Norway

After my peak of ridiculous overexcitement about Peru and Haiti yesterday evening, I’ve calmed down a little and am starting to think of Norway instead. As I said yesterday (I think), it’s one of the only countries in Europe I’ve never visited (the others being Andorra, San Marino, Liechtenstein, Malta, Cyprus, Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, Georgia and Armenia, if the latter two count), and I do fancy spending a couple of days in Bergen and looking at some fjords, as well as Oslo and the Norsk Folkemuseum (though I notice that their Midsummer festival thing isn’t mentioned on the website - worth checking that before I book anything, certainly). Plus, Norway has the advantage of being in northern Europe, thereby increasing the likelihood of my boyfriend coming with me.

So I hied me to Ryanair to find that they have flights from Glasgow Prestwick to Oslo (Torp, i.e. probably not actually anywhere near Oslo) for some ridiculously cheap price, and then I had a look over at the Norwegian railways site, and while their tickets are not cheap (well, nothing in Norway is, apparently), a jaunt to Bergen and back is definitely doable and according to the man in seat 61, it’s one of the most scenic trips in Europe and worth doing for its own sake.

And THEN I started to feel guilty about my carbon emissions, and so had a look over on DFDS Seaways to see if it would be at all feasible to get the ferry across to Haugesund or Stavanger instead. And ack, so much more expensive, particularly when you’re not travelling with a car, and given that I’d have to pay rail fares to Newcastle as well - and it doesn’t go on the dates that I’d want, and just no. I realise that this is a good deal to do with modern attitudes to travel - way back in 1997 I went interrailing around eastern Europe, and the trip started off with a ferry from Newcastle to Hamburg, but those were the days before airlines like Ryanair and Easyjet, before we could zip across to the continent in a couple of hours and still have change for £50, and that has changed expectations. I wish that I was prepared to make the sacrifice, but…I’m not.

I will comfort myself with the thought that actually ferries can have a negative environmental impact too, and according to Caithness.org, some car and ferry journeys can have a worse environmental impact than flights (yes, I know that they are talking about small airlines rather than jets, but I am taking my confort where I can). But I will still feel a little guilty. Dear scientists, please hurry and invent emission-free airline fuels, yes?

Birthday! (Not yet.)

So, I am turning 30 next year, on June 24th, to be precise. Argh.

The best birthday I have ever had was my 25th, back in 2003. I went to Normandy with my boyfriend at the time; we stayed in the house of some family friends near Livarot, and on my birthday itself we drove out to Le Mont Sant Michel for a boozy lunch (well, for me, anyhow; he was driving) and a wander about. That birthday made me decide that the idea way to spend my birthday was abroad, but I’ve not managed to do it again since: in 2004 I was too broke; in 2005 I was saving up for various other trips away; in 2006 I was working in Yei, which, OK, is technically abroad by my current standards, but I was living there at the time, so it doesn’t count - I had high hopes for 2007, but I turned out to be invited to a wedding in York the day before, and thus my birthday was spent horribly hungover, trying to get back to London without my wallet, which had been stolen the night before. Not ideal (though the wedding itself was lovely).

Anyhow. I have decided that for my 30th, I am going to do something that I have wanted to do for years and years: celebrate my birthday somewhere it is a festival. Happily, June 24th is both St John the Baptist’s Day, and also considered to be Midsummer in various placed (though yes, I know that technically the solstice is on the 21st), so there are no shortage of options. 

Predictably enough, Wikipedia has a fairly decent (if not exhaustive) summary of Midsummer festivals, and the World Events Guide, while not being the easiest site to navigate, has some practical suggestions. I do like the sound of the Baltic celebrations, many of which seem to have continued fairly naturally, rather than being artificially revived, but I’d also like to be somewhere with fairly relaibly decent weather, so maybe northern Europe is out (with the exception of Norway, which is one of the few European countries I’ve never visited, and it would be good to have an excuse). Many of the southern European options sound quite appealing, particularly something like this, which claims to involve ‘grotesque giants’. Hurrah!

But predictably enough, given my eternal Latin America hankerings, oh my GOD how awesome would this be? Or this? Of course, given that it’s the Southern Hemisphere, warm weather wouldn’t be guaranteed, and given that I’ve never visited Latin America, a brief visit (as I probably couldn’t spare more than a week or ten days) would frustrate me more than anything. But oh, tempting.

And then there’s the Caribbean: Puerto Rico, or (oh MAN) Haiti. Haiti!

I mean, almost invariably one of my friends is going to end up having a wedding on that date and all my plans will come to naught. On the other hand, I do have birthdays on a yearly basis, so it’s always good to have things lined up for the future. Hmmm.

Air Baltic and Uzbekistan

Most of the time my travel planning goes something like this: 1. decide where I want to go; followed by 2. find appropriate flights - but sometimes I end up doing it backwards. I flew Air Baltic back from St Petersburg to London (via Riga), as it was by far the cheapest flight available, and ended up signing up for their mailing list, because who doesn’t like being bombarded by details of cheap flights to random destinations on a near-daily basis? Exciting finds:

- Irritatingly enough, there doesn’t seem to be any information about this available on their website, but according to the emails they sent me, and also this site, Air Baltic is launching a Baltic Pass, allowing passengers who buy an Air Baltic flight to Riga, Tallinn, Liepaja or Vilnius from outside the Baltic countries to purchase flights between those cities for 35 euros. It’s a deal I’m unlikely to take advantage of myself, as a) I visited Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in 2005, and, barring a trip to Lithuania for my 30th birthday next June (of which more later, possibly), I’m not planning a trip back in the near future; and b) it’s easy enough, if you’ve got the time, to bus between the cities included, and I generally believe that Flying Is Cheating - but for people wanting a brisk jaunt around the Baltic countries, it’s a very good deal indeed [insert global warming-related disclaimer here].

- More excitingly from my own point of view is Air Baltic’s selection of destinations. Following my xmas trip to Budapest, I am in the rather frightening position of having NO PLANNED TRAVEL, which inevitably sends my brain into travel-planning overdrive, eager to latch onto intriguing options: I’ve long had a hankering after Tbilisi, but it’s the cheap flights on offer to Tashkent that really excite me.

Uzbekistan! I visited Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan way, way back in 1998 (nearly 10 years ago, which is frightening), and I’ve often been regretful that I didn’t make it to Uzbekistan on that trip. Tashkent itself doesn’t excite me that much (other than the fact that it’s the only Central Asian city to have an underground rail system, fact fans), but its proximity to places like Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva certainly does (and, as I have just seen from the website I’m linking, Shakhrisabz), and the Ferghana Valley. And, OK, “proximity” may be taking things a bit far, but it seems that the 356km between Tashkent and Samarkand can be travelled in under four hours, which is rather impressive. (Incidentally, I have to say that I love the fact that the Uzbekistan railway has a blog.)

As ever, this is just one of multiple trips that I am considering for 2008, dependent on multiple factors including employment and PhD funding and the like. But it’s a good one to think about.

Yotel

 I never got round to mentioning the Gatwick Yotel, did I? In short, it not only lived up to, but exceeded my rather wild expectations. Accessible from the Gatwick concourse, it’s staffed by friendly (and yes, I admit it, attractive) Spanish men; it’s clean and quiet and amazingly convenient, and the rooms are amazing: very comfortable (single) beds (they’re lofted up, so may not be great for those scared of heights), a television with seemingly unlimited DVD options (I didn’t switch this on, as I was there to sleep, but it was good to know it was there), and a wee bathroom with a gigantic shower and specially formulated shower gel. I checked in around nine, slept from ten until half past four and was checked in for my 6.10am flight by around five; I arrived in Glasgow bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and was able to do a full day’s work. All that for £45! Highly, highly recommended, and I’m very excited to see that they’ll be opening in Heathrow and Schiphol soon (not that I ever fly through Schiphol, but again, it’s nice to know it’s there). I’m slightly afraid that once word gets out they’re going to be swamped and it’ll be impossible to get a booking, but that doesn’t stop me from promoting it like crazy, as it’s awesome.

Here’s me in my pod:

More Yotel photos on my flickr account, here.

***

In other news, I thought they were just putting up early xmas lights, but it seems that I have in fact just missed Glasgow’s Radiance festival of light. Oops. I’ve got to say, though, that Glasgow does xmas lights better than any other city I’ve known: this weekend just gone is the one year anniversary of my first ever visit to Glasgow, and I fell in love with it as soon as I walked past the Gallery of Modern Art, looked up, and saw this:

(From infovore.org.)

St Petersburg

Oh, the rage - I just did a big huge update here and then IE crashed and it was lost, lost forever. So in short:

 - Admittedly I did not initially get the point of St Petersburg, which I blame on all those St Petersburg enthusiasts banging on about how amazing it is in comparison to Moscow, thereby inflating my expectations. By my second day, however, wandering about by the canals and along Nevsky Prospekt, I was definitely feeling the love, particularly given the sun had come out and my hands were defrosting.

- I stayed in the Azimut Hotel, which did the job: cheap, fairly central, and with a great view from its 18th-floor restaurant. While the staff were not exactly friendly, at least they didn’t act as if I’d deeply offended them and they’d never forgive me, which was novel.

- The Hermitage. Yes, yes, I know, everyone bangs on about the Hermitage in a deeply annoying way, but it really is that amazing, as much for its architecture as for its art (which frankly I found overwhelming to the point of my brain shutting down completely). Also, it has an internet cafe, and really, what more can one ask of a gallery?

- The Anthropology and Ethnography Museum, which likes to pretend it is all respectable and upstanding and its visitors are inspecting its exhibitions of Japanese costumes with fascination, whereas in reality everyone is dashing through the halls in search of the Kunstkamera, Peter the Great’s ghoulish collection of stuffed, deformed human foetuses and the like. Fascinating stuff, at least for sickos like me, comparable to the brilliant Medical History Musum in Riga, which has as its piece de resistance Dr Demihov’s two-headed dog (scroll down).

Seaplanes

Just a quick one tonight, but I caught an interesting programme on Radio Four at the weekend about seaplanes. It was a general discussion about the history of seaplanes and the way that they have been used in the past (including a particularly interesting bit about the seaplanes that used to cross the Atlantic from Foynes, on the Shannon Estuary on the west coast of Ireland - I had occasionally wondered how Shannon had ended up as such a flight hub in Ireland, and now I know), but also mentioned the fact that someone has recently set up a seaplane service from the River Clyde in Glasgow, flying to Oban and doing charter flights to various other points in Scotland. This was, in general, spoken of in terms of it being a Very Good Thing, and the bloke running the company made the point that it brought the more remote parts of Scotland within reach of what he claimed was the world’s biggest travel market, the four-day mini-break.

All well and good; I’m sure it’ll be a boost for tourism and for the economy, and I’m certainly not criticising the utility of seaplanes for linking up remote communities in places like Alaska and Canada, and they were even put to use in the bit of Sydney where I grew up. However, given that the seaplane programme on the radio was almost immediately followed by an advert for one of those polar-bears-floundering-on-melting-ice-floes-we’re-all-going-to-diiiiiieeeeeeee” pieces of reportage that seem to be a dime a dozen these days, I guess I was slightly surprised that the seaplane programme made no mention of the environmental impact of seaplanes - and erm, OK, I have just googled this and it seems that the environmental impact of seaplanes is fairly minimal, which shakes my argument somewhat, but I guess what I am really wondering is, more generally, when we’re going to reach a point where environmental issues are going to be mainstreamed in discussions around travel, rather than being treated as a serious issue which is still somehow separate from the choices that individuals make on a daily basis. Obviously I am not getting on an ethical high horse here - as I fly far too much to be able to do so - but it does make me wonder.

Moscow

Before I went to Moscow everyone kept saying to me “oh, Moscow is nothing compared to St Petersburg!” and when I was in Moscow people kept saying “oh, wait till you get to St Petersburg!” and to hear them talk you would have expected Moscow to be some sort of horrendous concrete bunker (St Basil’s Cathedral in the centre as its one saving grace) in comparison to the glimmering mirage of perfection that is St Petersburg.

I loved Moscow. I admit that I am a total City Girl, so I suppose I am an easy sell, especially after three and a half days on a train in the taiga, but still, Moscow had the sort of energy that I really like in a city - and prize above elegance, these days, I think - and, as ever, my time there was too short; I will definitely be going back.

I stayed at the erroneously-named Central Tourist House, which is 9km out of the centre and not a house, by any stretch of the imagination. It was not ideal accommodation, mainly due to the location, but certainly wasn’t as hellish as the reviews at TripAdvisor or VisitMoscow.com would suggest (but then, I am always mistrustful of review sites like TripAdvisor, as people’s standards and opinions are so variable: basically, as long as there are no bloodstains on the walls and the food doesn’t poison me, my accommodation needs are very, very easily satisfied), and presumably convenient for anyone coming from Vnukovo Airport, as it’s apparently on the way into town from there. Anyhow, I had a private room, double bed, en suite bathroom, interesting views over high-rise Russian suburbs, and a generous (if peculiar) breakfast was included; I was admittedly awoken by noise in the corridor at 4am, but that was the fault of the billion English tourists there for the football, and frankly given the circumstances I was just glad not to be stabbed.

I only had one full day in Moscow, so what I was able to see was limited, especially as that day was a Thursday, which happens to be the day that the Kremlin is closed. However, this is what I did see:

- Red Square, which was much more impressive than I’d thought it would be: it’s an elegant space, and surrounded by enough interesting stuff (GUM, St Basil’s, Kazan Cathedral, the Kremlin, Lenin’s mausoleum) to keep anyone busy for a while;

- St Basil’s Cathedral, the outside of which is the sort of image that’s been seen so often that it’s lost a lot of its power, but the inside is absolutely and unexpectedly breathtaking;

- GUM, the sort of consumer paradise that doesn’t fit well with the traditionally austere image that Moscow has;

- The Tretyakov Gallery, which was possibly the most impressive art museum I have ever seen, especially the icon collection: I am a sucker for icons anyway, and there was a group of Orthodox nuns singing hymns there the day that I visited, which certainly added to the atmosphere; and

- The Moscow Metro (site in Russian), which is glamorous and amazingly efficient - the trains come every 30 seconds at times! It is wonderful! - and more than just a way of getting around, is actually a tourist attraction in its own right, as these photos would suggest.

My day in Moscow concluded with the Red Arrow sleeper train from Leningrad Station to St Petersburg. I admit that by this point I was somewhat over trains, but this service redeemed itself by being by far the swankiest train I’d been on, and I shared a compartment with a chap who’d been a rocket scientist during the Cold War, which enlivened the journey considerably.

The Trans-Mongolian Railway

One of my favourite things to do, in a travel sense, is to sleep on trains. Sleeping on other modes of transport, particularly buses and aeroplanes, generally involves twisting one’s body into impossible formations, and never getting beyond a fitful doze for fear of flopping a concertina-ed limb onto the lap of the person in the next seat, or, if you ever do manage to fall into a proper sleep, it will invariably be when the person in the seat next to you needs to clamber over you on their way to the bathroom, or when the bus decides that that’s the perfect time to switch all the lights on and make a smoking stop while leaving the door open and letting in the freezing draught (please see Istanbul to Safranbolu bus journey, late December 2006), or put on a Middle Eastern comedy at full volume, causing one of your fellow British travellers to freak out and demand to get off the bus in the middle of a tunnel (please see Cairo to Dahab overnight bus, August 2006). I heard tell, while in China, of the legendary sleeper buses which have almost bed-like seats, but I remain unconvinced - not of their existence, but whether they would actually be any more comfortable than normal buses.

However! Sleeping on trains is a completely different kettle of fish, and one that I like to indulge as much as I can. My first overnight train journey was when I was 19, backpacking through Eastern Europe, and staying in a normal compartment on the overnight service from Berlin to Gdansk via Gdynia was so disrupting and exhausting that even on my paltry student budget I decided to splurge on the extra - oh, £5, maybe - on a couchette from Krakow to Prague. From then on I was hooked: Zurich to Graz (in a luxurious sleeper, as there were no couchettes left), Budapest to Sighisoara, Bucharest to Sofia, all in the unimaginable wonder of going to bed in the evening for a night of gentle swaying somnolence, and waking the next morning, well rested, somewhere else. Magic!

Since that seminal backpacking experience in 1997, I’d slept on trains a few more times - the lovely Bulawayo to Victoria Falls service in 1998, complete with fancy restaurant meal, and, more recently, Skopje to Belgrade and Belgrade to Bar - but my eye was fixed on the prize: the Trans-Siberian railway, allowing a person to take the train over a staggering one-third of the globe, and indulge in as much glorious train-sleeping as anyone could hope for.

Cutting to the chase: so I finally did the Trans-Mongolian in early October, and it was largely awesome. I had initially intended to buy my tickets on spec, but that turned out to be a little risky given that I was working to a rather tight schedule, and so I ended up enlisting the help of Intourist, who conveniently have a Glasgow office and were able to assist me in terms of visa support and accommodation en route as well. This is the first time I’ve ever used a travel agent for stuff like that, which made me feel a little dirty and ashamed, but I didn’t have time for all the visa-related faff, especially since I’m no longer in London. Another reason that I used them was because I was travelling from east to west, and while there seem to be plenty of agents offering cheapo tickets from west to east (Trans-Sputnik, a Dutch agency, being the cheapest I’ve found), I couldn’t find anything going the other way.

I broke the journey up into sections: a thity-hour trip from Beijing to Ulaan Baatar, the highlights being: the mountainous scenery west of Beijing, including glimpses of the Great Wall; the Gobi Desert, particularly at sunrise; watching the bogies on the train being changed at the border between China and Mongolia (and watching our cabin-attendants stuff contraband into empty pillowcases to smuggle it across the border); and the stunning Mongolian scenery, mostly big, bald mountains, the occasional ger, a lot of horses and some of the most isolated towns and villages I’ve ever seen.

I stopped for a night in Ulaan Baatar, and was rather charmed by the city, especially Sukhbaatar Square, and the Gandan Monastery, despite the fact that it was absolutely freezing, and there was snow on the mountains surrounding the city, although it was only mid-October. I had booked accommodation at the Gandan Guesthouse, but mysteriously was collected from the train station by Idre, of Idre’s Guest House, and stayed there instead - presumably the Gandan was booked out and the two places have some sort of agreement (details of both places are here). In general, the brevity of my time in UB just made me want to come back for more - I’m particularly keen to go trekking in the Gobi (though possibly not on a camel, because bloody hell, those things are PAINFUL to sit on for more than five minutes), and/or hiking in the Altay Mountains (though it may be more interesting to do that on the Siberian side).

Next leg was from UB to Irkutsk, around 24 hours, and I had the good luck to be sharing my cabin with the patriarch of a Mongolian smuggling dynasty, who spent much of the journey up to the Russian border secreting things, and much of the journey thereafter unsecreting them and selling them on platforms. The highlight of this leg was of course the views of Lake Baikal, which was also the main reason why I stopped off in Irkutsk and travelled out to Listvyanka, on the shores of the lake, overnight (I got an exorbiant taxi from Irkutsk to Lisvyanka, as the train was late, but I got the bus back to the city the next day which was significantly cheaper and didn’t take any longer), which was fairly spectacular, especially with the rivers starting to ice over and the forests full of autumn colours. I spent much of the next day back in Irkutsk, mainly because I wanted to see the Decembrists‘ houses (the 19th century Russian rebels, not the indie band), near the bus station, and then back on the train again for the three and a half day journey on to Moscow.

I will admit that the train-related novelty wore off after about a day, as did the endless vista of taiga, taiga and more taiga, punctuated by the occasional concrete Siberian town, and I spent much of the journey planning where I’d stop off if I were to do the trip again (which I will). Namely: Tyumen, for a side-trip to Tobolsk; Vladimir for a side-trip to Suzdal; andmost excitingly, Krasnoyarsk to travel up the Yenisey river to Dudinka on the Arctic Ocean (though I am too much of a travel snob to go on the swanky ship in that link: ordinary cargo boat for me, thanks). I’ve also got a real hankering to have a wander round Turkic Siberia, Khakassia and Tuva and Yakutia (Yakutsk will apparently at some point be joined by rail to the main Trans-Siberian line, though I can’t find any information about that online), and to ride the Baikal-Amur Railway, hopping off at Severobaikalsk to see some of the more out-of-the-way bits of Lake Baikal, not to mention continuing the trip to Vladivostok and Lake Khanka, and on to Sakhalin Island and the Kamchatka Peninsula…and see this, here, is the curse of the travel-obsessive: every trip you make just makes you more and more conscious of all the other great trips out there, and you will NEVER HAVE TIME TO DO THEM ALL. That thought, right there, terrifies me a little.

Anyhow! The Man in Seat 61 gives more information about the Trans-Siberian than I ever could, so I’m just going to leave it there. Oh, and Russian train timetables online, because you never know when you might need them…

China

Blimey, it has almost been a month since I flew to Beijing from Sydney, and I have been terribly tardy in writing about it, haven’t I? Anyhow.

For some odd reason, China had never been particularly high on my list of places to visit. I mean, it was on my list in the same way that EVERYWHERE IN THE WORLD EVER is on my list, but I never had that great, panting longing to go there, in the way that I did with, say, Africa, or Eastern Europe (or Latin America, which I have still not visited, woe). Perhaps it was the sheer hugeness of the place that made it difficult to grasp, mentally - I never felt that way about Russia, but while Russia is unimaginably vast, much of that vastness is empty, whereas China is packed frighteningly full of fascinating things that would take a lifetime to see. Which makes me slightly panicky.

I fully expected that visiting China would spark off a fascination, though, and indeed it did. I now have all sorts of trips planned in my head - out west to Xinjiang and Tibet; down the east coast from Shanghai to Hong Kong; through the south to the Burmese border. Who knows when I will find time for these jaunts, but no matter.

As it was, this time I only had a week, and I ended up spending the whole time in Beijing. This wasn’t my intention, but while I’d known that 1 - 3 October was National Day (and I arrived on the 3rd), I wasn’t aware that actually this holiday lasts for an entire week and indeed many businesses were still closed by the 8th - which meant that lots of Chinese people were travelling (Beijing was absolutely heaving), and therefore train and plane tickets were very hard to come by. Meanwhile, I had found myself a very comfortable berth in the Downtown Backpackers, and there was more than enough in Beijing to keep me entertained.

(Incidentally, a couple of sites I found very helpful were SinoHotel.com and ChinaTripAdvisor.com - the former, as the name would suggest, was good for accommodation, and the latter seems to have excellent deals on flights - when I was toying with the idea of flying to Xi’an for a couple of days, ChinaTripAdvisor.com was able to find my plenty of flights around half the price of those that were coming up on Expedia, and they were also very helpful. Recommended.)

I spent much of my time doing the typical touristy things like visiting Tiananmen Square (frighteningly vast and teeming with people) and the Forbidden City; the Lama Temple (gorgeous) and the nearby Confucius Temple; the pearl market (where I spent far too much money) and the Temple of Heaven next door, which was possibly my favourite temple, largely for the park around it which was full of people practicing tai chi, exercising, playing musical instruments (including one chap who ran the gamut of national anthems on his traditional one-stringed violin), playing cards and other games, ballroom dancing and doing karaoke. I also did a day trip to the Great Wall, of course, eschewing the reported crowds at Badaling, and choosing instead to hike from Jinshanling to Simatai, which was spectacular, but nearly broke me - thankfully there was a massage parlour just a few doors down from the hostel, frankly.

But to my surprise - I’m not sure exactly what I was expecting, but it wasn’t that - Beijing is actually a great city for just…hanging around. The street on whch I was staying, Nan Luo Gu Xiang, was in the heart of Dongcheng, one of Beijing’s hutongs - traditional, low-rise neighbourhoods, which are fantastic just for wandering about. Nan Luo Gu Xiang has been rather agressively gentrified of late, owing, I think, to it being a bit of a backpacker-and-foreigner haven (I certainly saw more European faces there than in the rest of Beijing, which is not necessarily a recommendation in itself), which meant it was a rather charming mixture of traditional cheap fast food outlets (and, slightly more upmarket, a fabulous - nameless - restaurant towards the south end of the lane, with wonderful food and Yanjing beer for 60p), very swanky shops, rowdy backpacker bars, and, my personal favourite thing about Beijing, tea house after tea house. My personal favourite was Sandglass Cafe (erm, I have no idea what’s going on in the comments on that review - ignore, I think), and the Zha Zha Cafe was also good (scroll down). I had a brief but intense fantasy of moving to Beijing and writing novels in these coffee shops, but frankly that would hardly be practical.

Beijing’s pleasantly easy to get around - the metro is quick, clean, very cheap, and has pleasant zoetrope-type advertisements in the tunnel, which I found very exciting; unfortunately it’s not always convenient for everywhere (it was about a 30 minute walk from where I was staying - normally fine, except when I was crippled from the Jinshanling to Simatai hike) - apparently the buses are good too, but I didn’t brave them, as taxis are as cheap as chips (or cheaper) and very friendly, especially if you’ve written down where you’re wanting to go rather than try to limp through in embarrassingly awful Mandarin. Only weird issue: ATMs are plentiful, but I found it incredibly difficult to find somewhere that would give me a Visa advance in US dollars. Which would of course not have been an issue if I had actually planned ahead for such things. Ah well, you live and learn, except, no, actually, you don’t, not if you’re me.

Oh! And I saw some acrobats! Which, yes, terribly touristy, but also ace. Shamefully I can’t remember the name of the particular troupe, but it was organised by Downtown Backpackers. Highly recommended.