Jeff Hopkins
Just another...observer
I lost my weight, then went on a China walkabout for two weeks.
During which I lost absolutely no weight.
Figures.
-
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Chlidonias Goes To Asia, part three: 2013 (2 Viewers)
- Thread starter Chlidonias
- Start date
I lost my weight, then went on a China walkabout for two weeks.
During which I lost absolutely no weight.
Figures.
Chlidonias
Well-known member
well my attempt to extend my flight to the 15 December went nowhere. Including the fee for the date change and the difference in the cost between the two flights, it would have cost me a whopping 2000 Yuan (NZ$400!!!!!!!!!!!!) to change the flight, which is twice what the original flight cost! So the tenth of December it is.
I have a train tomorrow to Guizhou and I will have a crack at seeing the Guizhou snub-nosed monkey. I *may* be able to squeeze in the white-headed langurs at Chongzuo but it seems unlikely. I'll see what happens.
In eleven days I will be in Malaysia. Then no more China.
I have a train tomorrow to Guizhou and I will have a crack at seeing the Guizhou snub-nosed monkey. I *may* be able to squeeze in the white-headed langurs at Chongzuo but it seems unlikely. I'll see what happens.
In eleven days I will be in Malaysia. Then no more China.
It never ceases to amaze me that if the customer wants to make a change it is either prohibitively expensive, or, not allowed. Yet, on the other hand, the airline can make changes irrespective of the impact. Of course, I accept that cheap tickets are sold on the basis of filling aircraft. However if the airline can change them at will there should be a little flexibility for customers. I've had to re-arrange schedules due to an airline making a change as I'm sure many others have.
Good luck with the last few days in China, looking forward to the reports.
Phil
Good luck with the last few days in China, looking forward to the reports.
Phil
Jeff Hopkins
Just another...observer
Not only is it about loading the planes but it's about counting on peoples plans changing at the last minute.
Chlidonias
Well-known member
I thought I should probably say that my idea of going to Japan has changed as well because China was more expensive than thought and Japan will just be too expensive on top of it. So Japan will be a stand-alone trip at some other point (unless some money falls into my pocket somehow).
So now I'll be spending a few weeks in Malaysia, maybe down to Singapore for a bit (for zoo stuff), then up to Thailand for a few months. With that in mind, I made a thread elsewhere asking about Bukit Fraser versus the Cameron Highlands (e.g. costs and mammals, which is better). See here http://www.birdforum.net/showthread.php?t=271797
So now I'll be spending a few weeks in Malaysia, maybe down to Singapore for a bit (for zoo stuff), then up to Thailand for a few months. With that in mind, I made a thread elsewhere asking about Bukit Fraser versus the Cameron Highlands (e.g. costs and mammals, which is better). See here http://www.birdforum.net/showthread.php?t=271797
Chlidonias
Well-known member
yes I was looking forward to Steller's sea eagle and flying squirrels and so on, but I'll get there some day.
Chlidonias
Well-known member
To get to Fanjing Shan (Mt. Fanjing), the one and only place where the Guizhou snub-nosed monkey lives, I first took a twelve and a half hour overnight train from Chengdu (the capital of Sichuan province) to Guiyang (the capital of Guizhou province). From there I had some directions written in my notebook on how to get to Fanjing Shan. I can't remember where I got the directions from but it was probably Lonely Planet because most of it was wrong! (Which is to say, the major points were correct but all the important details were not – such as might happen if, say, the person writing it had never actually been there). Still, I got there with no problems, first taking a six hour train ride from Guiyang to the smaller city of Yuping, followed by a one and a half hour bus ride to another small city called Tongren where I stayed overnight in a hotel by the bus station. The next morning I caught another bus to a town called Jiangkou about an hour from Tongren, and then another bus for another hour to the village of Heiwan and finally I was there!
Fanjing Shan is a major tourist attraction in its own right. There's an 8000-step stone staircase all the way to the summit, but if you're not feeling fit there's also a cablecar. I had a plan for seeing the snub-nosed monkeys and it was probably the feeblest monkey-finding plan that there has ever been. I had a photocopy of a scientific paper about the distribution of the snub-nosed monkeys on Fanjing Shan, the results of surveys undertaken in 2007 and 2008, which said they were found in four pockets. Most of these were not in areas accessible to tourists, as far as I could tell, but one had part of its distribution somewhere in the area of the cablecar. My plan was simply to take the cablecar to the top of the mountain and hope that there was a good view over the surrounding canopy from which to scan with my binoculars. Like I said, a pretty lame plan! And it turned out to not even be a workable plan!
I arrived in Heiwan about 11.30am, found a hotel, had some lunch, and then went to the entrance to the mountain. Fanjing Shan is actually a national park so there is an entrance fee and some great huge gates to stop any access outside of opening times (which put the kibosh on any planned spot-lighting!). The entrance fee was 90 Yuan (about NZ$18), and then there's a 20 Yuan shuttle which takes people the 9.5km up the road to the cablecar. The annoying thing with the shuttle is that it waits until it is full before heading off, and this time of year is not a busy one so sometimes I was sitting there a while! When I got up to the cablecar station I discovered that the fee for that is 160 Yuan. The costs were starting to pile up! The cablecar is pretty impressive, or if you don't like heights like me, then maybe terrifying is a better word! There's one point in particular where it crosses between two peaks and I swear if you dropped a penny out the window it would take four days to hit the ground. I tried not to look straight down and hoped the cable wouldn't break. The start of the cablecar is at 850 metres, the top of it at 2032 metres, and the actual summit of the mountain at 2572 metres. According to the photocopy I had the altitude range of the snub-noses is 800-2200 metres – basically right between the start and the top of the cablecar. I was expecting the temperature to be cold, probably even with snow considering it was December, but in fact it was quite warm, so much so that I had to remove a couple of the extra layers I was wearing. There is a nice (and steep!) stepped boardwalk trail up top through forest with lots of well-made signage about the local flora and fauna, but the only wildlife I actually saw there was an Elliot's laughing thrush. From the top of the cablecar there weren't really any good viewing points of the forest lower down because the mountain is quite rugged, so my plan for the next day instead became to just take the shuttle to the lower cablecar station and then walk up the staircase heading to the summit and ride the cablecar back down (it is 90 Yuan if only taking it one way). It wouldn't give me a great chance of seeing snub-noses but it would certainly be better than hoping to see them from out the cablecar window! And there should be lots of birds and other animals to see along the way.
As I mentioned, the stone staircase up the mountain has 8000 steps in it. It runs for over 6.5km apparently, but it doesn't just go straight upwards. The mountain isn't a single peak like one imagines when they hear the word “mountain” (think Kilimanjaro or Fuji), instead it is a great mass of different peaks, sort of like a Klingon's forehead, so the staircase trail meanders all over the place. It took me six hours to get to the top. In the first five hours I saw three birds. That's three individual birds: a grey-capped pigmy woodpecker, a speckled piculet and a red-flanked bluetail. It was ridiculously quiet. I also saw some monkeys but they were Tibetan macaques and not Guizhou snub-nosed monkeys. When I was almost near the top I found some fairly fresh branches and leaves on the trail which I fancied may have been knocked down by snub-noses (I was too high up for macaques by then), and then I found what I think was some snub-nosed monkey faeces on the path. The article I was talking about before had made a point that the faeces of the snub-noses are very distinctive (“like strings of abacus beads”) and no other animal on the mountain had similar droppings. So that was something at least. I was pondering what to do for the next day, because I really didn't want to walk up those 8000 steps again, and I didn't want to do it the other way either (cablecar up and walk back down) because walking down 8000 steps sounded even less appealing, and it would be stupid to just ride the cablecar up and down hoping that some monkeys would just happen to be underneath at some point. I was pretty much deciding on just giving up on the mountain and walking the access road tomorrow instead for lower altitude birds. But then I heard something crunching on the dry leaves that cover the ground up here. I'd been tricked twice already on the way up by the sound of water escaping from the water pipes that run along the track, but this was definitely something walking. I waited, and then a male Temminck's tragopan comes strutting out of the undergrowth, across the path, and off the other side. What an absolutely stunning bird!! This is a pheasant along the same lines as the male golden pheasant, so brilliantly plumaged that you wonder how they even survive. Some animals look absurdly colourful when you see them in zoos but in the wild in their own habitat they are actually well-camouflaged. Not male pheasants – they are just absurdly colourful full-stop. It wasn't a long view of the tragopan – because of the topography the track runs mostly along ridge-lines so a few steps off the path and whatever it is you see has already disappeared down the slope – but it was a good view for the time I had. That sealed it for tomorrow – back up the mountain it would be! I also got a new mammal that day. The tragopan turned out to have only been maybe fifty steps below the top cablecar station where the boardwalk trail is; and on that boardwalk trail I saw a maritime striped squirrel (related to the Swinhoe's striped squirrels I have seen elsewhere in China). I'm not sure why they're called maritime striped squirrels (their scientific name is Tamiops maritimus) because they certainly don't live in the sea!!
The next morning I was back up at the boardwalk on top of the mountain hoping to get some photos of the striped squirrel. He wasn't there, but right below one of the platforms was another (or the same) male Temminck's tragopan!! I even managed to get some really awful photos through all the saplings and undergrowth. So definitely worth going back up again. On the way down the mountain I saw three maritime striped squirrels and got a passable photo of one of them. There were a few more birds than yesterday but not a lot. Woodpeckers are really common up there though: I saw more grey-capped pigmy woodpeckers as well as some great spotted woodpeckers, and I heard a lot more than I actually laid eyes on. No monkeys, not even macaques. When I got to the bottom of the staircase I decided to just keep on walking the 9.5km to the entrance instead of taking the shuttle. On the river that runs alongside the road I saw white-capped water redstart, plumbeous water redstart and brown dipper, making up the trio of river birds I have been seeing together since Tangjiahe. But then a different river bird, the slaty-backed forktail. I've seen these before in Malaysia and Thailand but this was the first one in China. Then a little forktail flew up to join the slaty-back, and a few minutes walk along the river there was a pair of white-crowned forktails! I don't think I've ever seen three species of forktails in almost the same view before. Other than that there was a couple of mini-bird-waves mainly composed of grey-cheeked fulvettas with a scattering of mountain bulbuls, speckled piculets and rufous-faced warblers, and a Chinese bamboo partridge on the road and that was it. It got dark before I reached the entrance gate – I just happened to have my spot-lighting torch in my bag, coincidentally – but I didn't see anything interesting.
Final day at Fanjing Shan I did the same as yesterday: up to the top on the cablecar and walk back down. Heavens knows what the staff thought of me – everybody else who visits is just there to go up the mountain and back down, and then they leave town. This was my fourth time going up! The weather was a little different today; up at the top it was drizzling and the fog was so thick that the building where the cablecar ends was invisible until you were almost going into it! Because of this I skipped the boardwalk trail and just headed straight down the staircase. Not far down I dimly saw a shape on the steps below through the fog. I raised my binoculars and saw a male tragopan – third day in a row! The fog made it easier to sneak closer but really the bird seemed fairly unconcerned. For something that is often so hard to find, pheasants are sometimes a bit stupid. It moved slowly down the steps, pecking away at the ground to the side, and then suddenly there was a second one. Two male tragopans together was definitely not something I expected to see! I took a bunch of photos but all of them were out of focus because while I could see them just fine I couldn't seem to focus the camera on them properly through the mist. Not many woodpeckers on the mountain today, just a pair of grey-capped pigmy woodpeckers and a speckled piculet. Quite a lot of streak-breasted scimitar-babblers though, some of them in a mixed flock with spot-breasted scimitar-babblers, but other than that the only birds were a red-flanked bluetail and a flock of black-throated tits. Once again no monkeys but I knew when coming to Fanjing Shan that the snub-noses were a total long shot. The multitude of male Temminck's tragopans made up for it!!
Down on the access road walking back to the entrance I saw all the same birds as yesterday minus the brown dipper and bamboo partridge. When I'm walking on a road through forest I have a habit, as all animal-watchers should, of pausing at each bend and having a quick look at the road ahead in case there are any animals out in the open, like the bamboo partridge yesterday. Today I neglected to do so at one particular bend and I was kicking myself afterwards, because there was a pair of Elliot's pheasants around that bend! They were right on the edge of the road, at the bottom of the uphill slope, and the female shot straight upwards into the forest as I rounded the corner. Just as my brain was registering “that's a pheasant!” I realised the male was there too, dithering about in that confused way that pheasants have when they don't know what's going on, head bobbing about like “What's happening? My wife's flown away! What do I do? Oh hell, I better fly away too!” and he flew straight up and disappeared as well. It was a brief sighting but good enough to claim it. If the male had been alone I think I would have got a great look at him because he really didn't seem to know why he was flying away! The thing was, I had been looking out for Elliot's pheasants up the mountain but I didn't expect to see them on the road because the field guide says their altitude range in inland areas is 1000-2000 metres and if you recall the park maps put the lower cablecar station at 850 metres. If that is accurate then I saw the pheasants at about 600 metres or so, well below where they should have been. But then down at the entrance gate, supposedly at 310 metres, I also saw mountain bulbuls and black-headed sibias which should be above 1000 and 1200 metres respectively according to the field guide. Something seriously screwy with either the birds or the maps here at Fanjing Shan!
Tomorrow I head off towards Shanghai.
BIRDS
256) Temminck's tragopan Tragopan temminckii
257) Brown-breasted bulbul Pycnonotus xanthorrhous
258) Mountain bulbul Hypsipetes mcclellandii
259) Slaty-backed forktail Enicurus schistaceus
260) Chinese bamboo partridge Bambusicola thoracica
261) Black-headed sibia Hetrophasia melanoleuca
262) Spot-breasted scimitar-babbler Pomatorhinus erythrocnemis
263) Elliot's pheasant Syrmaticus elliotii
MAMMALS
37) Maritime striped squirrel Tamiops maritimus
Fanjing Shan is a major tourist attraction in its own right. There's an 8000-step stone staircase all the way to the summit, but if you're not feeling fit there's also a cablecar. I had a plan for seeing the snub-nosed monkeys and it was probably the feeblest monkey-finding plan that there has ever been. I had a photocopy of a scientific paper about the distribution of the snub-nosed monkeys on Fanjing Shan, the results of surveys undertaken in 2007 and 2008, which said they were found in four pockets. Most of these were not in areas accessible to tourists, as far as I could tell, but one had part of its distribution somewhere in the area of the cablecar. My plan was simply to take the cablecar to the top of the mountain and hope that there was a good view over the surrounding canopy from which to scan with my binoculars. Like I said, a pretty lame plan! And it turned out to not even be a workable plan!
I arrived in Heiwan about 11.30am, found a hotel, had some lunch, and then went to the entrance to the mountain. Fanjing Shan is actually a national park so there is an entrance fee and some great huge gates to stop any access outside of opening times (which put the kibosh on any planned spot-lighting!). The entrance fee was 90 Yuan (about NZ$18), and then there's a 20 Yuan shuttle which takes people the 9.5km up the road to the cablecar. The annoying thing with the shuttle is that it waits until it is full before heading off, and this time of year is not a busy one so sometimes I was sitting there a while! When I got up to the cablecar station I discovered that the fee for that is 160 Yuan. The costs were starting to pile up! The cablecar is pretty impressive, or if you don't like heights like me, then maybe terrifying is a better word! There's one point in particular where it crosses between two peaks and I swear if you dropped a penny out the window it would take four days to hit the ground. I tried not to look straight down and hoped the cable wouldn't break. The start of the cablecar is at 850 metres, the top of it at 2032 metres, and the actual summit of the mountain at 2572 metres. According to the photocopy I had the altitude range of the snub-noses is 800-2200 metres – basically right between the start and the top of the cablecar. I was expecting the temperature to be cold, probably even with snow considering it was December, but in fact it was quite warm, so much so that I had to remove a couple of the extra layers I was wearing. There is a nice (and steep!) stepped boardwalk trail up top through forest with lots of well-made signage about the local flora and fauna, but the only wildlife I actually saw there was an Elliot's laughing thrush. From the top of the cablecar there weren't really any good viewing points of the forest lower down because the mountain is quite rugged, so my plan for the next day instead became to just take the shuttle to the lower cablecar station and then walk up the staircase heading to the summit and ride the cablecar back down (it is 90 Yuan if only taking it one way). It wouldn't give me a great chance of seeing snub-noses but it would certainly be better than hoping to see them from out the cablecar window! And there should be lots of birds and other animals to see along the way.
As I mentioned, the stone staircase up the mountain has 8000 steps in it. It runs for over 6.5km apparently, but it doesn't just go straight upwards. The mountain isn't a single peak like one imagines when they hear the word “mountain” (think Kilimanjaro or Fuji), instead it is a great mass of different peaks, sort of like a Klingon's forehead, so the staircase trail meanders all over the place. It took me six hours to get to the top. In the first five hours I saw three birds. That's three individual birds: a grey-capped pigmy woodpecker, a speckled piculet and a red-flanked bluetail. It was ridiculously quiet. I also saw some monkeys but they were Tibetan macaques and not Guizhou snub-nosed monkeys. When I was almost near the top I found some fairly fresh branches and leaves on the trail which I fancied may have been knocked down by snub-noses (I was too high up for macaques by then), and then I found what I think was some snub-nosed monkey faeces on the path. The article I was talking about before had made a point that the faeces of the snub-noses are very distinctive (“like strings of abacus beads”) and no other animal on the mountain had similar droppings. So that was something at least. I was pondering what to do for the next day, because I really didn't want to walk up those 8000 steps again, and I didn't want to do it the other way either (cablecar up and walk back down) because walking down 8000 steps sounded even less appealing, and it would be stupid to just ride the cablecar up and down hoping that some monkeys would just happen to be underneath at some point. I was pretty much deciding on just giving up on the mountain and walking the access road tomorrow instead for lower altitude birds. But then I heard something crunching on the dry leaves that cover the ground up here. I'd been tricked twice already on the way up by the sound of water escaping from the water pipes that run along the track, but this was definitely something walking. I waited, and then a male Temminck's tragopan comes strutting out of the undergrowth, across the path, and off the other side. What an absolutely stunning bird!! This is a pheasant along the same lines as the male golden pheasant, so brilliantly plumaged that you wonder how they even survive. Some animals look absurdly colourful when you see them in zoos but in the wild in their own habitat they are actually well-camouflaged. Not male pheasants – they are just absurdly colourful full-stop. It wasn't a long view of the tragopan – because of the topography the track runs mostly along ridge-lines so a few steps off the path and whatever it is you see has already disappeared down the slope – but it was a good view for the time I had. That sealed it for tomorrow – back up the mountain it would be! I also got a new mammal that day. The tragopan turned out to have only been maybe fifty steps below the top cablecar station where the boardwalk trail is; and on that boardwalk trail I saw a maritime striped squirrel (related to the Swinhoe's striped squirrels I have seen elsewhere in China). I'm not sure why they're called maritime striped squirrels (their scientific name is Tamiops maritimus) because they certainly don't live in the sea!!
The next morning I was back up at the boardwalk on top of the mountain hoping to get some photos of the striped squirrel. He wasn't there, but right below one of the platforms was another (or the same) male Temminck's tragopan!! I even managed to get some really awful photos through all the saplings and undergrowth. So definitely worth going back up again. On the way down the mountain I saw three maritime striped squirrels and got a passable photo of one of them. There were a few more birds than yesterday but not a lot. Woodpeckers are really common up there though: I saw more grey-capped pigmy woodpeckers as well as some great spotted woodpeckers, and I heard a lot more than I actually laid eyes on. No monkeys, not even macaques. When I got to the bottom of the staircase I decided to just keep on walking the 9.5km to the entrance instead of taking the shuttle. On the river that runs alongside the road I saw white-capped water redstart, plumbeous water redstart and brown dipper, making up the trio of river birds I have been seeing together since Tangjiahe. But then a different river bird, the slaty-backed forktail. I've seen these before in Malaysia and Thailand but this was the first one in China. Then a little forktail flew up to join the slaty-back, and a few minutes walk along the river there was a pair of white-crowned forktails! I don't think I've ever seen three species of forktails in almost the same view before. Other than that there was a couple of mini-bird-waves mainly composed of grey-cheeked fulvettas with a scattering of mountain bulbuls, speckled piculets and rufous-faced warblers, and a Chinese bamboo partridge on the road and that was it. It got dark before I reached the entrance gate – I just happened to have my spot-lighting torch in my bag, coincidentally – but I didn't see anything interesting.
Final day at Fanjing Shan I did the same as yesterday: up to the top on the cablecar and walk back down. Heavens knows what the staff thought of me – everybody else who visits is just there to go up the mountain and back down, and then they leave town. This was my fourth time going up! The weather was a little different today; up at the top it was drizzling and the fog was so thick that the building where the cablecar ends was invisible until you were almost going into it! Because of this I skipped the boardwalk trail and just headed straight down the staircase. Not far down I dimly saw a shape on the steps below through the fog. I raised my binoculars and saw a male tragopan – third day in a row! The fog made it easier to sneak closer but really the bird seemed fairly unconcerned. For something that is often so hard to find, pheasants are sometimes a bit stupid. It moved slowly down the steps, pecking away at the ground to the side, and then suddenly there was a second one. Two male tragopans together was definitely not something I expected to see! I took a bunch of photos but all of them were out of focus because while I could see them just fine I couldn't seem to focus the camera on them properly through the mist. Not many woodpeckers on the mountain today, just a pair of grey-capped pigmy woodpeckers and a speckled piculet. Quite a lot of streak-breasted scimitar-babblers though, some of them in a mixed flock with spot-breasted scimitar-babblers, but other than that the only birds were a red-flanked bluetail and a flock of black-throated tits. Once again no monkeys but I knew when coming to Fanjing Shan that the snub-noses were a total long shot. The multitude of male Temminck's tragopans made up for it!!
Down on the access road walking back to the entrance I saw all the same birds as yesterday minus the brown dipper and bamboo partridge. When I'm walking on a road through forest I have a habit, as all animal-watchers should, of pausing at each bend and having a quick look at the road ahead in case there are any animals out in the open, like the bamboo partridge yesterday. Today I neglected to do so at one particular bend and I was kicking myself afterwards, because there was a pair of Elliot's pheasants around that bend! They were right on the edge of the road, at the bottom of the uphill slope, and the female shot straight upwards into the forest as I rounded the corner. Just as my brain was registering “that's a pheasant!” I realised the male was there too, dithering about in that confused way that pheasants have when they don't know what's going on, head bobbing about like “What's happening? My wife's flown away! What do I do? Oh hell, I better fly away too!” and he flew straight up and disappeared as well. It was a brief sighting but good enough to claim it. If the male had been alone I think I would have got a great look at him because he really didn't seem to know why he was flying away! The thing was, I had been looking out for Elliot's pheasants up the mountain but I didn't expect to see them on the road because the field guide says their altitude range in inland areas is 1000-2000 metres and if you recall the park maps put the lower cablecar station at 850 metres. If that is accurate then I saw the pheasants at about 600 metres or so, well below where they should have been. But then down at the entrance gate, supposedly at 310 metres, I also saw mountain bulbuls and black-headed sibias which should be above 1000 and 1200 metres respectively according to the field guide. Something seriously screwy with either the birds or the maps here at Fanjing Shan!
Tomorrow I head off towards Shanghai.
BIRDS
256) Temminck's tragopan Tragopan temminckii
257) Brown-breasted bulbul Pycnonotus xanthorrhous
258) Mountain bulbul Hypsipetes mcclellandii
259) Slaty-backed forktail Enicurus schistaceus
260) Chinese bamboo partridge Bambusicola thoracica
261) Black-headed sibia Hetrophasia melanoleuca
262) Spot-breasted scimitar-babbler Pomatorhinus erythrocnemis
263) Elliot's pheasant Syrmaticus elliotii
MAMMALS
37) Maritime striped squirrel Tamiops maritimus
James Lowther
Well-known member
good stuff with the tragopans etc. Chlidonias, sorry about the monkeys
i went to beidaihe and beijing in october and i thought china was a tough place to travel but reading this thread i think i was in the really easy bit!!! impressive stoicism on display.
by the way, someone mentioned ibisbill at baihe near beijing - they are not guaranteed there, i missed them
so don't feel too bad about not trying
cheers,
James
i went to beidaihe and beijing in october and i thought china was a tough place to travel but reading this thread i think i was in the really easy bit!!! impressive stoicism on display.
by the way, someone mentioned ibisbill at baihe near beijing - they are not guaranteed there, i missed them
so don't feel too bad about not trying
cheers,
James
viator
Well-known member
Jealous of the tragopans - not once but multiple sightings is stunning! Yes you missed the monkey's but no-one can have everything and definitely a long shot.
Based on my last weekend in Johor (Panti <-> Mersing) and this week in Singapore seems this year the rainy season might be worse than average so have some leeway in your plans esp when heading south of KL.
Based on my last weekend in Johor (Panti <-> Mersing) and this week in Singapore seems this year the rainy season might be worse than average so have some leeway in your plans esp when heading south of KL.
Chlidonias
Well-known member
thanks guys. I'm not too cut up about the monkeys because they are probably the hardest species of primate to find in China (except probably the Burmese snub-nose) and so I didn't really expect to see them, especially when I got there and saw what a huge expanse of ruggedness the mountain was. It was just a hope. But as I always say, if you don't try you can't succeed!
The Elliot's were a very nice last-minute surprise too.
I am back in Shanghai now. I took the buses in reverse (Fanjing Shan to Jiangkou to Tongren to Yuping) and then a 22 hour overnight train from Yuping to Shanghai. In my original plan I was going to go all the way back to Guizhou to catch the train but on my way to Fanjing Shan I noticed the train I got from Guizhou to Yuping was bound for Shanghai so that saved me 12 hours or so. Tomorrow evening I fly out to Kuala Lumpur (well, the morning of the tenth but it is 1.45am).
The Elliot's were a very nice last-minute surprise too.
I am back in Shanghai now. I took the buses in reverse (Fanjing Shan to Jiangkou to Tongren to Yuping) and then a 22 hour overnight train from Yuping to Shanghai. In my original plan I was going to go all the way back to Guizhou to catch the train but on my way to Fanjing Shan I noticed the train I got from Guizhou to Yuping was bound for Shanghai so that saved me 12 hours or so. Tomorrow evening I fly out to Kuala Lumpur (well, the morning of the tenth but it is 1.45am).
Chlidonias
Well-known member
So I am in Malaysia now. The country has got even more relaxed about immigration since last time I was here. Now you don't even fill out an arrival card or declaration or anything. You just head off the plane to Immigration, they stamp your passport and wave you through (this is if you're a New Zealander, possibly different for other nationalities because Malaysia likes us), you collect your bag from the luggage belt and then walk through Customs without a glance. Easy-peasy.
A bit of a round-up of the trip so far: a few hours at Hong Kong airport at the start, followed by a fairly rubbish visit to South Korea, followed by an even more rubbish visit to Russia, then a brilliant time was had in Mongolia, and then the mixed bag that was China. That didn't start out well but it picked up very well indeed once I got to Sichuan. I think it was partly because China takes a few weeks to “get into” because it is so different to everywhere else you've been, and then after that while you don't really get used to it, all the oddities just seem more normal. Also Sichuan is just the best province for wildlife, and it really did seem a different place to the rest of China.
I really did like China a lot. I probably won't get to go back but I would like to. There are still so many animals left to see there – I mean, just how does one go about finding a giant salamander?! Pretty much everybody in the country was exceptionally nice, if often baffling (and probably baffled), and unlike most of the countries I've been to in southeast Asia there was almost literally no scamming or anything of that nature. There were a few minor instances but I think that was probably more due to me misunderstanding things than actual scams. And unlike, say, Thailand or Malaysia, I was quite happy leaving my bags sitting on a seat in a bus station while I went off to the toilet because I knew full well they would be there when I got back. It's just that sort of country.
I love the fashion in China too! Everyone is an individual and nobody else cares. Or at least it seems like nobody else cares. In the West people are so stuck up that if someone isn't wearing “normal” or “fashionable” clothes the cool people look down upon them and make snide remarks. I have wondered if it is the same in China (or Japan come to that) or if everyone is just fine with everything. I saw a mid-twenties lady shopping in the supermarket in Beijing, wearing high heels and a pair of exceptionally neatly-pressed pyjamas with cartoon elephants on them. I saw another lady somewhere else wearing pyjamas as well. And there's the girls and lads who look like their wardrobes vomited the clothes over them and they just went with whatever landed in the right place. I think it is great because everyone should be an individual and not a conformist. Do what makes you happy and not what other people say you “should” do.
One thing I didn't like, and this is going to sound odd, was the food! I actually prefer the westernised take-away Chinese food such as I eat in New Zealand. Part of that probably comes from my inability to read a Chinese menu. In the tourist spots (say, in Chengdu or Songpan) there are English-language menus or menus with pictures, but most of the places I was at didn't have those of course. Instead I would go in the kitchen and point at things. And this was where things would get weird. I would point at some pork, an onion, a tomato, some green vegetables, make the sign for “just mix all that up together” and then they would bring me out three full meals: say, one made of pork and onions, one pork and tomato, and one a soup of vegetables and tomatoes. It didn't seem to matter that I was one person and most of the food would go to waste (although I can eat a lot!). And I never knew the price of anything when I did that so often I got a nasty surprise when the bill came. Sometimes I had good food in China (the donkey meat dish I had in Beijing was a stand-out) but they do have a liking for serving dishes swimming in pools of oil or grease, and frying everything where-ever possible. And then there's the soups made up of hunks of fat; no meat, just repulsive great globs of fat and nothing else. Yeah, the food is not good in China.
Another funny thing stemming from me not speaking Chinese, was when I didn't understand someone (which was always) they would often write out what they had said in Chinese characters for me. I sort of get that, because some people can read a language without being able to speak it properly, but if I plainly can't understand a single word they are saying should they really expect me to understand an entire paragraph of symbols?
Anyway, China is done. Malaysia is now. I'm considering a mystery country next for just a few weeks, before I head to Thailand.
A bit of a round-up of the trip so far: a few hours at Hong Kong airport at the start, followed by a fairly rubbish visit to South Korea, followed by an even more rubbish visit to Russia, then a brilliant time was had in Mongolia, and then the mixed bag that was China. That didn't start out well but it picked up very well indeed once I got to Sichuan. I think it was partly because China takes a few weeks to “get into” because it is so different to everywhere else you've been, and then after that while you don't really get used to it, all the oddities just seem more normal. Also Sichuan is just the best province for wildlife, and it really did seem a different place to the rest of China.
I really did like China a lot. I probably won't get to go back but I would like to. There are still so many animals left to see there – I mean, just how does one go about finding a giant salamander?! Pretty much everybody in the country was exceptionally nice, if often baffling (and probably baffled), and unlike most of the countries I've been to in southeast Asia there was almost literally no scamming or anything of that nature. There were a few minor instances but I think that was probably more due to me misunderstanding things than actual scams. And unlike, say, Thailand or Malaysia, I was quite happy leaving my bags sitting on a seat in a bus station while I went off to the toilet because I knew full well they would be there when I got back. It's just that sort of country.
I love the fashion in China too! Everyone is an individual and nobody else cares. Or at least it seems like nobody else cares. In the West people are so stuck up that if someone isn't wearing “normal” or “fashionable” clothes the cool people look down upon them and make snide remarks. I have wondered if it is the same in China (or Japan come to that) or if everyone is just fine with everything. I saw a mid-twenties lady shopping in the supermarket in Beijing, wearing high heels and a pair of exceptionally neatly-pressed pyjamas with cartoon elephants on them. I saw another lady somewhere else wearing pyjamas as well. And there's the girls and lads who look like their wardrobes vomited the clothes over them and they just went with whatever landed in the right place. I think it is great because everyone should be an individual and not a conformist. Do what makes you happy and not what other people say you “should” do.
One thing I didn't like, and this is going to sound odd, was the food! I actually prefer the westernised take-away Chinese food such as I eat in New Zealand. Part of that probably comes from my inability to read a Chinese menu. In the tourist spots (say, in Chengdu or Songpan) there are English-language menus or menus with pictures, but most of the places I was at didn't have those of course. Instead I would go in the kitchen and point at things. And this was where things would get weird. I would point at some pork, an onion, a tomato, some green vegetables, make the sign for “just mix all that up together” and then they would bring me out three full meals: say, one made of pork and onions, one pork and tomato, and one a soup of vegetables and tomatoes. It didn't seem to matter that I was one person and most of the food would go to waste (although I can eat a lot!). And I never knew the price of anything when I did that so often I got a nasty surprise when the bill came. Sometimes I had good food in China (the donkey meat dish I had in Beijing was a stand-out) but they do have a liking for serving dishes swimming in pools of oil or grease, and frying everything where-ever possible. And then there's the soups made up of hunks of fat; no meat, just repulsive great globs of fat and nothing else. Yeah, the food is not good in China.
Another funny thing stemming from me not speaking Chinese, was when I didn't understand someone (which was always) they would often write out what they had said in Chinese characters for me. I sort of get that, because some people can read a language without being able to speak it properly, but if I plainly can't understand a single word they are saying should they really expect me to understand an entire paragraph of symbols?
Anyway, China is done. Malaysia is now. I'm considering a mystery country next for just a few weeks, before I head to Thailand.
Good luck in Malaysia Is. !
This may make more sense now : they write the symbols out because often the dialects (and there are hundreds of them) are so very different, even though the written form is the same, that it is sometimes impossible for them to understand each other (and not everyone speaks Putonghua - Mandarin). Still, a Westerner (even a Southern 'Westerner') still shouldn't be expected to understand Chinese text !
This may make more sense now : they write the symbols out because often the dialects (and there are hundreds of them) are so very different, even though the written form is the same, that it is sometimes impossible for them to understand each other (and not everyone speaks Putonghua - Mandarin). Still, a Westerner (even a Southern 'Westerner') still shouldn't be expected to understand Chinese text !
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chris butterworth
aka The Person Named Above
Brilliant report ( and trip ) so far and good luck with mammals in Malaysia. You'll have to make an effort to get to Japan some day. Giant Salamander are ( reasonably ) 'easy' on Hokkaido, I've seen them in canals in the centre of villages in the Daisetsu mountains, plus there's a shit load of other good stuff.
Chris
Chris
Chlidonias
Well-known member
thanks guys.
I definitely am going to get to Japan at some point, just not sure when.
I should say that I'm not doing much in Malaysia. I basically was just going to go to Bukit Fraser for a week or so (hopefully to see lots of mammals!) and I was thinking about Langkawi for small-clawed otters, and that was it. Whenever I get to Singapore I was going to head across to the Panti forest as well for banded leaf monkeys but not sure when that will be. (I've been to Bukit Fraser before but never Langkawi or Panti).
I definitely am going to get to Japan at some point, just not sure when.
I should say that I'm not doing much in Malaysia. I basically was just going to go to Bukit Fraser for a week or so (hopefully to see lots of mammals!) and I was thinking about Langkawi for small-clawed otters, and that was it. Whenever I get to Singapore I was going to head across to the Panti forest as well for banded leaf monkeys but not sure when that will be. (I've been to Bukit Fraser before but never Langkawi or Panti).
Jos Stratford
Beast from the East
Just to say, I'm pretty impressed by your write-ups too, this style of travel just my cup of tea ....got little inklings of a venture this way in the nearish future too ...not totally sure if your encounters in China encourage or warn me off though
Chlidonias
Well-known member
thanks Jos, a much more interesting type of travel than organised stuff where everything goes to plan!Just to say, I'm pretty impressed by your write-ups too, this style of travel just my cup of tea ....got little inklings of a venture this way in the nearish future too ...not totally sure if your encounters in China encourage or warn me off though
China really is great. The language thing is a bitch, but getting around on the trains and buses is easy-peasy if you get someone at where-ever you're staying (assuming they speak English) to write down the place names in Chinese characters. I would usually work out where I was going from, say, Chengdu, and get the whole next lot of place names written down all at once in case I couldn't find someone in between who could do it for me. And then once you're at your destination, who needs English right?
And everyone there really is super-friendly.
Chlidonias
Well-known member
And the mystery country is Burma! I was just waiting till the visa was done before saying so because I didn't want to jinx it. I was always planning on (probably) going to Burma on this trip but it was going to be later. But after I got to Kuala Lumpur, thinking about how I was going up to Thailand, I suddenly decided it made most sense (to me at least!) to go via Burma: i.e. fly KL to Yangon (= Rangoon) and then Yangon to Bangkok. I went to the Myanmar Embassy to see what I needed for the visa and discovered they had outsourced their visa service to a company called Ever Fine Tours. So I went there and found that it is a same day service (!!!) and literally all you need is your passport, two passport photos, a photocopy of your ID page in the passport, your flights in and out of the country, and to fill out a very simple one-page form (eye colour, hair colour, that sort of thing). It costs 140 Ringgit. Simple as anything! I had a look on Air Asia and found a flight from Yangon to Bangkok for 4.64 Ringgit. In case you think that is a typo, it cost NZ$1.70, AU$1.60, US$1.40, 1 Euro or 0.87 UK Pounds (all conversions courtesy of XE). But get this: after the addition of airport tax, fuel surcharge, baggage allowance, and a ridiculous 19 Ringgit credit card fee the cost of the flight ended up being 155 Ringgit!! It is still pretty cheap in real terms, but what an outrageous increase! Then I got an inbound Air Asia flight from KL to Yangon which was 80 Ringgit before tax, and 199 Ringgit after the taxes (and the credit card fee was only 8 Ringgit). So there wasn't much of a difference between the two flights in cost in the end. How bizarre. I think it must be something to do with it being an outbound flight from Burma. By the time I'd sorted flights and booked the accommodation in Yangon it had suddenly become the weekend so I needed to wait till Monday to finalise everything.
So I fly to Burma on the 26 December, and out to Bangkok on 16 January, which makes about three weeks in the country. I have a plan for the route – Yangon (including Hlawga Park), up to Bagan (by the Irrawaddy River), east to Lake Inle, then to Kalaw (forest birds) and up to Mandalay after that (solely for the zoo), then down to Bago for Lake Moeyungyi, and finally back to Yangon. Mostly I will be trying to find birds; I'm not sure what I will find in terms of mammals, I sort of think maybe just a few species of squirrels. I really have no idea what to expect in Burma. It will be interesting, that's for sure. I have read some trip reports, some of them from tour companies who see several hundred species in a couple of weeks, so I sort of have an idea of where things are (although I certainly won't be seeing that number of birds!!).
I know there's internet in Burma but how widespread it is and whether I can get onto the forums will be a mystery until I get there and find out. It's possible I may be MIA for a few weeks....
chris butterworth
aka The Person Named Above
That should read Shikoku - not Hokkaido :-C I'm blaming nattering women ( although it's probably trying to read one language and answer questions in another. At my age I should know better )
Chris
