China Part 5

Readers, how I posted a blog about my time in Shanghai without including any of the lovely pictures I took of the Bund with my new camera, I don't know.





The "European shore" of the Huangpu River has buildings that date back to the late 19th century. This part of Shanghai was conceded to foreign powers after the Treaty of Nanking in 1842. Shortly afterwards, the traders moved in. These grand buildings all once served as banks, consulates, customs houses and clubs for the exceptionally wealthy. Many of them are now closed but are spectacularly lit up at night for the crowds of tourists wandering up and down the elevated river bank.





Zhongshan Road follows the curve of the river. This photo was taken close to the Meteorological Signal Tower looking north.





Here is the modern face of Shanghai. This, the far shore of the river at Liujiazui was nothing but rice paddies until very recently.




Broadway Mansions looms over the steel bridge which leads over Suzhou Creek and away from the centre of the action. Japanese military officials oversaw their occupation of Shanghai from the top floor of this building, which had previously been full of western journalists reporting home on the siege of the city. The Japanese used Shanghai as their starting point from which they then laid waste to the country all the way to Nanking, the Nationalist capital of China. When Nanking fell, the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-Shek moved to Chongqing, and eastern China was under Japanese dominion until their surrender in 1945.


I spent 3 nights in Shanghai, meeting Shanghai people and paying Shanghai prices, before taking a plane out to Xian due to the shortage of railway tickets. I'll pick up the story next time upon flying over third world farms and landing in the dusty ancient capital of China.

China Part 4

The train zipped through the Yangtze River delta to Shanghai. Our speed reached a top of 317 km/h. I watched the indicator at the head of the carriage like a man constantly obsessed with the speed and the direction of things. Occasionally I gazed out at length at one of the cradles of Chinese civilisation. It's developed from Nanjing all the way through to the coast. The greater Shanghai area is home to 27 million people. That's more people than live in my entire country.

A city of this size puts things in perspective. I will never think of Sydney in the same way again. As much as it was "the big smoke" for me, growing up in my town of 8000 professional drinkers and retired sporting heroes in country New South Wales, most of Sydney is characterised by suburbs and front lawns full of bindies and runners of kikuyu grass. To beat the heat of Summer we used to strip down to our cossies and dash through the garden sprinkler while clutching flavoured ice blocks, as did our city-based cousins.

Having a lawn in Shanghai probably means you are squatting in a heritage listed property. Europeans and Americans moved into Shanghai en masse around the turn of last century in the spirit of the same opportunism which had driven them to Asia and Africa throughout the previous 3 or 4 centuries. They took the best land and set up their trading empires, building vast mansions and enormous banks down by the Huangpu River.

There's a lot of activity in Shanghai. I got a feel for this the afternoon I rolled into town. Having learnt my lesson that it was prudent to secure an ongoing ticket immediately upon arriving in a new location, I emerged from the platform and set out to look for the "soft sleeper ticket office." Being the only caucasian and the only person with a backpack made me stand out like an original song on the pop charts. As did the fact that I was obviously unsure of where I was. I did see other caucasians later but they were wearing suits and had their eyes firmly focused on the horizon as they jostled through the crowds. Businessmen: it's all about outcomes.

A punter standing around having a post-lunch cigarette and spit with his mates saw this confusion and asked me where I was going. It was a normal enough question. "Xian," I said. He launched into action and made me a deal without me even knowing it. Seconds after it sank in that he was about to sell me a bus ticket to Xian for 600 RMB. I used the bustling crowd to lose him, put on my black beanie and did some urgent window shopping at Chinese tour booking office. When it was safe to move on, I continued up the street and saw him leading a group of confused travellers in the opposite direction.

It's probably a lucrative business, scamming confused newcomers. Even if 20 reject your deal outright and only 1 bites - and you mark everything up by a ludicrous amount - you're still breaking even wih the official competitors. It is said in the travel books how important "face" is in dealing with Asians and that you should never do anything that embarrasses them in public. This includes calling their bluff, so even if they suggest a price which is 8 times a reasonable amount, you should respond with "no that's too much, how about 1/16th of said amount?" I used this recommended approach for the first half of the trip but it felt fake. I felt I was betraying my Australian roots. By the time I reached Beijing I had reverted to the tried and true "you've gotta be joking mate." It felt great. I wish I'd taken my slouch hat.

I never found the soft sleeper ticket office, which was a shame because it sounded nice. I imagined plush velvet couches and waiters circulating with trays of hors d'eouvres. Instead I found the standard ticket office, which had become the home of about 2 million of those 27 million Shanghaiers I mentioned earlier. They were temporary residents trying to get tickets to their hometown for the Spring Festival. They moved in with their suitcases and cigarettes and mothers in law and stood around talking and eating sunflower seeds. Announcements blared the latest train to fill up and I suddenly thought of going to Kunming, 2 days away by train, but undoubtedly greener than these pastures. I found myself in a queue without quite being sure of how this even happened, and started rehearsing my Chinese. It came out with a pronounced stutter, but he understood me alright. "Meiyou," he said, twice, something I understood perfectly. It is the most favoured utterance of a Chinese ticket officer around Spring Festival, and sounds exactly like "mayo." I suddenly desired a chicko mayo sanger at Lake Alexandra punctuated by the popping of tennis balls on rackets at the nearby courts.

The English speaking window man informed me (I think) that there were no tickets available to Xian for the next 11 days. And none to Kunming within 6 days. Fine, looks like I was flying then. I reckoned that it was pointless to plan in too fine a detail your trip to China because things will change dramatically when you are on the ground. This is true of everywhere of course but I think China demands the flexibility of a gymnast whereas many other destinations probably only require a bit of yoga now and then before setting out. Are you with me?

I left and went to Subway, where the nametags of the sandwich artists read "oven" and "grill." Another customer spoke to me in perfect American English (I know what you're thinking and no that's not an oxymoron so don't even try and pull me up on that one - a lot of them are quite clever these days) and told me about her life as a children's talent scout in Shanghai. Clearly I wasn't in Suzhou anymore. She wore a little French beret and had crooked teeth like mine, if not so yellow. She finished up and wished me a good day and pleasant time in Shanghai and left. I let her go, then spent the rest of my time in Shanghai wishing I had made myself pretend to be more attracted to her. Are you with me?

Down at the hostel, a Chinese guy interrupted while I was checking in and the receptionist went and served him before me and I made up my mind that I didn't like the place. That perception didn't change over the 3 days I stayed there. Not only was the receptionist a complete and total dickhead but there were 2 guys dying in my dorm room, the elevator was broken, the drinks were 10 times as expensive as in Qingdao and my washing didn't dry in the 3 days I was there. I resolved to spent as much time out of the hostel as I could, threw down my bags and headed for the Bund.




The vista which welcomed me down at the Huangpu River: no less awesome because of the fogginess which obscured the tops of the buildings at Liujiazui. This area has become one of a few symbols of the economic boom China has witnessed over the last decade. It is said, that 10 years ago, this area was just rice paddies. Shanghai is the most "western" of Chinese cities. The entrepreneurial spirit of its people was downright irritating at times.

The next day I headed for the French concession, which was total bollocks. There's an area that's been rebuilt according to fulfill "standard European ambience," and which is full of shops selling designer label clothing which was truly a waste of time. Lonely Planet directed me to a cafe that doesn't exist, then the Sun Yatsen house, then the site of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, both of which were full of overzealous security guards watching me as if I were trying to bring down their stupid government. Perhaps they thought epaulettes impressed me? I actually find them to be really camp. All I wanted was something decent to look at and a good chicken and mayonnaise sandwich.

But things became interesting later that night when I went into a Muslim-run restaurant for some of my favourite noodles. The Muslim part is incidental and not important to the story at all. I just want you to know how cosmopolitan and accepting of other cultures I am. A group of 3 Chinese in their early 20s watched me with curiosity, then moved to the seats opposite me once the existing customer had cleared out. We enjoyed some conversation, enough to break the ice of international friendship, along with the beer they plied me with. They then ordered liberally from the menu and invited me to join them. Then when we'd finished they paid for everything including the noodles I'd ordered to begin with. The negative thing about it however was in the hostile attitudes they showed towards the Koreans in the restaurant. I felt sorry for the weird and insular Koreans right then. Yes they are odd, group-oriented and socially backward, hard to befriend, suspicious of change, and utterly hopeless with English but I don't see why that should resulting in anyone actually disliking them. It would be far worse if they travelled to everyone corner of our beautiful world with a striking contempt for its diversity, or without a clue as to how things develop historically. Or, if they had the stated objective and the power to take as much as they could without consideration for others.

Tomorrow: a walking tour of the Bund and acrobats!

China Part 3

17/1/11
Travelling south through Shandong and Jiangsu provinces. China in Winter: barren, polluted, dusty and dry. Went to Jinan first, in the west, before turning south to head to Nanjing. Highlights: some conversation with the guy next to me, who later politely corrected a few things; also listening to The Vines + Cut Copy as I travel through China.



The super fast Z93 express train that took me from Shandong to Nanjing in 8 hours. I'd heard horror stories about the discomfort of Chinese trains before I left Korea but wanted to try them nevertheless. I ended up making 3 long-distance railway journeys while in China as well as a couple of shorter ones around the Yangtze delta. The verdict? Chinese trains are fast, efficient, clean and punctual. The overnight sleepers I took also put paid to any stories I'd heard about the Chinese being unbearable travelling partners. True, purchasing the tickets can be a time-consuming and stressful experience, but once you are in your seat and watching the landscape zip by at up to 330 km/h, you'll inevitably ask yourself the question "why can't my country do this?"

At Qingdao Railway Station, I was tense. "Take a spare padlock," people had said. "Lock the zips of your backpack together." I sat in the soviet-inspired waiting room no. 4, complete with chandeliers, and flipped through my Mandarin phrasebook while waiting for the boarding call for the 10:30am Z93 bound for Shanghai. "Don't stick out too much," I told myself. "Don't look like a traveller. Don't stand up. Also, that black beanie ain't fooling anyone."

A group of boys in their early 20s constantly looked over and made comments to each other, then one of them looked as if he were selected and would advance toward me before losing his nerve and returning to the group. "Here it is; watch your things," I told myself. My paranoia toward these young chaps was mounting so much that I'd discounted friendly interaction with anyone else. So when a different young bloke approached me from the other side, just wanting to chew the fat before we boarded the train, I met his friendly "Hello, do you mind if I sit here?" with "Who are they?" gesturing at the first group. He shrugged and commenced his repertoire of questions for foreign travellers:

1 Where you from?
2 How old are you?
3 You married?
4 Why not?
5 Why you travel alone?
6 You no get lonely?

How can I? People interrupt me from my Lonely Planet Mandarin Phrasebook everywhere in order to ask these questions. I'm thinking of getting my responses laminated on a card and hanging it around my neck:

1 A small town near Sydn... oh, never mind - Australia, the kangaroo place
2 30
3 No
4 Women don't like me very much
5 We're in Asia champ, there is no such thing as "alone"
6 Yes but your women are quite affordable

He was a nice young bloke with decent English. Still, he got nothing from me but the prickliness of a paranoid Australian traveller who'd finally gotten around to reading his copy of the government's smarttraveller brochure. I was suitably humbled when, shortly before boarding the train, he moved away and sat alone with his suitcases.

On the train I'd loosened up and was chatting with the young engineer from Wuhan beside me. "How old are you? Where are you from? Are you married?" I asked him. Perfectly normal questions for someone wanting to know a little more about someone.

"Do you want some bread?" Please say yes. I'd been curious about this stuff called mantou, a flavourless, cheap but very filling Chinese bread often found at street markets, and so had bought some on the way to the station. Despite purchasing the smallest bag I could find, it was clear I'd need a family to help me finish the stuff. Two huge domes of scarcely-baked dough stared out at me from the clear plastic bag like a massive pair of nipple-less mammaries on one of those fetish websites that I never look at. Now that you've spilt your cup noodles all over the carriage you must take some, surely. He didn't. Saving face? Maybe I wasn't insistent enough. I'm not very good at that. If someone says "no," I usually assume they mean "no," but that's the way I was raised. Not all cultures have the same behavioural protocol. We reached Nanjing and he took me to the subway. More random kindness. The Chinese were growing on me.

Finding the hostel would have been so simple if I'd just followed the directions that I'd copied down from the hostel website. Instead, at Sanshanjie St exit 4, the uncertainty set in. "Maybe that's the big streetsign? I'd better check what's up at the intersection. Oh there's a canal down there. That might be the canal that the directions referred to. Lemme just check the map. Yeah, that's where I am now, so if I follow this street I'll be there in 10 minutes." Of course, I was walking in the opposite direction. I then walked in the right direction for a half an hour and even peered in the window of the hostel as the ground floor was a bookshop/cafe before moving on and asking for directions from the rival hostel, which I'd found first. I then left that hostel, thankyou thankyou, and, in an unnecessary anxious hurry, plowed into a young Chinese girl. More apologies. I feel stupid and I hate Nanjing. I checked in and Michelle walked past my dormitory door. We went sight-seeing and I forgot everything.



The Fuzi Temple area of Nanjing at night is much neon, waterway, and tourists saying things like "can you take a picture of me in front of the neon dragon and waterway?"

The next day, a comfortable and very fast train whizzed us through the Yangtze delta area from Nanjing to the canal city of Suzhou. This city is popular with Chinese tourists for having preserved the ancient waterways which once would have (how's that for alliteration?) transported goods and important people back and forth. Suzhou is known for its beauty and in the softly falling snow of mid January it was indeed a beautiful sight. The Chinese have a saying that goes something like "in the sky there is heaven, on earth there is Suzhou" as a paean to the wonders of this "town" (population 6 million).




The canals of Suzhou by day and by night. The street our hostel was on was mercifully closed to anything but pedestrian and bicycle traffic. As a result, our part of town was characterised by a kind of atmosphere which I imagine had persisted for centuries.

We set no agenda in Suzhou and so easily slipped into this atmosphere by wandering the streets and going in and out of museums as we liked. The Kunqu Opera Museum was a find, particularly as we had the place to ourselves and enjoyed the company of an unusually jovial guard, but for me the highlight was the Art and Craft Museum of Suzhou. Photography was forbidden, but I'd taken a few snaps before I learnt of this, including a few of the Buddhist images which had been painstakingly carved into the elephant tusks below. The tusks themselves stood at the entry to the museum, facing each other, making for a very impressive entrance. Each room was filled with some of the most exquisite and precious objects I've ever seen. Chinese tourism is mostly about things on the scale of the Great Wall and the Terracotta Army - granted, they do "big" things very well - but discovering the small Suzhou Art and Craft museum was all the more rewarding given that we just happened to stumble upon it as we walked into town.



I'll pick up the story next time upon my arrival in Shanghai, after I lose my bloody train ticket and therefore have to go back into Suzhou at night in order to buy another one. The start of the second half - and best part of the trip - is still at least one week away, when I head out to Xian and things become a little more rewarding. In the meantime there are some terrific pictures of Shanghai and some jaw dropping prices to pay, as well as an encounter with some acrobats that leaves me vowing to never drink or abuse my body in any way again.

China Part 2

The word in the hostel was to get your forwarding tickets as soon as you got to a new location. China has a number of festivals throughout the year but none as important as the rapidly approaching Spring Festival (Australians call it "Chinese New Year"; "Lunar New Year" is another name for it here in non-Chinese parts of Asia).

During this festival, Chinese people travel en masse in order to return to their hometowns and celebrate with their families. They eat dumplings on the stroke of midnight and light fireworks outside their doorway to repel evil spirits. In the 2 weeks leading up to New Year's night, they light fireworks at random: any place and any time are candidates for an explosion. I ended up spending New Years in a small town called Gubeikou, some 120 km north-east of central Beijing, where regular punters could be seen in their frontyards lighting fireworks with the mechanised detachment of someone wearily throwing a stick for a dog.

I knew that railway tickets would become difficult to get at this time of year, but thought this would only be an issue in the week leading up to Spring Festival. As it was still 3 weeks from the big occasion, I was as unlikely to hurry as an Australian in a city famous for its beer. Everything in China happens on a Chinese scale however, and it is in fact the previous 5 or 6 weeks that are affected, so that night I set off for the English speaking window at Qingdao railway station. And I might have wandered into McDonalds on the way.

Hannah and I admitted to each other that fast food was "cheating," and that no one travels to China for a Big Mac, but there are occasions when it really comes in handy. We met at the counter, where I asked her if she could read Chinese, and she responded by saying no, but they were about to bring out the foreigner's menu for us. That's the one with big numbers that you point at.

Chinese McDonalds is mostly the same as the ones all around the rest of the world - that's one reason why travellers use it I suppose - but it might take a while for their patrons to catch up with the general atmosphere of the place. I never thought I would be discussing the "civilised" aspects of a fast food restaurant but as I exited the bathroom I noticed something happening that probably wouldn't occur in the Mittagong branch: there was an old man washing his underwear in the basin. The manager told him this was not allowed and asked him to leave. He just shouted back at her to go away and that was that. Or maybe he was saying that no he didn't want any fries, I'm not sure.




Hannah and I went exploring this place the next day - Lao Shan. It's rocky face rises out of the sea and makes for a tough hike. The mountain is important in the history of Chinese religion as a Buddhist pilgrim named Faxian set up camp there upon his return from India in 412 AD. The Buddhism mingled with Daoist and Confucian beliefs and morphed into the religious hybrid that reigns in east-Asia.





The highlight of the day for me was in stumbling across this village by the sea. From a distance the terracotta roofs leading down to the ocean made it look vaguely Mediterranean. We took the winding roads down through the terraces into the village and looked at it up close and it became unmistakably Chinese however. I don't think the townsfolk got too many Westerners in their village.


The ticket I purchased was not for Saturday, like I had planned, but for Monday. This squashed my schedule in Nanjing from a leisurely 3 days into just 1 night. It also meant that I had an extra 2 days to explore Qingdao. The next day I set out to see the German churches of the city. Qingdao was seized in 1897 by Germany, which had become hungry for a piece of the imperialist pie by then. Missionaries followed in the wake of this occupation and today Qingdao retains a Catholic church and a Protestant church in the old part of the city, as well as a few other "European" attractions around town such as Huashi Lou - a castle-like manor that was once the home of Chiang Kai-Shek.






Top: The Catholic church, which was closed for renovations on the day I visited. Below: The author freezes in front of the clock tower of the Protestant church. Qingdao was cold, really cold.


On my last night in Qingdao I was treated to dinner by one of the employees of the hostel. Xiao Zhang had taken the job at the hostel in order to talk with travellers and improve his English. He took me to his favourite restaurant and ordered up a few plates of dumplings and some jellyfish, as well as beer and some of the local speciality "lojiu" - a kind of wine that you drink heated - which is also very hard to find outside of Shandong. After several glasses of that and as much as we could eat he put me on the city bus and I sat in a haze reflecting on the kindness which had already been shown to me within my few short days in China. The next day I had to leave for Nanjing where I'd arranged to meet up with Michelle, an American traveller who was eventually heading south for Xiamen, and who had offered to buy my forwarding ticket to Suzhou.

China Part 1

The moonlight on the open sea remains one of the most beautiful things I've seen. It reminded me of a time when we truly were adventurers, charting our course toward new lands by the heavenly bodies. A full moon on a cloudless night meant full visibility and promoted the confidence of sea-captains and their hardy, intrepid crew. I stood on the decks and felt the spray of the sea on my face, peering up at the moon's Sea of Tranquility, now reflecting on the gently shimmering surface of the Yellow Sea back here on earth. The ship sliced through the sea and edged closer to China. I felt quite the resolute explorer myself.

Back below deck things weren't quite so romantic. After boarding and finding the key to my "Royal Class" cabin, I threw my luggage and my body down and tuned into Boney M, which was on repeat over the ship's PA. My porthole opened up a new vista for me and I drank it in. Industrial Incheon port slowed to a standstill at the end of the day. The red sun descended over western hills. There were Chinese people putting their bags down in my room. Of course they were. Now they were sitting on my bed. Now their Dad was shuffling in and taking off his slippers. Now he was clipping his toenails.

Problem solved; I was moved to a single cabin (like I'd booked in the first place, one month previously), this one without a view of the harbour - without a porthole at all in fact - but crucially without an Septuagenarian Chinese man's toenail clippings. Royal indeed.

Ships move slowly out of the harbour. I love watching the crews working together to get a 50 000 ton vessel out into the open waters. There is this cooperation between the crew on board and the groundstaff, mainly communicated by signals; all the while the ship slowly breaks away from its moorings and crawls to the mouth of the harbour to plot its course on the open ocean. No wonder the ship comes up again and again in literary metaphor.



We sat here, at Incheon Port for a good 15-20 minutes. I'd like to know exactly what goes on. Staff on the ground rode bicycles between the dockside and their office. One of the first things I noticed about China was how old the bicycles were in comparison to their Korean counterparts.



Leaving Korea.

On board that night I slept poorly through the sounds of passengers talking loudly in their sleep through the wall of my cabin. Or, perhaps they weren't sleeping at all but shouting over their card games. The only other foreigner on board - a smelly Dutch hippie who had vague plans of going from Peking to Mongolia to ride horses or something (he still called it "Peking;" I couldn't ignore that) - chose to sleep in the 50 person dormitory below decks: "spitting class." Royal Class was heated to the point of discomfort and I was pleased to be roused from my restless slumber by the announcements - first in Korean, then in Chinese - informing us of our position and our ETA. But I can only assume this as the only thing I understood was "nimen hao" and then something about breakfast, which turned out to involve some kind of pickled fish and kimchi:



My old friend Kim Chi and his also not-suitable-for-breakfast-associates.



Our tugboat steams out to meet us as China comes into view.

Once we'd docked it took around an hour to get off the ship. I'd observed how Asians like to organise themselves for travel (by using the "me first" method) and decided that it wouldn't hurt to hang back a little and wait for the panickers up front to clear out ahead of me. We were to be herded onto transit buses and driven to customs for processing. What I didn't know was that the Chinese authorities had allocated a certain number of buses for this purpose, and that all passengers had to be accounted for by the last journey. As a result, after waiting an hour for the crowds to thin, I found myself on the last, and fullest, bus.

You haven't travelled in Asia unless you've been squashed flat up against the window of a train or a bus at some stage. As another 10 people were ordered onto the already overflowing bus (I think the driver had someone on his lap), I reminded myself that Thailand is for the sun and the beach and women named "Pong," whereas China is for true adventure and the stories one brings home. I couldn't move my left hand to reach out for support, but this didn't matter at all as I was fully wedged into an upright position by the people around me. My other hand held tightly onto my backpack, which was roughly the size of the toe-clipping grandpa in cabin 403. The bus stalled. The bus wouldn't start for 5 minutes. Can we get off? Verboten! It kicked into life. The driver got it moving before it could protest again. We drove through the gates of the dock and around a right hand corner: a distance of 150m. Everyone laughed incredulously. We could have walked it back and forth 2 or 3 times while standing on that bus.

I was the last person to be processed at customs. The junior officer seemed confused with something - how to pronounce my name perhaps? I think not. Getting my things in order I marched forth and steeled myself, "Right, on the other side of that door, that's China, Lach. Now be careful and enjoy yourself. You've earned it." I walked out and squinted in the weak winter sunlight and straight into the arms of a gimpy little man, who wrapped up my legs in a tackle reminiscent of Allan 'Alfie' Langer in the '89 Origin Series while pleading up at me for some money. The townsfolk laughed and coughed and spat and someone tried to sell me a map and several dynasties later I remembered the Chinese for "Go away!"

Pretending to pirouette out of his tackle and charge ahead in simulation of "try time for the Tigers at Leichhardt Oval," I spotted the smelly Dutchman over the road, who was also bound for the long distance bus terminal. I knew where this was. I knew I knew where it was because I had the latest edition of Lonely Planet China in my backpack, and not only did I have it but I'd been studying it for the last 3 months. All we had to do was cross the road, walk up the next one, and it was on the right. Which it wasn't. It was in fact a 25 minute bus ride away (during which we were escorted by a passing good Chinese samitaran who also taught (and spoke perfect) English at a local academy. She paid for us too.)

I tried my Chinese at the Weihai bus station but they kept switching me back to English. I should have perhaps seen this as a signal that the Chinese probably don't much feel like listening to me butcher their language. So we did it the tried and true way: with them butchering English. On the bus, a movie about Mao kept the travellers loyal to the party as we passed the farmland of Eastern Shandong province. When I saw a farmer leading an ox, leading a cart full of straw, I realised I'd arrived in the 3rd world. The snow on the ground got thinner and thinner as we neared Qingdao.

Two new destinations in one day! And the second time, in Qingdao, I truly did get ripped off, taking my eyes off the ball and walking straight towards a greedy pedicab driver, who charged me 50 kuai to drive around the streets and ask people for directions to the Kaiyue Hostel. Pride had me exit and take to Qingdao on foot, and 15 minutes later I was relaxing with a Qingdao (the amber variety) in the hostel's bar, after a good 30 hours in transit. Ganbei!