Belay Specs!

Whilst we were in Yangshuo, we met this cool German couple (climbers, obviously) who owned a very cool pair of specs. Basically, they have prisms on a glasses frame allowing you to look up at your climber with out straining your neck :D genius!

They are called CU belay glasses and they cost a small fortune [98Euros for a pair]

Shanghai Conspiracy

There is a conspiracy over my head... I'm sure of it... Not crazy, I swear, I've seen them everywhere, looking at me, ready to send some clouds and mist when I take my camera out... Chinese everywhere... CONSPIRACCYYYYYYYYY!!!! -_-'

Better now, I've taken my pills. Doctor always told me:
"Greg, calm down, But if you are feeling sinister
Go off and see a minister
Chances are you'll probably feel better
If you stayed and played with yourself"

Apparently Belle and Sebastian had the same doctor...

So, where was I... ah yes, explaining you the conspiracy. Weather is kind of crap in Shanghai, most of the time white mist probably linked with pollution, grey clouds, so the light for photos is bad. Was taking quite a lot of pictures when we arrived there but the crappy light really got my motivation down and i stopped going out with my camera, saving it for our trip out of Shanghai (I've several thousands pictures to sort if someone wants to help me).

But it exists some kind of nice remedy and mine is a 50mm 1.4D, able to take the light even if it's not there. So last Saturday i took it with me, to have some drinks with friends. Thanks for your smiles and happiness, gave me back some motivation :)

Kaeru,
Photographer wannabe.

Shanghai Healing Home

Slightly different NGO helping Chinese orphans, this time with cleft palates; Shanghai Healing Home takes cares of babies with cleft palates, feed them up so that they can take on surgery and then looks after them while they recover.

They recently moved to a new location deep in Pudong, near Guanglan [广兰] station on Line 2. The new home is much more spacious and homely compared to the old place in Puxi.

They even had 3 new babies (who looked only a couple of months old) who don't have names yet and are provisionally called no. 1, 2, and 3.

Rachel [Left], who has no toy truck to hit me with and Anna [Right].

a very smiley little boy (Benjamin)

Beer in a bag!

[LEFT] Yes, beer in a plastic bag. TsingTao beer is sold on the street fresh from the keg into a plastic bag....yum.


[BELOW] Seafood on Hebei Road [河北路], trying a barbequed starfish - which had a suspiciously green mushy interior which apparently tastes of verylittle given how weird it smells.


[LEFT] An aquarium on the end of Zhanqiao [栈桥] pier， however, you would probably learn more about sealife from poking the food on offer in tanks on Hebei Road [河北路]. Which Greg did repeatedly until a waitress told him off.




[BELOW] a guy baking corn on Zhanqiao [栈桥] pier.

Qingdao Bouldering [青岛抱石]

After scouring the internet for information (and contacting some very helpful and some not so helpful ppl) on bouldering in Qingdao [青岛] we managed to find the location (and some routes) for some great boulders. As far as we can see, a guy called Rocker seems to be the leader in posting information about and developing bouldering and climbing in Qingdao.


Sport climbing is available in Fushan [浮山]


Bouldering is avaliable at:

~ JinJiaLing Mountain [金家岭山](also known as Jinling mountian), close to Yinchuan 俄East Road [银川东路] past Tailing Road [泰岭路] - INFO
~ FengChao [蜂巢] (honey comb) - INFO
~ QuanXinHe [泉心河], which is far from town on the otherside of Laoshan [崂山] - INFO
~ ZhangJiaHe [张家河], again far from Qingdao town more in the direction of Yantai Peak [烟台顶] on Hong Shan[红山] - INFO
~ ChangLing [长岭]， which is far from town on the otherside of Laoshan [崂山] - INFO



There were loads of boulders with plently of routes on JinJiaLing Mountain to play with:

Rocker's Bouldering Guide - HERE

NanJing [南京]

Nanjing! - a 2 hour train ride from Shanghai (leaves from both Shanghai Train Station上海火车站 and the very new and shiny Hongqiao railway station 上海虹桥火车站 - which is way out west near Hongqiao Airport on the newly opened section of Line 2.

Apart from seeing a bit of Nanjing [南京] we also learnt a valuable lesson: ALWAYS take your passport to stay in a Chinese Hotel (or hostel). They refuse every other form of identification (if you are a chinese citizen you can bring your ID card instead). Also if you had happened to be staying in a different hotel before they could call up to get them to confirm your details, but as we are resident in China that wasn't going to happen. So after sitting in a police station for 2hours to wait to find out that the police have no access to our information registered on the government database. So we had to head home that same day: on the brightside it's free to exchange your train ticket for a different day, just as long as you manage to find the right queue in the train station.

Before we left we managed to get into Zhongshan Mountain National Park [钟山风景名胜区] and see the Xiaoling Tomb [明孝陵景区]:







and Dr. SunYat-sen's Mausoleum [中山陵景区]:

It rained a lot, but atleast it made it bearable to walk around.

Which led to interesting rolled-up-trousers-shoe-free fashion.

More Baobei...

Apparently, Ke Xin [可馨] is now staying with a Baobei Ayi in Shanghai, until they manage to find a 'healing home' (foster family) to look after her and then hopefully an adopter.

According to some other volunteers I met the other day, one of the previous babies (about 3months old) who was born with a massive Teratoma (aparently bigger than her head)possibly a fetus in fetu, and had surgery to remove the growth at 15days old which resulted in her being sliced from hip to hip both at the front and back. She apparently has a waiting list of 200 people (mainly American: lots of Chinese orphans are adopted over to the States) waiting to adopt her. Despite this they think it will take well over a year until she is with her new adoptive parents due to the paperwork involved with the Chinese orphanage, the Chinese Government and the American Government.

I spent my Wednesday lunch time with a little boy (nearly 4 years old) who has some Gastro Intestinal problems and who throughly enjoyed hitting me with a little toy car.

Expo Benefits

So, in addition to the HUGE drive to clean up and green up Shanghai City the Expo has other benefits too. Until the end of the Expo its possible to avoid the normal list of official paperwork and form filling needed to transfer RMB into a foreign currency. Instead all that is needed is your passport and for the value of money that you have exchanged into foreign currency, this year, to be less than $50 000 USD in value. For values over 50 000USD you need to do something special - although I didn't bother finding out what that was on the account of not having 50 000 USD.

So, if you need to get your RMB out of China it's best to do it before this October.

Buying Train Tickets at Shanghai Railway Station

I tried buy train tickets today, before we had just bought them on the day from the ticket counter, but we are attempting some vague 'organisation' for this weekend's trip to Nanjing [南京].

I heard that 'there's a china eastern airline counter where you can buy train and airtickets inside this tomson centre along ZhangYang Road adjacent to Pucheng Road & PuMing Road' LIES! I went and asked the lady at the counter and she said 'No'.

Mind you this guy is a little more helpful on the whole topic of buying train tickets.

Anyhoo...I went off to the station itself and to the HUGE ticketing office [lian ge shou piao chu - 联合售票处] which lies at the corner of Meiyuan Road [梅园路] and Moling Road [秣陵路]. Which is just a big hall with a line of windows on one side and long queues of people trying to buy tickets, there is meant to be a queue for foreigners but I didn't immediately see one. I waited about 20mins in a queue to be confused by the lady behind the counter - i think each counter only sells specific types of tickets - there seemed to be particular queues for slow trains, rapids and expresses. So, I went to a different queue where I finally bought 2 tickets to Nanjing (cost 146RMB per single ticket, train takes 2 hrs to get there and leaves from Shanghai Hong Qiao Railway Station [上海虹桥火车站]). After all the bustle of the ticket hall I passed some funky ticket machines - which it turns out are much simpler to use to book your tickets and have a choice of an english menu (huzzah!). Although I must point out that I only saw the route for Nanjing (and all the stations in between there and Shanghai) on the screen and I didn't check if you could book other routes on it.

How to get to the magic ticket machines? Well from Line 1 metro station, head towards Exit 1

Then before you go up the stairs to exit, turn left down a small shopping alley

the entrance to the small shopping alley

walk to the end of the small shop lined corridor, then at the end face right and go up the stairs to ground level. Once at ground level (at least one of) the ticket vending machine hall(s) [自助售票处] is on the right.

Entrance to the ticket vending machine hall

Magic ticket machines with English

Baobei Babies...

I finally managed to find some volunteering (which doesn't involve paying money to do worthwhile causes - weird i know) with the Baobei Foundataion which basically involved poking a little orphan who is in hospital either waiting for or recovering from an operation.

The Baobei Foundataion basically works with orphanages all over China to fund operations for children mainly born with from some kind of spinal problems, like spina bifida and some other thing which i had never heard of... anyway the foundation organises for the orphans to come to Shanghai, they then pay for their operation and once recovered they try and place the baby in a 'healing home' - a foster family who look after the baby until they are adopted.

The Ayi and baby, 'Ke Xin' [可馨]

Often they try and get an Ayi (carer) from the same orphanage the baby is from to bring the baby to Shanghai and stay with the baby 24/7 during the baby's hospital stay. So I spent some time with Ke Xin (a 9month baby girl with spina bifida) to allow the Ayi to have a little break, like have a shower or go buy lunch.

Attempting to speak to the Ayi in Chinese, she said that many of the children from her orphanage (in HeNan province [河南]) tend to be adopted by americans, however some children, especially those with more serious disabilities tend to stay in the orphange long term. According to one of the ladies who works for Baobei Foundation, some of the children are found days after birth and some with no information on their birth or name, which leads to some babies having to have their birth date estimated from the state of their umbilical cord and names given to them by the orphanage.

You'll be happy to know that Ke Xin recovered very quickly from her little surgery and was discharged on thursday to stay in her foster home. Even the Ayi was impressed at how well Ke Xin had been doing and that she had put on weight since the operation.

Expo!

So we finally got to the Expo (after Tanya generously let us steal her tickets for a day - Thank you Tanya!). The place is HUGE, and we spent most of the day (and a bit of the evening) just wondering around the site looking at the pavilions, and considering the fact that most of the queues were 3-4 hours long, we only managed to go inside two pavilions: the first was the Netherlands - which had a very fast moving queue and the Phillpines which had NO queue on the account that the inside held almost zero cultural interest and looked like a cross between a night club and a trinket shop.

Israel had a very funky pavilion

...but it was apparently being held together by duct tape

[Left] There were people sleeping on benches (and on grass) all over the site, and after walking around for 4 hrs it started to look like a great idea.
[Right] Kids with Haibao dolls

Resting in the shade playing cards - please note the 'expo seats' which 90% of people were carrying around.

[Left] British Pavilion [Right] Korean Pavilion with a really cool facade made up of Korean characters

Italian Pavilion

Yangshuo - Moon Hill [月亮山]

On the way to Moon Hill [月亮山]...

Tourists wearing the flower headress, hand made by the local old ladies - who are very persistant in selling them (that and postcards)

Going up Moon Hill [月亮山] requires buying a ticket, and climbing lots of stone stairs. Despite the HUGE 'No Climbing' signs on display at the entrance to the path, we saw a big group of climbers head up there with gear as we were coming back down.

Yup, that's Moon Hill.

At the top of Moon Hill

Yangshuo [阳朔] - Climbing Part II

We also went to Swiss Cheese Wall and Space Butress [太空站] (both on the October 2009 update to the Yangshuo Rock Climbs topo guide), we didn't really take any photos of the latter though added to the fact that space butress was a bit tighter on comfy belay places, particularly around the climbs we were playing with (no. 19-21).

Swiss Cheese Wall

The approach to Swiss Cheese wall (which greg and I missed and ended up walking through soggy paddy fields, much to the bemusement of the local farmers)

The view from the wall

A girl who thought our hammock looked like what the smurfs in Avatar slept in...she then proceeded to steal our hammock for most of the afternoon.

Yangshuo [阳朔] - Climbing

The fantastic Karst landscape provides endless possibilities for climbing on lovely (ok, sometimes razor sharp) limestone. The outcrops of rock were surounded by paddy fields with the odd water buffalo either milling about or being made to plough the field by a farmer. We hired some bikes (mountain bikes of varying quality - evil grip shift of DOOM) and cycled to the climbs each morning - which was great for letting us take in the views Yangshuo has to offer.

The quality of the bolting was awesome. some truely good work by the guys developing the area.

Below is a sample of photos of the places we managed to see.

Baby Frog Butress [蝌蚪岩區圖]

The view from Baby Frog Butress [蝌蚪岩區圖]

Rei climbing what I think is Liar (5.9)

A short detour, up some stairs from the car park nearest to the wall took us through a small pagoda-style pavillion down past more fields and then to the river with a swathe of bamboo boats waiting and a good number of bamboo boats floating past

The Egg [公鸡蛋山], the North Face [北面]

The 'master' casually waiting for a climb, with some fantastic karst scenery in the background

[Left]All the kings horses (5.9) [Right] Rooster Booster (5.10a) a nice left face corner at the end for a bit of stemming joy - we actually met the guy (Bob Keaty) who set the route a little later...

Paddy fields - and some *tiny* water buffalo

The 'master' (I miss heard 'monster' but nevermind) taking 'Chuck if ya want to' (5.11d, 7a) in his stride...