This is probably the sweetest arrangement yet. I get offered a modeling job in China's Hawaii. Airfare payed. 2 nights in a great hotel. 2 days of shooting with gourmet meals provided. 2000 RMB for filming the commercial. It ended up that I was hardly in any of the shots so I just hung out on the beach the whole time. Then when it was over I arranged for them to give me cash for my return flight. So I took my 2400 RMB and a full stomach, met Kevin on the beach in Sanya, slept in a tent on the beach, and then left to conquer Vietnam the next day!

-steve

The English teaching contracting company I worked for in Guangzhou was acting quite unreasonable. After a dreadful, evil week of teaching in the middle of July, Kevin walks into my room and... Now you have to realize that Kevin has extreme amounts of patience and self control. Anyway, he walks into my room and calmly tells me he has had it. I was like "what!, you of all people can make it till the end of august!". Nope, he had lost it. He told me that he was leaving the next weekend. Just leaving.

The next morning (after a lot of tossing and turning all night) I walked into his room and asked him what he was planning to do. He told me he wanted to do a little traveling. I asked him if he wanted a traveling partner. Then together we said "time to conquer Asia baby!!!". So the next day we applied for Vietnam visas and then went bungee jumping. I tell you, the rest of that teaching week was a breeze. After it was all over I found out that we weren't missed a whole lot. No one really is with this company. As the wise manager always told us "Change to a company brings new ideas". Well fine then - you have your little changing company and I am going to do what I came here for.... Someone hand me my backpack.

-steve

Kevin and I got off the plane to Bangkok from Guangzhou and we wanted to head up north right away. We managed to take the local bus to the train station (crazy bus paying system). Of course when we made it to the train station it was late and there were no tickets available. We kept pestering them and finally they let us go third class (I guess no foreigners take this so they don't even offer it). The best part was that Bangkok to Chiang Mai in a bus is about 500 baht, but third class was only 150 baht (6 Canadian dollars) for 700 kilometers. When we got on the train, we realized why no foreigners took it. This overnight train just had benches and there were people everywhere on them. We squished into a bench and tried to sleep all night sitting up. That proved to be very ineffective. There is always a trade-off when going traveling for cheap - money vs. sleep.

-steve

Getting to the gorge was hard enough. Bus stations in Lijiang were hard to deal with and there was just no easy way to do it. Finally we jumped in a taxi with two other girls after bargaining for a cheap price. The taxi guy let us off at a bridge just outside the gorge and took off. We left and realized we had no idea which side of the river to walk on. We started down the side we were on and got to a ticket booth. It looked ok but there was something strange about it. One thing was for sure.. we don't dish out money very easily (especially 30 RMB (3 USD) yes I am cheap).

Good thing it was so early in the morning and the ticket booth guy was asleep. We snuck past him and walked quite a distance before he popped up and saw us. He ran up to us and then we played dumb - pretending we didn't know you had to pay for it. He stood there and blocked our path so we took a right into a small restaurant to have breakfast. He let us go in but we could see him waiting outside for us. We ate and just as we were finishing, we noticed that some people were at his booth wanting to pay. As he went back to deal with them, we took off down the path without him noticing (hearts racing). We walked for about half an hour and started to notice that we were on some stupid tourist pathway because old ladies were whizzing by us on man-powered carriages. Also the path was all pavement.

Just then our friend from the ticket booth caught up with us on a bike and... here we go again. After playing dumb for half an hour we finally coughed up the 30 RMB each (we were wasting time). We continued on our way and then it happened. We reached the end of the path only to realize we were walking on the wrong side of the stupid gorge. AHHHHH!! We finally walked back a little bit and payed some farmer to take us across the river on his raft. Fortunately when we got to the other side we were on the right side of the river and past the ticket booth of the real entrance to the gorge. From then it was all about conquering.

-steve

So I get to Hong Kong for the first time by my self and I have a few ideas of what to see but the big problem is that it is night and I have nowhere to stay. So after checking out Victoria Peak, I start walking down the hill (by this time it is like 10pm). I am starting to get worried because it is getting late and the hotels I have seen are just too expensive. I just didn't have any time to go looking around. That is when I spotted the nicest thicket on the side of the mountain. So I just jumped in and curled up. It was actually not bad being one with the animal sounds and tree roots in the back. Not too bad until 2am when there was a torrential downpour. I grabbed my stuff and hiked it down that mountain top speed and took refuge in a bus stop. I curled up on the bench and got hardly any sleep for the whole night. Hmm... I think I will splurge a little bit tomorrow.

-steve

Kevin and I are done hiking the gorge and since we only have a week in Yunnan we are eager to get to Dali tonight. Otherwise there is no way we are going to be able to visit Dali. We get to the bus station and everything is sold out for the whole evening. We kind of sat around and pouted (prayed lots). Then just as we were about to give up, some guy took pity on us and told us to walk down the street and turn the corner. We did it because we had no other options. 10 minutes later, he brought his private van around the corner and we jumped in with his family. Then we were off to Dali! We spent the whole trip teaching his kids english and I guess that pretty much paid for the trip because he let us off in Dali and that was that!

-steve

Kevin and I arrive to Dali after our miraculous trip from Lijiang. Still caught up in the faith thing, we start looking for a place to stay just after dark. All the places we go to are just way too out of our range (more than 4 Canadian dollars). Basically if it was more than that we slept in a park. After scouring the whole area for a hotel (and finding no good parks) we decided there was no finding a place. We decided to lean up against a building and sleep on the street (and praying lots). Some guy saw us as he was putting away his fruit stand. We told him we couldn't find a cheap place to stay. He laughed at me the frugal little white boy. Actually I was probably more frugal than him. Anyway, he took us through some pretty disgusting, dark alleys and brought us to this pretty rundown place. We told him we weren't really "into" these types of set-ups but he assured us that everything was ok. We walked in and it was actually pretty nice. And the best part of all - clean beds at $2 CAD a night!! SCORE!!!!!!!!!!! (and showers). So Kevin and Steve avoid the streets for another night.

-steve

The last picture before we and the situation went downhill

Lindsay and I thought it would be a great day to climb Baiyun Shan (White Cloud Mountain) one day after work. So we took the bus to the north end of Guangzhou and set out. This was a typical china hike. Firstly there was a big wall surrounding the mountain so you have to walk through a toll booth. Secondly, there is a paved path or road up the mountain so you can get up in your high heels or tour bus. One of my first philosophies is that you can't keep me off a mountain. There has to be some back way around the wall! After about a half and hour of searching, we concluded that this particular mountain had a high wall all around it. So we reluctantly paid our 5 RMB (1$ Canadian) each and entered.

So we walked to the top and bla bla bla, looked at the city with a bunch of Chinese tourists. On the way down we noticed that there were so many little paths heading off the main paved stairway path so we decided to take on of them. I had been here before and I knew the dirt paths were much better than the normal paths. We ended up getting a little lost and it was starting to get dark so we decided to just bushwhack our way down to an entrance. When we finally did emerge from the jungle, things looked a little strange. We walked around a bit and saw a gate. But as we were walking out, a guy in a military uniform and a machine grabbed us and started yelling. Because of all the commotion, a few more came and crowded around us. We were led to a small room and told to wait. Over the next 5 hours, we were interviewed by about five or ten military officials (one who was flown in just to talk to us).

They were convinced that we were spies on their base!!! I have to admit this was probably the most scariest experience yet. We just kept shuddering and talking about jail and torture and things like that. Eventually we got in contact with our friend (who happened to be the son of a military official himself) and he explained who we were etc.. They still weren't very convinced and made us sign a bunch of documents, take photos etc... Then they drove us out of the compound in a jeep and dumped us on the street. Man, those Guangzhou streets never looked any better. Our buddy then told us that if it wasn't for him we would either a) be in jail, or b) be shipped out of the country. He advised us to put back on the high heels and take the stairs up the mountain.

-steve