1. China: Journey to China
The Wandelgek was finally fullfilling one of his long time travel bucketlist dreams. He had tried to travel deeper into China after his 2019 adventure on the Trans Siberia and Trans Mongolia Express, but failed to do so because his arrival in Beijing coincided with the Chinese National Holiday week, which is starting at the 1st of october.
But he vowed to try again and for that he made damn sure that he was out of the Tourist season and long before the 1st of october. He had seen photo’s of the places he wanted to visit for mountain walks in the national holiday week and it simply meant climbing these mountains in an enormous crowd of Chinese tourists, doing the same. Not much fun and hotels are fully booked and trains are full as well. Just a warning for foreign tourists and travellers to plan travels before or after that week.
Because of an early plane from Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, and the obligatory 3 hour upfront presence at the airport, The Wandelgek booked a hotel near Schiphol and went there a day before. He returned to the IBIS Styles hotel, which he had used returning from China in 2019 as well and which had been a pleasant surprise to him.
Schiphol Airport / Amsterdam Airport
This also provided The Wandelgek with the opportunity to arrange some practical issues on the airport the day before leaving.
1st of all he could already digitally check in for his plane…
… and after that he went to a money exchange office of GWK to change Euros for Taiwanese Dollars and Chinese Renminbi (Yuan). The Wandelgek had a transfer flight via Taipei airport on Taiwan, so he needed a bit of Taiwanese Dollars for a cup of coffee or a beer or a snack, while waiting a few hours for the connection to Shanghai.
Major tip for travellers to inland, rural China: BRING CASH MONEY! Yes plastic (credit and debit cards are accepted in China, but that goes as far as the large cities). In rural China you can use services as Ali Baba pay or Wechat pay (more on those later), but Cash will do too (preferably smaller notes (smaller than 100 or 50 yuan).
So the Wandelgek got himself some change which were 100 yuan notes, which luckily he was able to change into smaller notes at local hotels and shops.
Again the GWK Exchange had an offer where they guaranteed to take back large Chinese banknotes (50 or 100 yuan) against the same exchange rate as today. There is a minimum amount of euros you need to exchange for that which is about 1000.
IBIS Styles Hotel
The rooms at the IBIS Styles hotel are very spacious, clean…
… and have a large bathroom too.
The hotel room view is over the Airport …
The bar is a very nice place to spend the afternoon and late evening …
… and the restaurant has fine dishes like e.g. Carpaccio and roasted chicken with fries…
Again a very nice stay which means that when needed I’ll consider this hotel again.
Next morning after an early rise there was a very good breakfast to start the day and then after check out, off with the convenient and free shuttlebus to the airport.
At the Airport again
The Wandelgek immediately went for the luggage counter to get rid of his large backpack (weighing about 21 kilo) and after that through customs. The plane to Taipei was still scheduled at 11.00.
He now had time to go for a coffee before boarding the plane. Actually this was the most ZEN/Relaxed boarding ever, because of not having to take an absurdly early train which might or might not be on time to transport him across the country to the airport. This was so much better …
The flight via Taipei to Shanghai
After boarding and lift off with China Airlines, a Taiwanese airline, the flight went quite smooth. The Wandelgek still remembered his long flight to Buenos Aires in a plane where leg space was so little that he had to sit diagonally in his chair to have a liitle space between his knees and the seat in front of him. In this plane the space was quite good though. Luckily so, because the flight from Amsterdam to Taipei takes about 14 hrs and then still 2 hours from Taipei to Shanghai. Another thing that was much better on this flight were the regular food interuptions. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, but also just hot or cold drinks and lots of snacks…
At the start The Wandelgek noticed this screen of which he thought it was indicating the route of the flight …
That was above Russia and Ukraine!!! “Are they NUTS?”; he thought, thinking over disasterous MH17 scenarios. But then he noticed the line was a bit to direct for an average flight and it only indicated the distance between the two airports.
The real flight route was much more south over the southern Black Sea coast…
Phew…
On the flight, the movie program was quite extensive and I watched 3 different movies of which two were Asian:
1. The breaking ice
The Breaking Ice is a 2023 Chinese-Singaporean romantic drama film written and directed by Anthony Chen. Starring Zhou Dongyu, Liu Haoran and Qu Chuxiao, the film was selected for the Un Certain Regard section of the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. It was selected as the Singaporean entry for the Best International Feature Film at the 96th Academy Awards.
I liked the movie a lot and a great scene is when the three protagonists challenge eachother in a bookshop to steal the heaviest/thickest book and run out of the store. Another great scene is just before that where we get to look into a book filled with beautiful mountain drawings. Actually one of the reasons for me to travel to China again, are these drawings by Chinese artists of mountainscapes with strange trees. More about that later.
2. Evil does not exist
Evil Does Not Exist is a 2023 Japanese drama film written and directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi. With a cast of non-professional actors, the film follows a single father who lives in a village that is disrupted by a real estate project and the consequences its development will have to their environment.
3. I forgot the third.
Some things to know before entering China
Before entering China it is good to know a few things:
1. If you travel into and out of China for no longer than 15 days, chances are that you do not need a visa. Check this with your foreign affairs ministery. More info at my intro blogpost to these China travels:
2. As mentioned before in this blogpost: When travelling the countryside: bring enough cash money!
3. In China certain websites and apps that are common use in other countries are explicitly forbidden and thus blocked. Think of Google and of Whatsapp. The Chinese have their own version of Whatsapp, which is Wechat, but for us westerners the use of it is quite a challenge. To subscribe to Wechat you need someone already a member to introduce you. That is possibly problematic. Another thing is that Wechat initially (for some reason later during my travels that did go much better), does not work well with vpn and you need a vpn connection to still be able to use google and Whatsapp (e.g. to keep in touch with home). Still a Wechat connection can be advisable too. It is used by locals and could help you to connect to hotels, drivers, guides or just local Chinese people you met, etcetera.
4. Install a working vpn that has proven itself in China, BEFORE ENTERING THE COUNTRY! After entering it is not possible because vpn’s are blocked. I used Astrill vpn and it worked quite well after the initial problems of becoming a member and the vpv-issues were solved.
5. Roaming in China is quite expensive. Better is to either block roaming and use WIFI connections in combination with vpn or to buy a local telephone card for calls and internet connections. I skipped that and used WIFI connections only.
6. Not much Chinese people speak English or any other language than Chinese. Therefor it can be practical to install either an online translation app like Google Translate or buy/download an offline translation app, to be able to communicate with chinese drivers, translate chinese restaurant menus or just ask questions at people passing by. In large cities the chance of finding English speaking Chinese is a lot better than in rural areas.
All mentioned apps at 4 and 6 can be obtained via Google Play app for Android smartphones.
7. When travelling by train, remember to not have cannisters (doesn’t matter what’s in them, except if they are empty) which are larger than 150 mililiter. Luggage is being scanned before boarding a train and cannisters that are too large are being confiscated. 5the main reason for this seems to be that drug traffickers and drug users mix the drugs into fluids and gels and foams, etcetera and are able to extract these afterwards.
Arriving in Shanghai
The flight to Shanghai from Taipei was on schedule and was a relatively short one. Thus I arrived at Shanghai Airport a bit before 12.00, at noon. Temperatures were a shock. It was 39.8 Celsius. Which felt like walking into a 43 degrees Celsius oven.
Luckily the car that picked me up and the hotel room were very well airconditioned.