Squat Toilets in China

During my first month in China I had complained or commented on the toilets to friends. Well not just me the other westerners that I was traveling with did similar. All of the hostels I stayed in had western toilets but in shopping centers, restaurants, bus stations, train stations and even on trains you encounter squat toilets. At the time some Chinese friends said that these toilets are fine, wait until you get to Yunnan.

2 months later I am in Yunnan and taking an 8 hour bus journey from Dali to Shangri-la. 4 hours into the journey the bus stops at a restaurant for food and a toilet break. Squad toilets is to be expected they are the standard all over Asia but normally they have walls and doors surrounding them. Not the case when you leave the major cities in China.

Chinese toilets

Squat toilet in China

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Smoke, ganja, ganja, smoke?

A common problem you have to contend with when traveling is touts trying to sell you stuff such as drugs, hotel rooms, taxis or asking to take you to their "friends" shop or to a market. In Asia most of these touts seem to assume that every western tourist wants to buy drugs and as a result when you are in the main tourist areas you are constantly harassed by them.


In Shanghai when walking down the main tourist shopping street guys will walk along side you whispering "marijuana, cocaine". In Thailand things are a little different due to their strict approach to drug dealing and drug possession. Drugs are still offered to tourists but those offering them are quite discrete. Next you have Cambodia where restaurants will have "happy" items on the menu, for example you can order a regular pizza or a "happy" pizza. Marijuana is illegal in Cambodia yet it is sold in many restaurants and bars. The owners pay bribes to the local police and they are left alone.
Vietnam is a little more discrete than Cambodia but yet the moto taxi drivers ask if you want a taxi when you refuse their next question is if you want Marijuana. Malaysia is a little different, when you arrive in the airport you see a big sign saying "Drug possession is punishable by death".


Finally Dali in the Yunnan province in China is different, you are regularly offered drugs but they are far from your stereotypical drug dealer. When you walk around the old town you are constantly approached by elderly ladies who say "Smoke, ganja, ganja, smoke?". They are quite aggressive, they will follow you down the street repeating it over and over again and they do this everytime they see you. I was in Dali for almost two weeks and it was took until the second week for them to recognise me and to realise that I wasn't interested. I was not brave enough to take a picture of them when they were following me but I got a photo of them walking away.

Not your typical drug dealer

Dancing before work...

I'm back in China. One day when walking to the Bus station in Kunming I passed a restaurant where all of the staff were outside dancing. I got a video of the last twenty seconds of it.



I showed the video to a friend and asked what it was all about. Apparently it is quite common for employees to dance together before starting work. I asked why and was told it is a way to cheer people up. I'm not sure if it would work in Ireland....

Neon lights, Goose Intestine and Photography in Hong Kong

I am in China now where the Internet is restricted. Blogger.com is blocked so it has been difficult to update the blog. This post is about my time in Hong Kong.


Hong Kong is expensive, the streets are very busy with lots of people, there are shops everywhere, there are even more shop signs and at night everything is lit up in Neon.

Busy streets in Hong Kong

Hong Kong by Night

I took a ferry around Hong Kong island and Kowloon, the harbor is one of the most photographed harbors in the world. After about 5 minutes I got bored taking photographs but everyone else was taking as many pictures as possible.

Photo time in Hong Kong

Finally here are some photos of a hot pot that we had for dinner one night in Hong Kong. A hot pot consists of a simmering pot of stock at the center of the table. In this case we had two types of stock, one spicy and one not so spicy. The pot is kept simmering throughout the meal and the ingredients are placed in the pot and cooked at the table.

Hong Kong Hot Pot

In this particular restaurant we could order an unlimited amount of ingredients but if we did not eat them then we would have to pay for whatever we did not eat. I've included photos below of some of the more unusual ingredients.

Goose Intestine

Fish Skin

Pigs Neck/Throat

Next stop Malaysia

After a few days in Kuala Lumpur I went to Penang, spent two nights in Georgetown then went to Batu Ferringhi. Here I spent a few days by the beach and finally got around to reading the third Stieg Larsson book. The accomodation was more expensive than usual but it was on the beach. The photo below is taken from the patio door.

Room with a view

I tried to hire a motorbike on Penang but seeing as they had insurance they would not hire out bikes without a valid drivers license. So I hired a car instead and did a trip around the island which allowed me to see some of the not so touristy areas. We stopped at a small fishing village for lunch and had fresh fish.

Fresh fish sweet & sour style

After Penang I went to the Cameron Highlands and then to Melaka and finally back to Kuala Lumpur for my flight to Hong Kong.

Tea Plantation in the Cameron Highlands

Dinner is lost in translation

Here are some menus that I came across during my travels in Vietnam.

Half done beef a beef balls

Fried rice with variaties

If you are feeling unwell they have nurses on hand

I had previously ate crab in tamarind sauce and shrimp with tamarind sauce but I decided to give the tamarind sauce dish a miss in this restaurant. Take a look at the 4th item on the menu below.

Finger Nail with Tamarind Sauce

The bus that doesn't stop

After the mountain biking trip I spent a night in Mui Ne then took a bus back to Saigon and spent another night there. I met a guy in the hostel who was complaining how Vietnam was very expensive. He had just paid 300,000 dong for a taxi from the airport. He was not too happy when I told him I was planning on taking the public bus that costs 3,000 dong. To put this into perspective €1 is approximately 25,000 dong.

I got to the bus station and I was the only tourist there. I knew the bus I needed was 152 so I saw that on a sign and waited there. There were no signs in English. A few minutes later a young guy approached me and asked if I was going to the airport. I was a bit suspicious of him as you are constantly approached by taxi and moto drivers. He told me that it was bus 152 and that there was on due in about 5 minutes. Then he saw his bus and ran to get it, it didn't stop so he just jumped on as it passed.

Soon after he had gone a guy and girl said hello to me. They asked where I was from, where I was going and so on. We chatted for a few minutes until some people started shouting at me and I noticed bus 152 coming down the road. I grabbed my bags and walked towards the bus. The bus didn't stop instead it just slowed down as it was passing the bus stop so I had to throw my bag on and jump on while it stayed moving. Once I got on the bus I put my bags down on a seat and went up to pay the driver. At this point I noticed the two people that had spoken to me earlier were also on the bus. They had already paid for my ticket. They would not accept money from me, instead they sat opposite me and spoke to me for the rest of the journey. Once we got the the airport they walked with me to the departures entrance. This was my second time to meet people in Vietnam who were genuinely friendly, helpful and not trying to sell me something!

Mountain biking from Dalat to Mui Ne

After a few days in Dalat my friends continued north to Na Thrang. I had a flight in a few days from Saigon so I needed to make my way back there. I heard that you could do a mountain biking trip from Dalat to Mui Ne so I asked about it in the various tourist offices. You needed a minimum of 2 people to do such a trip so I left my email address with them and asked to be contacted if they had someone else looking to do similar.

The following day I got an email saying that they had someone else wanting to do the trip and that we'd leave at 7am the following day. The trip from Dalat to Mui Ne is about 200km but we did the start and end of the journey by car so we cycled a little over 100km. There were a few downhill sections, one of which lasted for about 15 minutes but the rest was relatively flat with a few climbs every so often.

View of mountains on way to Mui Ne

Every time we passed through a village people would come out to wave at us and shout hello.
Later I asked our guide how frequently they ran these tours and he said it had been about 2 months since they last did one. This explained how we were a novelty for the locals :)

Mui Ne to Dalat by bus

After a few days in Mui Ne we took a bus to Dalat. We had heard that the road to Dalat was very bad so we were prepared for the worst. Once we got on the bus we noticed they had a spare tyre sitting on one of the seats which seemed a bit odd. About 15 minutes into the journey the bus stopped at the side of the road and they proceeded to take off a wheel, remove the tyre and put on this new tyre. Only in south east asia would this happen, anywhere else they'd have changed the tyre before collecting a bus load of tourists to go on a journey.

Changing a tyre 15 minutes into a journey

The journey to Dalat was very slow as the road was so bad. At times there was no road at all instead a gravel path with large craters. The bus driver was well used to road and quietly smoked cigarette after cigarette as he slowly made his way along the road.

View out of the bus

We made it to Dalat safely and hired out motorbikes this time at a regular price without the tet tax. There was considerably less traffic in Dalat than Saigon although their bridges did not inspire confidence.

Traffic in Dalat

Bridge in Dalat

You want bike? you rent mine.

After getting stuck in Saigon for longer than planed I eventually made it to Mui Ne. The tet tax continued and we struggled to get accommodation. The day after we got there we decided we'd hire some motorbikes but the tet tax was out in full force and the price was double because it was tet.

We tried a few different places and they had all doubled their price, they all had lots of motorbikes available for rent so its not like there was a big demand for them. 

Finally after hearing that yet again the price was double due to tet we decided we wouldn't bother but as we walked back to the street one of the moto taxis was there. He had listened to our full conversation and rather than his normal "you want moto" he said "You want bike? you rent mine". We talked for a bit and agreed on a price that was a few dollars less that what the shops wanted. His bike was new unlike the  old bikes the bike hire place had. He called his friend who arrived on another bike which my 2 friends hired. They gave us their helmets and then rang another friend who arrived and give us another helmet (3 of us and 2 bikes). We agreed to meet them in the same place the following day at the same time to return the bikes. We paid them and the 3 of them left smiling all on the one bike and no one wearning a helmet.

We spent the day riding around Mui Ne visiting the sand dunes, sandboarding and stopping at some fishing villages.

Fishing village near Mui Ne

Entrance to sand dunes

Sand dunes close up!

More sand dunes