Malaysia and the happy return to China - Guilin, China
Guilin, China
We arrived to the airport in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia around 4:30pm. Immigration was probably the quickest and easiest we have gone through. They didn't have any immigration or customs forms and they didn’t even check our luggage at all…pretty laid back. We took an express train that runs between downtown KL and the airport so that was really easy as well. Our hostel was directly opposite the subway station so that was super easy too. When we checked in the guy at the hostel told us that if we wanted to go anywhere the next day we had better go on to the bus station now and buy our tickets as the next day was the beginning of Malaysia’s Independence holiday weekend and everyone was traveling somewhere for the weekend. We put our bags down and walked to the bus station and got a ticket to Penang for the next morning at 8’oclock. The station was really crowded but we still bought the tickets we wanted pretty quickly. We got dinner on the street in Chinatown. We ate clay pot chicken and rice with a side of sautéed veggies. It was good. Malaysia’s main claim to fame is their food. It’s all anyone talks about when they tell us about their visit to Malaysia. The food is mainly Chinese and Indian with a bit of Malaysian’s own flare. I’ve really enjoyed the Indian food. It’s less spicy than the food I ate when I was in India and there are more vegetables. Most of the population in Malaysia is either Chinese or Indian and almost all the businesses are run by one of these two populations. The aboriginal Malays are the poorest people in the country and make up very little of the work force. There have been controversial government run programs going on for about 30 years to try and help the Malaysian population raise its standard of living, but so far this hasn’t helped. The history here is very international. In the 15th century The Chinese ruled Malaysia, in the 16th century the Portuguese, the Dutch in the 17th, and the British in the 18th century. Malaysia gained its independence in the 20th century. There is a mix of religions from this as well. Islam is the primary religion, but there are many Christians, Hindus, and Buddhists as well. I’ve enjoyed seeing all the different styles of head scarves and the happy faces of the Muslim women wearing them. Some of them have different colorful designs, some have sequence, some have a formed fit at top so it’s almost like a ball cap, and some have pretty pins on them. We’ve seen a few women wearing the full burkes, which were interesting, but definitely not fashionable in anyway.
There were two other tourists on the bus with us from KL to Penang. We met each other at the beginning of the journey by asking each other if we were getting on the right bus, and then when we got dropped off in Penang we were asking each other how to get to Georgetown (the historic world heritage site of the island). With each other’s help we arrived in Georgetown and found places to stay. Anna and Christian are both from Germany and both are doing internships in KL, however they had not met until the morning of our bus ride. The four of us ended up spending two days together. Anna already had a hostel booked, and luckily Christian, Brock, and I found a guesthouse a few buildings down that had a three bed room available, so the three of us roomed together. We spent the afternoon using Anna’s guide book to direct us on a tour of historic Georgetown. What makes Georgetown so popular is its international marks of history. There is a variety of European architecture mixed in with Hindu and Buddhists temples, mosques, and Christian churches. Out of all of Malaysia Penang is said to have the best "hawker" food stalls. These are stalls in the street that cook up quick eats. We had noodle dishes for lunch and a great Chinese meal for dinner. We went to a crowded Chinese restaurant and ordered Chinese style and shared all the dishes. The next day we rented two motorbikes; Brock and I on one and Anna and Christian on another. We rode around and checked out the island. We went to the main beach, which surprisingly on the Sunday of a holiday weekend was almost deserted. Then we went to Penang National Park, which is a park of trails through jungle. We did a 1 ½ hour long hike that took us along coastline, creeks, and jungle. Afterwards we rode to a tropical fruit farm and bought some fresh fruit and ate it. Brock and I had a mango, a guava, and a delicious fruit called sugar apple. It didn’t taste, feel, or look at all like an apple so I don’t understand how it got its name, but it was really good. It looked kind of like an artichoke and its texture was a lot like a mango, but the taste was very unique and sweet. From here we stopped at a roadside stand selling “stinky fruit” or the formal name, durian, and I’ve also heard it called king fruit. It’s called stinky fruit because it has a pretty potent and most would say stinky smell. The actual edible part of the fruit is around a few large seeds that are enclosed in a large and spiky shell. The fruit itself is creamy, not juicy, and tastes to me like garlic flavored soft cheese. I started feeling a bit nauseous as I ate it. It is the only fruit I’ve tried and not liked. Brock liked it though. We were lucky to be able to try it because I was told it is seasonal and we are here for the tail end of the season, but we were unlucky because the guy that sold it to us ripped us off big time. He sold it to us for 20 ringitt per Kg which was equal to about $6.50 for one piece of fruit, but we bought it because we thought it might be our only opportunity to try it. Well since then we’ve seen, and smelled, plenty of other roadside stands selling the same fruit for 3 ringitt per Kg. Oh well, it was an experience. After eating stinky fruit we rode to the largest Buddhist temple in SE Asia. It was definitely large and extravagant. You’ll see the pictures. We had a late lunch of Nasi Kandur (Indian food) and then rode back to Georgetown and took it easy for a few hours and then met back up for drinks and some hawker food stands. I got a dish I really liked that is a Penang specialty and I think a mix of Chinese and Malaysian cuisine. It was a flat soft noodle with shrimp, oyster, sausage, bean sprouts, chives (I think), garlic, egg, and a mix of sauces, and almost every other food stall made it.
Brock and I said our goodbyes to Christian and Anna and headed out the next morning for a town called Tanah Rata in the Cameron Highlands. This is a hilly area of jungle and agriculture. We didn’t get in until mid afternoon and we tried to go out for a hike in the jungle but got mixed up on directions to the trail head so we decided we would walk to a waterfall but also got mixed up on directions to that trail head. We had a really poor map. We finally found another trail and waterfall by the very end of the afternoon and then went out for an Indian dinner that was delicious.
The next morning I had some time to do some yoga and hooping while Brock slept in (after his full night of watching some sci-fi series he down loaded before we left Florida). After he awoke we headed out to a tea plantation. We went to BOH Tea Estate, which is the largest producing tea estate in Malaysia. We took the local bus and when we got off so did two other tourists. We had another 3.5 km walk through the tea fields until we reached the factory so we introduced ourselves to the other two tourists making the same walk. They are a couple from Portugal, Sara and Diogo, who are at the beginning of their yearlong backpacking journey around the world. They plan to visit almost every country we have already visited. They were a really cool couple and we enjoyed sharing the afternoon with them. The tea estate was cool too. We had never seen a tea plant until then. The factory gives free tours whenever they are processing the leaves but this only happens every three weeks and we were there when there was no work to be done in the factory, but we were still able to walk through it and there were many information displays explaining the whole process of farming and processing the tea leaves. After walking around for a bit we enjoyed a cup of excellent tea on a patio overlooking the tea fields. We walked back just in time to catch the local bus heading back into Tanah Rata. From there we had just about 3 hours left of sunlight which was just the right amount of time to fit in a trek through the jungle and up to the top of one of the hills or “gurungs” as they say here. The trek was steep and junglely. Nothing too great about it and there wasn’t much of a view from the top due to overgrowth of the jungle at the scenic view point. We descended and had another Indian dinner; it’s just so good. I felt bad that I hadn’t tried any Malaysian cuisine yet, so we split a plate of what was said to be a classic Malaysian plate. It was not good at all. It was the oddest combination of food and flavors; asweet corn bread broken into cubes and topped with spaghetti noodles, boiled egg, tofu, cucumber slices, and a tomato based sweet and sour sauce. It made me think of what a desperate college student might put together from the few odd foods found in the kitchen at the end of the semester. That night we had a drink at the “jungle bar” attached to our hostel. They had an outdoor fire place and hand carved big wooden chairs and benches to sit on. We met some other backpackers and just hung out for a little while.
The next morning we took a bus back to KL. That afternoon/evening we walked around and did a bit of sightseeing in KL. We walked around the capital square of government buildings and a big open field. All the buildings were dressed with big Malaysia flags in honor of their independence day that had just passed. We walked to a large mosque and Hindu temple. I walked around in the Hindu temple and observed a few small gatherings lead by monks (or whatever they would call a religious guide) going on in front of different statues of different gods. It was very colorful and cheerful inside. We were not allowed admittance into the mosque, but from the outside it didn’t look nearly as lively as the temple. In general I’ve noticed the majority of mosques are pretty simple and the inside is primarily just a large open space. This is done on purpose as to not distract from the focus of Allah. I think this makes sense. There are no chairs either as the people pray in a series of movements between standing up and kneeling and bowing down. We then walked to little India and on the way we passed through a big shopping district. This was an interesting sight because all the stores were selling Islamic attire for women. The stores looked just like you would expect to see from any trendy clothing street except one big difference, the clothes were designed to cover the entire body. Still very colorful and bright, but just a lot more fabric then I’m use to seeing. We found little India and had dinner in an outdoor food stall market and ate some more really good Indian food. There was a band playing live music, which was really good. They played mostly American music. We made it back to the hostel pretty late and went to bed.
The next morning I woke up early and headed out to the US embassy to get more pages put in my passport. I decided to walk there so that I could see the city on my way. It took me 50 minutes to get there. I checked in and sat down with my waiting number and pulled out my passport and realized it wasn’t my passport, but Brock’s passport. Ooops! I couldn’t believe I didn’t check. We use money belts and his passport was in my money belt and mine was in his money belt back at the hostel. The embassy only takes walk-ins from 9am to 11am so I didn’t have much time to go change out the passports. I took a taxi and made it back by 10:20am and was out of the embassy by 11:40am with my additional passport pages, and then took the metro back to the hostel. That afternoon Brock and I walked to the twin towers and then to another tower that was designed for tourists to have a view of the city from up high. The price to go up the towers was over $20 so we didn’t go up either of them. KL is a pretty nice city. Fairly clean, lots of fancy business buildings, lots of shopping and food markets, some parks, and plenty of mosques and temples. That evening we met back up with the Anna and Christian (the Germans that we met in Penang). The four of us walked around Bukit district which is a lively place at night, mostly filled with food stalls. We had dinner and a beer and then went home. Malaysia doesn’t make their own beer, so we had beer from Thailand called Chang.
The next morning we headed to the airport and flew back to China. Our visas were good for multiple entries up to April of 2014 so we decided to go back and finish where we left off. It wasn’t cheap to get in and out of China again, but we figure we will probably never make it here again. We like this country a lot and we still had some places we wanted to see. This time around our destinations were centered on the natural beauty of the country; mountains, lakes, rivers, and rice and tea fields. But it’s not just the scenery that brought us back; it’s the culture and the lack of other foreign tourists that makes China such a neat place to be. We tried to find a bathroom the other day and realized we needed to learn the word for toilet. We had not run into this problem anywhere else. English is not spoken by many people here and that is a challenge we don’t really have the opportunity to come across in most places. The language barrier is not necessarily fun, but it highlights that we are in a foreign country far from home, which is a feeling we want while traveling. We have fun just watching and listening to the people here interacting together. They all talk so loud and animated and the language has so many stresses on the sounds that it seems like they are arguing and we will think they are mad at each other and then all the sudden they are laughing and smiling. The other thing we love about this place is the food. It is so good. One thing we won't miss is all the hacking up of loogies that everyone does so often here. I'm assuming that due to the air pollution people form phlegm in their lungs and throat, so they feel the need to cough it up and out. Whatever the reason, its gross.
Our first stop was Hangzhou which is a lovely city prized for its West Lake and Dragon Well green tea. The city circles around the lake and the lake is encircled by walking trails and parks. The parks are very beautiful. There are lots of weeping willow trees, ponds, benches and bridges, statues, and pagodas. It’s a very picturesque park. It was a drizzly cloudy day, so I’m not sure how well our pictures give it justice. We arrived at midnight and took a taxi to our hostel. When we got up the next morning we started the day by enjoying a great meal of Chinese food and then walking around the lake. Later we walked through a busy pedestrian shopping street filled with silk clothing stores, tea shops, and restaurants. We wanted to taste some of the tea in the tea shops but due to the language barrier we ended up just buying a simple black tea from a simple drink stand. It looked fun to sit in the shop and taste tea, but we just couldn’t communicate enough to manage that operation. We had also tried buying a pot of tea in a tea house but the cost was crazy expensive, $15+ for a pot of tea. Dragon Well tea is the most popular and highest selling green tea in China, and Hanzhou is where they grow and process it, so I think the price is marked up a lot for the tourists. We finally ended up buying a small tin of the green tea leaves in a shop so that we could make it on our own. It was good, but I don’t have enough background to say if it is better than other green teas. To me green tea tastes the same every time I drink it; nice but very gentle in flavor. After window shopping a bit we found the Chinese Medicine Museum and went in and checked out the history and variety of Chinese Medicine. Plants, animals, insects, and minerals are all used in Chinese medicine. The displays explained how originally those who studied medicine had to ingest the substances themselves in order to study them and find out the benefits and risks of each one they studied. The museum ends in the pharmacy, which was really cool to observe. The pharmacy techs were mixing prescriptions. The doctor orders prescriptions of concoctions of a variety of herbs and what not, so the techs were weighing out and mixing all these herbs and then bagging them and giving them to the customers. From here we walked to a nearby train station and picked up the tickets I had pre-purchased from a ticket company online a few weeks earlier. It felt so nice to just walk up to the ticket office and hand them a piece of paper with a number on it and receive back two train tickets. It’s much easier the second time around. Afterwards we got dinner from some crowded food stalls in a small alley. We bought “beggar’s chicken,” fried crabs on a slick, and a vegetable noodle dish. Beggar’s chicken is a specialty of Hangzhou. They take a small chicken and wrap it in these large leaves and then wrap that in paper and then cover the paper with clay and bake it for 3+ hours. It was really good. After dinner we walked back to the lake and watched an amazing water fountain show that moved in tune with music.
The next day we went to a silk museum and then to the tea villages and a tea museum. In the silk museum we learned about the history of the silk trade, the silk worm’s life stages, how the silk is taken from the cocoon (1000+ meters from each cocoon), how the silk is then woven into thread and then clothes, and then how it is further decorated with dying techniques and embroidery. It was pretty interesting. The tea museum was also pretty cool. First off it’s located within the tea villages which are lovely and then the museum itself has lovely landscaping. 70% of the tea produced here is green tea, 12% oblong tea, 5% black tea, and 7% a mix of white tea, yellow tea, dark tea, and flavored or scented tea. The tea plants nowadays are bushes but there use to be very large tea trees as well. We read about the history of tea, its social importance in China, and how the processing varies between tea types. The big difference is that green tea is made by pan-frying the leaves and black tea is made by fermenting the leaves. Everyone drinks tea here pretty much all day long. The people use plastic drinking bottles (I think just because they are convenient for on the go drinking and cheaper than insulated metal bottles) that they fill with hot water and a mix of tea leaves. They don’t use tea bags. They just put the whole leaves into the water. They don’t crush up the leaves, so once the leaves get wilted and saturated with the hot water they sink to the bottom and it seems easy enough to not swallow them. I think the people also mix in a variety of other herbs and flowers as well. You can find hot water dispensers in most public places.
That evening we went to another food stall street and had a meal of mantis shrimp, snails, and stir-fried veggies. The snails were really tasty, but a significant amount of the flavor came what they were cooked with (lots of garlic, onion shoots, ginger, hot peppers, and a variety of sauces). They were a bit tricky to eat, but it was fun and surprisingly filling.
The next day we took a bus to Huangshan Mountain and slept at a hostel at the base of the mountain in a small town called Tangkou. We woke up early the next morning to take a bus to the entrance gate of the mountain. The entrance price to hike up the mountain is $40. Yikes! But we had to pay it. This is the mountain you see in pictures, movies, advertisements, and paintings. It’s the classic “yellow mountain” of China. Unfortunately, the weather for our hike was not that good. It’s a very cloudy mountain naturally and the clouds are a part of this classic Chinese scenery, however, too many clouds and all you see is white. We still were able to see the amazing scenery on our hike up to the summit and during scattered breaks in the clouds. The summit area is a maze 36 granite peaks each over 1000 meters high, and the clouds often sit between the peaks. Small and neatly shaped pine trees grow in a scattered manner on the peaks. It’s definitely a unique topography. The summit area is well trailed and very crowded with Chinese tourists. We were surrounded by thousands of people and I think we saw a total of 4 other foreign tourists (that we could differentiate at least).
We were exhausted that night so we had an early night. We woke up the next morning and headed to the bus station to take a day trip to these well preserved historic villages dating back to 1000AD, but the buses were already booked full for the day, so we had to find an alternate plan. It was cold and raining, so it might not have been too enjoyable to walk around the historic villages anyways. We decided the only thing there was to do on a cloudy rainy day was to go to the hot springs. At the base of the mountain there is a nice hot springs resort with many different pools all surrounded with lovely plants and the mountainous background scenery. There were already two girls from our hostel going and then when we went to buy our discounted tickets from a hotel owner down the street we met three other foreigners who also decided to go to the hot springs. We had another group to hang out with for the day. This time there were two other Americans (San Francisco and Utah), a French Canadian, an Australian, and Swede. We were a fun happy bunch relaxing in the assortment of hot spring pools. The pools were infused with different things (coffee, vit. C, wine, coconut milk, jasmine, and our favorite rose). We spent the entire day and some of the evening there.
The next morning we took a bus back to Hangzhou so that we could take an 18 hour sleeper train from Hangzhou to Guilin in Southern China. We got to Hangzhou around 11 am and our train wasn’t until 6pm so we had some time to kill. It took us awhile to transfer from the bus station to the train station, and then all the luggage lockers were full so we couldn’t leave our luggage and go out in the town like we had planned. In the end Brock stayed in the train station with our stuff for a few hours while I went out to the silk market and picked up a few things for myself and as gifts. Our train ended up being delayed by an hour. When we saw that our train was listed as a time to board and the group of passengers were lining up at the gate to board we followed suit. We must have somehow missed our boarding entrance time by because as the minutes past and we were still in line we noticed that the board no longer said our train number but the train number of the train that would be boarding next. We had been waiting in line with the wrong group of passengers. Our hearts sank as we realized our train must have just driven away without us. We went to the ticket office to see if we could exchange our tickets for another day, but there were no seats (hard seats) for three days, and only standing room for a 21 hour train ride on the lowest class train for the next day. We exchanged for the standing room, and then got online to see how expensive it would be to fly instead of stand for 21 hours on the train. We found flights for the next day at $107, but we spent over an hour trying to book the flights without success because we didn’t have a Chinese mobile phone number or a Chinese credit card. We didn’t know exactly what we would do, but we needed to leave the train station before it got any later, so we headed to the hostel we had stayed at during our first visit in Hangzhou. Luckily, the English speaking receptionist was still there and when we told him about our troubles he offered to buy the tickets for us online and we could pay him cash, which we happily did. By this time is was 11pm so we settled in to our dorm room and went to bed. The next morning I got up and went to the lake to do some yoga in the relaxing scenery of the lake. I actually had a hard time finding a spot to do the yoga as all the open spaces are roped off with signs saying that you can’t walk on them. All this pretty grass space and no one can use it except to look at. I choose a cement dock on the water shaded by a pagoda. I was hoping I could find a spot without a lot of people, but that didn’t work out, so I had a bit of spectators, but I’ve gotten use to ignoring that I’m being watched. Afterwards I and played with the hula-hoop for awhile in the courtyard at the hostel. It was a nice morning and it helped me de-stress from the prior evening’s events. We left the hostel at 1pm to give ourselves plenty of time to make it to the airport for our 4:30 flight. The flight was delayed by an hour and in that hour I checked the board three times to confirm that the flight wasn’t leaving earlier or that it changed gates. Things seemed fine and when we lined up to board and Brock noticed that the airline had changed and that instead of saying Shandong Air (the airline we booked with) it said China Air. My heart started pounding, I about freaked out, and then Brock pointed out that it actually said both airlines and that it appeared they had combined two flights into one. It took my heart about 30 minutes to slow down again.
We arrived in Guilin and took an airport shuttle into town and then a taxi to our hostel. The hostel was called Backstreet Youth Hostel. It was a really good hostel and we had booked a private room so we were really happy. The next morning we left the hostel early to hike through the Longji (Dragon backbone) Rice Terraces and villages that were about a 3 hour drive away. We booked a transport to the villages through our hostel. The van drove us and 5 other travelers, who we hung out with throughout the day, there and back. We were actually the only backpackers in the group. The others, mostly foreigners, lived in China (working and studying). Within the rice terraces there were about 4-5 small villages. The terraces were constructed in the 13th century by the same group of minority Chinese (Yao and Zhuang) that still live there today. There are just fewer than 300 families living and working in the terraces. The road that leads into the mountains where the terraces are was only built ten years ago. Our driver told us that before the road was built most of the villagers never left their village for their entire lives. Only a few people would have to walk in and out every once in awhile for supplies. We were there for the early part of autumn so the rice plants were full of rice and starting to change from green to golden in color. We tried some local plum wine and rice wine. Both had a very homemade taste, but good enough to enjoy. I also tried two different types of teas they make from local plants that were not actual tea plants but some other plant. The restaurants put pitchers of these teas on the tables and it was free so I had a few small cups. I should have thought more about drinking it because I ended up getting the stomach bug again. I figured at the time the water was boiled but now I’m pretty sure they just took the water out of the streams. To them it’s probably clean enough since they are not in a city and the water is from a clear running stream. I waited 3 days and it wasn’t going away so I took some Ciprofloxin and it improved fast. First stomach issue since Columbia.
The next day we booked another tour that would take us down the most beautiful part of the Li River on bamboo rafts and then drive us to Yangshou (our next destination). A boat ride on the Li River is said to be the highlight of this region by Lonely Planet, and it was stunningly beautiful scenery. The only issue was that it was a typical large Chinese tour group, and that was incredibly annoying. We spent 5 hours and 45 minutes on the tour, however only 1 hour on the river and 1 hour getting to Yangshou. The other 3 hours and 45 minutes were spent being a large tour group and nothing else. I guess it was cool to actually be in one of those large Chinese tour groups one time in my life.
Yangshuo is a really cool place. It’s a small town in the middle of all these steep limestone hills along the Li River. The topography is very unique and also very classic for China. Pictures of the scenery here are used for a lot of advertisements and art. It is also the scene on the back of the CYN 20 bill. The hostel we stayed at has a roof top terrace. It appeared to be the tallest roof top terrace in the town. We arrived at our hostel around 4pm and the first thing we did was buy a Tsingtao beer and hang out on the terrace. The view from up there was awesome. We met some other travelers (foreigners who live and work or study in China) and we all watched the sunset and then went out to get some dinner. This is a very crazy time in China right now because it is their main holiday week, “Golden Week.” It celebrates National Day of the People’s Republic of China. Statistics show that 1.3 billion Chinese people travel within China for this Holiday, so it’s a very busy time to be in a touristy area such as Yangshuo. We learned about the holiday a few weeks beforehand and had booked all of our reservations and didn’t travel anywhere besides between Yangshuo and Guilin (1 hour apart by bus). Yanshuo was very crowded, it took probably 4x as long to walk down the main street as it normally would, but this made for a fun time and good night life. By the end of our first night in Yangshuo we had another group of friends to hang out with for the next 2-3 days. Jamie from Seattle and her friend Josh from Germany were living and studying in Shanghai, Alex from France was working in Hong Kong, Susana from Columbia was studying in Beijing, and her friend Katarina was visiting her from Columbia. The seven of us hung out together all day and night. We had a great time.
The first full day in Yangshou was spent on bicycles. We rented bikes and rode up along the Yulong River for about 20 Km. We rode through many small farming villages and farm fields. We even got pretty lost in some fields and had to pay a local woman to help us find our way out of the maze of vegetable gardens. We took bamboo raft taxi rides to cross the river at one point and used a bridge to cross another time. The next day we walked around the town and the local park and then walked along the shore of the Li River until we found “Secret Beach,” which is a nice part of the river that has a beach and the flow of the river slows down so you can swim in it easily. There were lots of ducks there too. It was gorgeous and just what I wanted. We ran into two college students from Utah and Wisconsin on our walk and they joined our group for the rest of the day and night. That evening, just like the two evenings before, we all hung out on the roof top patio and had some Tsingtao and then went out to the bars and clubs to enjoy the night time action. From what I’ve seen the Chinese night life behavior is not very lively. In Yangshuo over their big holiday the bars and clubs had live bands and DJs playing good music, but the Chinese people didn’t dance or even seem to socialize much in them. The bars and clubs all have this dice drinking game available to play and they do play that at times, but otherwise they just sit at the table and listen to the music and relax or play with their phones. Luckily, we were a mix of foreigners, so we knew how to party right, and the setting was perfect for it; loud music, dance floors, flashing lights and décor, crowds, and cheap beer and street food. Our hostel was in the thick of the night life too so all we had to do was walk down from the roof top terrace and into the night life. That was our last night together as a group, as the next day, we were all going separate ways.
The next day Brock and I took the bus back to Guilin. We had our own room with a big window facing the river, and we were pretty exhausted from all our long days and nights in Yangshuo, so we just relaxed and hung out in our room for our last day in China. The next morning we woke up early and headed to the airport to fly to Bangkok Thailand to meet up with Gabe and Vee Fitch.