibet and China helped me in many ways, which I will elaborate on in future posts.  I realized a few things about myself:

- I need to slow down and appreciate the things around me.  Patience has never been a forte of mine, and I had to learn to mellow down in a place where everything was mellow.
- I need to be nicer to my dad.  I am in fact, a terrible son.  I am rude, abrupt and inconsiderate of his feelings.  Years of trying to hate him for my parents divorce certainly did a number on me.  I realized I needed to channel that anger into figuring out how to connect with him again, and this was certainly a great opportunity to do it.
- I need to put the camera down and just appreciate the scenery without the lens in the way.  
- The only faith I need in my life is to live a good life.  I'm not meant to follow any major religion, even one as peaceful as Buddhism

This leads me to the song that I started with each day with while on this trip.  Affirmation is a song from the same titled album by Savage Garden, released in 1999.  In this song, there are statements that were like gems I found on this journey including:

"I believe your parents did the best job they knew how to do."
"I believe we place our happiness in other people's hands."
"I believe you don't know what you got until you say goodbye."

The first line obviously speaks to my relationship with my dad - he's never been there to parent because of the geographic distance between us, but I realized on this trip, no matter how much abuse I spew out at him, he still loves me.  It takes a real man to be able to love someone else so unconditionally that they put up with that kind of behaviour.

The second line speaks to my need in my teens and most of my 20s living up to people's expectations and what others thought of me.  Coming from a competitive university culture, my career was all about measuring up or being better than my counterparts and never really doing what it was that I wanted to do, to make me happy.  My decision to quit really was the start to taking that happiness back into my own hands.

The final line speaks to all the things I've taken for granted - especially my relationships.  I never appreciated what my mom did for me before she died (and never had a chance to say it to her).  I never had a chance to tell my grandmother what an inspiration she was to me for being an 80 year old uneducated widower who survived by herself in a country that was so foreign to her.  This line also focuses me to appreciate the places I have and will travel to - to remember why you were there rather than trying to remember them later through photographs.

It's an amazing song, and goes well with Tibet and its spirituality.  I now start everyday with this song.  It's my positive reinforcement.  Enjoy the song below - and enjoy the throwback to 90's clothing.

A nomad in Asia - AKA 4.5 weeks

I've been trying to settle my restless mind over the past couple of days and it has been close to impossible.  Having leapt off the plane on Thursday, so joyous to be home in Taipei, it has been non-stop craziness ever since my return from four and a half weeks in Asia.  I've finally had the chance to sort through 2500+ photos, read through my scribbles in my travel journal and collect my thoughts on how I want to convey to all of you my amazing 33 day journey.

The Petronas Towers, Kuala Lampur, Malaysia - The Malaysian government built these towers then sell it to $1.2 billion to Petronas.  Cha-ching.

For those of you who don't know, I spent two weeks in China and Tibet with my dad, my uncle and 20 other Taiwanese tourists, a week in Vietnam, a week in Singapore and four days in Malaysia.  Each of these destinations offered a different taste of Asia, and interesting learnings on life, history, culture and most importantly, food.  In a nutshell:

Tibet was serene but guarded.
Vietnam was chaotic but laid back.
Singapore was perfection but orchestrated.
Malaysia was cultured but lacked focus.

Near Gongar, Tibet - A country with spectacular visuals that would make any artist salivate at the opportunity for inspiration.

I plan on posting my experiences in four parts - each country gets its own volume of collective blogs, and each country has my observances of culture, people and personal revelations.  In a sense, I had a series of Eat, Pray, Love moments that allowed me to appreciate why I made the decision to take the year off.  In each of these "chapters," not only will include funny and fascinating tidbits of each of the destinations, but also a self-discovery insight, an "aha!" moment if you will, and also the song that best matched with my mood that day.  (Thank God for my iPod - it came in handy when trying to find the right songs to match my experiences.

Beautiful Halong Bay, Vietnam - This rock is famous and is featured on their 20,000 Dong (20,000 Viet Dong is equal to $1USD.)

Here's an overview of what you can have to look forward to (Note: as I continue to update, each of these chapters will have a link to their corresponding blog entry once it has been written.):

Volume I - Tibet, China - Patience is a Virtue AKA 7 Days (x2) in Tibet

Chapter I - The Great Chinese Building Boom - Xining, China
Chapter II - The Lhasa Express - A Day with the Train
Chapter III - Lhasa - Temples, Incense, Praying...Oh my!
Chapter IV - Me and my Dad (pt. 2)
Chapter V - Five Days in a 4x4 - Off to Everest Base Camp
Chapter VI - Going, going... Gonggar
Chapter VII - On the other end of the spectrum, Shanghai

Near Gonggar, Tibet - First Palace (aptly named as it was the first palace in Tibet) which overlooks the fertile Lhasa valley below.

Volume II - Vietnam - Organic Chaos AKA Good Morning Vietnam!

Chapter I - Hanoi, the crazy Asian cousin of romantic Europe
Chapter II - Majestic Halong Bay
Chapter III - Beach Bum in Nha Trang
Chapter IV - Saigon pt 1 - Mekong Delta and CuChi Tunnels
Chapter V - Saigon pt 2 - Vietnam's history and Vietnam's healing

St. James' Cathedral in Hanoi, Vietnam

Volume III - Singapore - Perfectly Wrapped AKA One Hot Sweaty Mess

Chapter I - Museum Visits for the Culture and Air Conditioning
Chapter II - Advertising People Love Drinking...ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD
Chapter III - Malls, Malls, Malls
Chapter IV - A Day at the Zoo - Hello inner 5 year old child
Chapter V - Relaxation - Food, Pools and Partying

The Singapore Skyline

Volume IV - Malaysia - Many Worlds in a Peninsula AKA Rain, Rain, Go Away

Chapter 1 - Kuala Lampur - Big City, Big Stomach
Chapter 2 - Malacca - Not a Swear Word
Chapter 3 - Wrapping Up a Whirlwind

Little Amsterdam Channel, Malacca, Malaysia

So I hope you'll come on this digital journey with me as I revisit all of my favourite memories and I hope you'll enjoy my commentary and insights.