We arrived in Hangzhou to heavy rain but managed to get a taxi from the southern railway station which is on the other side of the Qian Tang River. I had never been to that side when I was here in December and if I hadn’t known it I wouldn’t have known it to be Hangzhou. The scale of the city that side and the new construction and buildings there are mind blowing to say the least. There are still some green areas in between but I was glad that we were staying on the other side of the river near West Lake where it is very leafy and green and there are a lot of parks and gardens and a relatively small city area. It was nice to arrive somewhere I knew my way around instead of flying blind in a new place. The enormous West Lake is a huge attraction for the Chinese who flock here in their millions because there are not a lot of wide open lake areas with beautiful gardens surrounding them as there are in Hangzhou. The lake covers a vast area and would take days to walk around it and over the many bridges and follow all the meandering pathways around the lake. The park areas are dotted with tables and chairs where people can take their thermoses and picnics for a few hours. There are of course the obligatory “Starbucks””KFC” and McDonalds” dotted around the lake but there are also some restaurants and other snack bars to cater for everyone.

The one drawback in Hangzhou is that there is no metro system so you have to rely on taxis and buses. The buses are far more reliable but a bit more difficult to use unless you know where they are going. There are many tourist information locations around the city but very few of the people speak any English. Luckily I knew a couple of routes to get us places. We tried to get a taxi back from the city and the taxi drivers here are notorious for not taking you if they don’t like the direction you are going. We were standing in the rain in a road I was not familiar with and were knocked back by six of them so we decided to walk to any bus stop and ask a driver the way back to the university. Luckily we turned a corner and I recogized the street and the bus stop so we got on but I couldn’t remember where to get off and couldn’t see out of the fogged up windows. I asked an older couple behind me if they knew Xixi road but they weren’t sure so they in turn asked a girl behing them and she asked the girl opposite her. In the end the four of them were having a discussion about where we should get off. They decided on the stop and motioned for us to get off. It was lovely of them and we all said fond goodbyes! Maurice said it reminded him a similar situation in Ireland where if one person doesn’t know the answer others get involved to find a solution.

In Hangzhou Maurice is getting a bridge made with three teeth for his upper jaw. He lost a tooth a few months ago and the dentist in Perth recommended a bridge with three teeth for $1580. The service and oral hospital is amazing. He paid 50cents to see the orthodontist and had 3 appointments scheduled within minutes. The bridge is costing $325 a 5th of what it would cost in Perth and the facility is affiliated with the university and is state of the art!

Maurice had an eventful time getting money from the bank and helping a young chap who fell off his bike while texting! and had a bad gash on his nose. Maurice took off when others arrived as he tends to faint at the sight of blood!

We rearranged our travel plans and set off after 2days for Suzhou for 4days on the fast train via Shanghai on 1st June. We don’t know how lucky we are with queues at home. The train ticket office had thousands of people waiting to buy tickets in ordedrly long queues but they also process them at a fast rate. We did 304kms an hour to Suzhou so even going via Shanghai it only took and hour and a half.

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We had a good flight from Vientiane to Kunming. When we flew in Maurice was amazed at the number of trucks and semi trailers that he saw in a transport yard. He never thought that many existed in the world let alone in one spot.

The “Triumphal Golden Horse Hotel” was on a busy road in a suburban area near a spaghetti junction. The room and corridor decor was a bit like bad taste Las Vegas with a lot of mood lighting and studded padded doors and oversized lounge chairs. It was very good value with a separate room -complete with 20ltr water cooler, TV and a square table with four chairs around it. It looked like most guests would play cards there. It seems to be a big pastime here whether in the hotel or on the street at little noodle houses or in the park. If it is not cards it is chinese chess or mahjong with a number of people surrounding the players watching them. The rooms were large and for $45 including an enormous (all Chinese) breakfast, lunch and dinner buffet, incredible value! The dining room was more like a refectory with long tables but the food was excellent. We were the only “laowai” foreigners there but it was full of Chinese people and the food was very fresh. We didn’t have the lunch as we went into the city centre on the local bus and walked back.

A few doors down from the hotel in a tiny place we had a great dinner where a bit of Mandarin and lots of pointing got us a dinner of wonton soup, a cold noodle and chilli dish and delicious fried potatoes chinese style with chilli and spring onions. We shared a large beer and the bill came to $3!

Even though Kunming is an enormous city with groups of high rise appartment buildings and ultra modern corporate buildings and a lot of traffic it has a relaxed feel about it especially on the Sunday when we walked around the city centre and back to the hotel. There is a large pedestrian area and a lot of small parks on one side of the long main road.

One receptionist wanted to try out her English and me my mandarin so between us we understood each other. The one drawback in saying a whole sentence in Mandarin is that I don’t understand all of what they say back to me so that can be a bit of a challenge.

We found some other very friendly and helpful people in town.

I wanted to recharge my Chinese sim card and were sent down the road by a very helpful man by mistake to the opposition company. A young guy there come outside with us and hailed us a taxi an explained to the driver that we wanted to go to China Mobile and gave him the directions. Two girls there helped me recharge my phone and a grandfather carrying his grandson helped us to get to the bus stop that we needed.

The locals on the local bus were laughing at us because we both went to sit down in a double seat with an arm rest at the end but we both couldn’t fit our western sized bottoms on the seat so we had to sit separately.

We went into a chemist in the city centre to get something for a case of diarrohea which I had picked up in Laos from I don’t know where since we had shared the same meals and Maurice had no ill effects. Dr Maurice tried various remedies of gastro-stops, gut relief and rehydration salts from his medicine chest to no avail. I wish that I had videod the charades between the lady behing the counter who thought I was suffering from constipation to Maurice’s actions for diarrhoea. We were all laughing in the end but we did get some capsules which had “stomach and intestine” written on them in English. The lady kept saying her three English words of one, two, three so we got the message to take them 3 times a day and after taking 3 I felt back to normal.

Chinese medicine and remedies are very much in use and we went for a morning walk and found a series of streets with every shop dedicated to roots, wood fungus, deer antlers and all sorts of unidentifiable things for sale as well as the grinders for processing all of the dried items. We passed people sorting out coils of something and when we came closer we saw that they were coils of small dried snakes. I was glad I took the conventional medicine! The hospital was just down the road from us and there were a group of people huddled around the back of a small station wagon and they were making room for a body on a trolley which was wrapped and tied up in a blue tarp. The hospital obviously hands the body over to the family to take home. Sad to see but life as it is here.

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The bus left Luang Prabang at 8am. The “VIP” bus has armchair like seats and it would be a very comfortable ride for the Lao people or any others who are under 5ft but we had to sit with our legs wide apart to be semi comfortable. We sat on the upper level of the bus and had a wonderful view. I took some photos but the windows weren’t very clean so they will probably be like looking through a net curtain.

The trip would not good for anyone who suffers motion sickness as it is a very winding trip up through the mountains with some hairpin bends and the bus acts like a cradle, rocking from side to side. We were treated to many Lao popular music CD’s a couple of which had a bit of a melody.

There was a toilet on the lower level but you would have to be a dwarf to get through the doorway. Luckily the dirver made a stop about 3hours into the journey where we paid 2000kip (25cents) to use the squat toilets. Luckily the knees are holding out! Maurice and I also knocked our heads as we got up on the overhead shelves as they are also built for Laotians. We had a stop for lunch and we were amazed that a girl came out of the lower level of the bus complete with a large bag and a motorbike which she got on and drove away.

The scenery for the first leg of the trip to Vang Vieng was wonderful with specdtacular views way down the valleys and up to the mountains. There are a lot of plantation forrests We then got some rain but not too much and it then cleared up for the rest of the journey.

The little villages perched on the mountainsides have a mixture of houses of woven bamboo with thatched roof or houses made of handmade concrete blocks. Most places seem to have satellite dishes. We only saw one primary school sign and lots of children collecting water or playing together. After 4hours we came to a large village with lots of stalls selling a variety of goods. We then came down from the mountains and a lot of hills had been logged but many hills had also been replanted so it seems that they are replacing as they log and not just wiping out whole areas. We then came across a lot of rice paddies and market gardens and a few more large villages. The bus driver honked the horn many times to move the many cows, goats and dogs that were just wandering freely. There was also a lot of poor housing right next to the road and lots of people sitting together playing cards or just relaxing.

The trip on the flat was different from the mountain road which was in good condition. The last four hours we bumped our way over patches of bitumenised road and dirt road and very corrugated road and many large pot holes filled with water. The bus driver definately earned his money.

There is a lot of construction of houses and other buildings and a few of the Lao people we spoke to are keen to catch up with their Vietnamese and Thai neighbours but they seem to have done very well in the 13years since Laos was opened to the world. We found the people polite and friendly in general with even a few words of English. We learnt to say hello, thank you and that is delicious and they seemed happy with that.We arrived in Vientiane after 11hours and got a tuk tuk into our hotel just back from the Mekong river. As it was late we just went around the corner to a little cafe and I had homemade fettucini which were delicious for $4. There are a lot of small cafes and a motorbike shop where you can rent a vintage motorbike to ride around the city.

The living costs here in the capital are just as low as in Luang Prabang and the coffee here is excellent with nearly every small cafe having a coffee machine of some kind.

We had a lot of thunder and a torrential downpour during the night but we have been lucky and we had no rain when we went out today to see some of the city. The main drag from the presidential palace to the Victory monument is modelled on the Champs Elysees with the presidential palace at one end and their Victory monument at the other but when I climbed the stairs up to the top of the monument that is when the similarity ended.

The last two floors were packed with stalls selling everything imaginable – enterprising to say the least!

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We flew in the afternoon to Kunming and will see what our “Triumphal Golden Horse” hotel is like. We were sad in one way to be leaving Laos which we have both really enjoyed.