Gisborne and Wellington, New Zealand

As my mum was a Maori she was taken to the family marae (meeting house). Her coffin was placed on the marae and family and friends were able to farewell her.
At this time people tell stories and sing songs or pray. In the evening those who want to, can sleep on the marae with her.

There is a separate building where meals are prepared and guests can eat. It is traditional to give food or some money to the family to help with the expenses of the funeral.

Our marae is featured on the New Zealand fifty dollar note and these are the weavings and carvings inside it.

My mother was buried in a small family cemetery with her parents and my dad who died a couple of years ago. She was in her 83rd year.

We slept one night at the marae and were able to catch up with all my siblings. I am the eldest of 10 and my parents adopted one of the grandchildren to make us 11. It was the first time we had had a photo taken of the whole 11 together.

We are standing on the front of the marae in birth order from left to right!

After the marae we drove back to Gisborne to catch up with John's family and our friends.

We drove to Wellington to attend my sister's wedding. We had not planned to return for the wedding but she was delighted we could make it. I was asked to take my mother's place and give the bride away. Luckily someone was able to lend me some clothes so I didn't have to wear my backpacker's 'zip-offs'.

After 10 days we returned to China to continue our travels for another year.

Qingdao-China to Hong Kong- to New Zealand

While in Pingyao we got an email from our daughter Kerri telling us that Lil's mum had had a massive stroke. We had to catch an electric cart out of the old town and then a bus to the provincial capital Taiyuan. We had already booked a sleeper train from Taiyuan to Qingdao so made our connection with that. The railway line and station at Qingdao were closed as they were rebuilding some of it to be ready for the Olympic games as Qingdao is hosting the sailing events. After an 13 hour trip we had to get off the train at Cangcou station. The soft sleeper was old but comfortable and we shared it with a mining engineer, who spoke very good English, and a businessman.
Qingdao airport
At Cangkou we had a lot of difficulty getting a taxi to the Qingdao airport and were pestered by touts with unlicensed vans wanting to take us. Finally we managed to find a student who spoke a little English but a lot of French and he helped us negotiate with a van driver. After a couple of hours at the airport we took our Dragonair flight to Hong Kong.

The landing in Hong Kong was pretty rocky and we couldn't see anything because of the heavy rain. Once we had landed we saw that there was a typhoon warning. Our flight to Auckland with Cathay Pacific was delayed an hour and then another hour and after hanging about we were told to report to the desk at 10.30pm. When we did front up we were told the flight would go at 7.40am the next day and as many people were stranded there were no hotels and we had to sleep on the airport floor. It was difficult to sleep as large groups of people were watching football on TV and it felt like we were at a live match because there was so much clapping and cheering.

In the morning we fronted up again and found 300 people at the desk with one clerk who spent the whole time on the telephone and wasn't able to answer any one's questions. We were then told that we would not fly until 4pm that day.
We managed to get some phone cards to ring NZ and a lovely free shower and food at the Cathay Pacific lounge.
A clear view of Auckland as we arrived!
We flew into Auckland and had to wait for a flight to Gisborne which left at 11am which was when the service for my mum was beginning. Kerri and my sister-in-law met us at the airport and we drove to Ruatoria and then onto Waiomatatini. We arrived 69 hours after leaving Pingyao in China in the same clothes and my mum had already been buried.

Pingyao, Shanxi, China

Pingyao is a small Chinese village- 40,000 people. It has an intact 6 km Ming dynasty city wall which is reportedly the last remaining in China. The bricks have stamps on them from their makers of the Zhou dynasty (827-728). Thank goodness there were some places that were not destroyed by the students during the 'Cultural Revolution'. There were some models of the devices used to thwart invaders of the walls.

It was a thriving merchant town in Ming and Qing dynasties when China's earliest banks were set up. After the heyday there was no money to modernise so the town is a great example of how things were with houses built around courtyards and narrow streets. The original houses had large wooden beams and rice paper windows.

As the banks had so much gold and silver it was necessary to have security guards and the place where they trained in martial arts is an interesting place displaying all the weapons they used.



Today there are hordes of electric carts ferrying Chinese tourists about the narrow streets.They run over the wheat at the same time!

We met a very nice university student in his final semester called Edison. He joined us to explore the old town and we had great fun together and learnt a lot about China. Edison had a job at the ASUS computer company after his graduation so he was most impressed we had an ASUS notebook.

He told us this was the most complicated Chinese character



It was necessary to buy a ticket to have access to many of the old town historic buildings and it was valid for 2 days. There was no overall map of the sites you could visit so we have to wandered about until we found an entrance with a turnstile, it was hit and miss but there were signs in Chinese that we could not read. In 1997 Pingyao was declared a Unesco World heritage Site.

We visited a wealthy merchant's house that had the servants rooms lower than his to show his status in the community.

Our hostel was built around a courtyard and was very nice with all the mod cons.

One day we heard some music in the street and went to investigate and found it was a funeral procession. At the head of the line were groups of men carrying decorated bamboo frames followed by musicians and then these people who had trays with what looked like food offerings. The women wore white mesh rectangular pieces of cloth over their faces.


Outside Pingyao is Shuanglin Temple. It was a very interesting place with 2000 painted clay figurines. Unfortunately we were not allowed to photograph those inside.

There were beautifully glazed roof ornaments featuring white elephants. The temple is used as a training base for art students and several were there
sculpting some of the statues from clay.
This was a street stall selling meatunrefrigerated and exposed to the elements! Maybe it was donkey meat like Edison had given me to try.

Terracotta Warriors, Shaanxi, China

In 1974 some peasants were digging a well and uncovered The Terracotta Warriors. The army is 2000 years old and the first excavated vault, 210 metres by 60 metres, has thousands of life-size terracotta soldiers and their horses in battle formation.

After the 6000 figures of warriors and horses are 3 rows of 210 crossbow and long bow bearers. Behind them is the main force of armoured soldiers holding spears daggers-axes and long shaft weapons, accompanied by 35 horse-drawn chariots.The wooden chariots have rotted now and each soldier has different facial features and expressions.


There are still many parts of this vault that have not been excavated yet.

Over 10,000 weapon pieces were uncovered and sorted, and because of a surface treatment they were given, were still sharp after 2000 years.
In 246 BC, at the age 13, Ying Zheng assumed the title of 'First Emperor- Qin Shi Huang'. He united the country and standardised the writing and currency. He ruled till 210 BC.

The army was to protect him in the afterlife. The Emperor's tomb had many ingenious defences against invaders as it was filled with precious stones so he had the artisans buried alive to keep the site a secret!

There are many mausoleums in this area of China and thousands have yet to be excavated.

Xian, Shaanxi, China

From Kaifeng we travelled by train. From the train window we saw lots of fruit trees and villages with these pawlaunia trees (a soft wood tree we call Chinese coffin tree as it is used to make boxes etc) and they reminded us of the lane where we live which has several trees like this.

Chinese tradition (some areas) has it that when a person is born, a tree is planted for him or her. After that person dies, his "coffin" tree is harvested for that purpose. For one to be buried otherwise would doom his spirit to wander forever.

This reference was posted to me by someone who read the blog so I will add it here. Thanks JP.

We thought Xian would be riddled with touts so we very surprised to find we were left alone at the train station on arrival. Maybe the rain kept them indoors.

A French Canadian lady recommended the Ibis hotel to us so we enjoyed being in a new place with all the conveniences one needs and being cheaper than the International Hostels and even the highly rated hostels on www.hostelworld.com and we spent some time relaxing there. (I have recently tried adding links to my blog so I hope they work).

I complained that the heating was too cold and the hotel manager brought us a platter of delicious fruit and then we discovered that we had the aircon on cold!

According to our guidebook "Xian was a classic world city two centuries before Homer penned Iliad and (and Rome was founded) and five centuries prior to Buddha's enlightenment", phew that makes it pretty old!

One night we saw a restaurant on the second floor that looked full of people so headed in to eat. Two girls in uniforms chorused a greeting to us and put us in the lift to the 2 floor. We had arrived at a hot pot restaurant. Only one young man spoke a little English and we had left our Mandarin phrasebook behind. He presented us with a sheet of paper all in Chinese. We had to fill in how many of each dish we wanted but had no idea what there was. We drew some pictures of what we would like and most of the vegetables we drew they didn't have "Mei you" (No have). From the back of the restaurant a group of Chinese teenagers appeared and helped us with our order saying "You don't know what is delicious but we do". An Australian girl was with them and they had treated her to duck tongues and pig palettes! That got us worried as to what we would end up with.

At a hot pot restaurant you order small dishes of thinly sliced meat, chopped vegetables, and dipping sauces and they go into a broth (spicy or non spicy)in a large pot in the centre of the table and you regulate the temperature and cook things to your taste. After cooking everything you drink the soup which is so yummy. It was an inexpensive meal and we went several times more and never paid more than $4nz.

The Chinese people are very curious. If you open your bag they will crowd around and look in it. If you have a card in your hand someone will try to take it to read it. They are also very friendly and will jabber away even if you don't understand. If you ask for help they will try to help you. So we have had a lot of fun communicating without having their language.

These huge pots can be seen outside restaurants and soup of some sort will stew away for hours inside in small crockery dishes with handles. I am not sure how they are heated but the dishes are all stacked on racks inside.

The epic caravans of the Silk Road east terminated in Xian along with the camels ladened with exotic trade goods as well as invited Buddhist monks and Islamic emissaries.Today there is a huge Muslim area with a street market and night market selling food and handicrafts.

The minaret
We visited the Great Mosque which was nothing like the domed mosques that you immediately think of. The minaret was like a little pagoda.

There were some Muslim families visiting and having pictures taken so we snapped away too. It was a nice peaceful place away from the souvenir sellers yelling "Hello, hello, hello, hello, come and look." 50 choruses of this is so annoying!


There is a Bell Tower in the centre of the street dating from the 14th century but was rebuilt by the Qing in 1739.

It was easy to get around by local bus at 20c nz each - the same price as a haircut, and street food.

Kaifeng, Henan, China

We took a train from Nanjing to Kaifeng in Henan province. It is not a place that is on every one's 'must see in China list' but it looked like a good place to stop on our way to Xian and the Terracotta Warriors. The train was full as we were only able to get a hard seat and there were lots of people standing in the aisles. There were several TV screens in the train showing a reality show of people making fools of themselves in public and a Chinese film where they fly through the air, drink potions that give them super powers and then they have loads of Kung Fu fights. This kept everyone occupied and helped the time pass quickly and the uniformed railway sales people had to compete for an audience and customers.

We chose a hotel from the Lonely Planet guide book and arrived there at about 8pm to a rain soaked city. The hotel was enormous and there were lots of business men staggering about after their evening of drinks. It had a plaque saying it was a 2 star hotel. It must have been wonderful when it was first built but it is now adequate but neglected.

There were only a few stalls selling food in the Muslim night market street outside the hotel because of the cold wet weather so we headed for a Mc Donald's restaurant for some fast food -most seem to be open for 24 hours. We were ambushed by a local young man who wanted to practise his English and tell us about his dreams to go to the US to study and play basketball. His attempts to communicate our order to the staff ended up confusing everyone - he was keen to impress his mother with his skills as I guess she will have to pay for his trip.

In the morning we were greeted by another local who introduced himself as Jason (Xu Shi Jie) and he showed us his notebooks full of clients he had guided around the city- 408 of them- over the last 4 years. He told us he is a Christian and has been learning English for 28 years and is self-taught. He usually works as a rickshaw driver but loves to speak English and guide any tourists if they are about.

We became clients number 409!

Kaifeng is south of the Yellow River and after centuries of flooding the old Northern Song city is buried 8or 9 metres beneath. Between 1194 and 1938 the city was flooded 368 times-an average of once every two years!

The city is surrounded by fertile fields of crops from the silt.

Kaifeng was the first city in China where Jewish people settled after arriving from India along the Silk Road. There is a small Christian community and a much larger Muslim community.

While strolling down a local street we passed Jason's local barber so went in to say hello. John decided to get his hair cut and joined the queue for 1RMB- about 20c NZ - she had just increased her prices by 50% but gave it to him at the old price!

We had a fantastic day with Jason. We visited the Yanqing Temple which was built to commemorate Wang Zhe the founder of the True unity Sect of Taoism. There were many women sitting inside the domed building chatting.

The carvings at the Shanshangan Guild hall were fantastic. The grapes on the beams look so real and the beams were carved from a single log. Jason was able to tell us the significance of some of the carvings. Many of them are symbols for wealth, prosperity, happiness and generativity (the pomegranate featured to symbolise more sons, grandsons and the continuance of the family line). The hall was built by merchants from different provinces and was very interesting.

We caught a bus to a park to watch the locals at play. On the bus some of the old people (much older than us) wanted to show their good manners by giving up their seats for us. Of course we insisted that they sat down and so this banter would go on and on and the seat would remain empty until there were enough seats for us all to sit!

At the park which was full of mainly retired folk we saw groups practising their diablo tossing skills, gambling at cards and mah jong,
singing opera,
and whipping their tops into action. There was also a free haircutting class as trainees got their skills up.
A lot of the people in the park had seen Jason on TV and in an article in a newspaper about his activities with tourists-from 3 years ago. They couldn't believe that a rickshaw driver could speak English.

We chatted to some of them about NZ too and they knew Helen Clark (our PM) was in China. They also knew that we had lots of sheep and were convinced we had sheep milk as well!

Not much money has been spent on modernizing Kaifeng and with the old city buried the planners are not allowed to build tall buildings that need deep foundations for fear of damaging the underground city.

Nanjing, Jiangsu, China

We booked a bus through our hotel for Nanjing. It took all the back roads and stopped at every little village along the way but was still faster than the train.
Many of the hostels/hotels will buy train and bus tickets for you at a small fee so it is very convenient. It means you don't have to traipse across town and then get pushed around in the long queues.

From the bus window I snapped some photos of the houses that had interesting mosaic scenes on their balconies or front walls.

We also saw some long houses in the fields. They looked like they were made from rice straw or pressed earth covered with straw. It was difficult to tell if they were lived in, housed animals or were for some other use- my first thought was for growing mushrooms. We asked some locals but they had never seen them.

There were also many factories along the way and the air became more and more smoggy and the light a dull yellowish colour.

Nanjing has 5.29 million people. From 1368 - 1644 it was the nation's capital and it was the capital again of the Republic of China in the early 20th century.

There are many universities here and the hostel we are staying in has students from Australia studying here as well as teachers teaching in the local schools. It feels like a boarding house.

There is a gorgeous lake in the middle of the city but it was impossible to see across to the other side of it because of the pollution. People were out flying kites, riding bikes, dancing and we saw several pup tents along the shore. There was an American guy teaching English to any child who turned up. They were learning words like Easter bunny, jelly beans and basket!

Th city has a city wall from the Ming Dynasty (AD 1368-1644) it measures over 33kms- the longest city wall ever built in the world. It averages 12m high and 7m wide and was built from bricks from 5 provinces. Each brick was stamped with where it came from, the overseers name and rank as well as the brick maker's name. If the bricks broke they had to be replaced. Even back then they had quality control systems like they are introducing to the food industry today with its bar code labels that can identify the grower and his or her products!

In the 19th century, the Opium Wars brought the British to Nanjing and the first of the 'unequal treaties' was signed opening some Chinese ports to foreign trade and ceding Hong Kong to Britain.

In the 20th century, as the capital of the Republic of China it was the site of the worst war atrocity in Japan's assault on China. In 1937, as the occupation by Japan became imminent the Chinese government encouraged the people of Nanjing to stay saying: "All those who have blood and breath in them must feel that they wish to be broken as jade rather than remain whole as tile." Thousands of people were killed as they tried to flee through the tunnel to the only city gate that was not locked.

We visited the Sun Yat Sen Mausoleum along with thousands of others. He is recognized as the father of Modern China. There are hundreds of steps and gateways to go through before reaching the mausoleum. It is a well laid out area in a huge pine and osmanthus park and it would take a long time to see everything in the park.

We went by an electric shuttle cart to the Linggu Temple which was included in our ticket. The Buddhist temple is nearby a memorial hall to the monk Xuan Zang who brought back the Buddhist scriptures from India.

The plum blossoms looked great in the botanical garden and signs were everywhere advertising the 2008 International Blossom Festival.

Huangshan, (Yellow Mountain), Anhui, China.

We booked into a new hostel in Tunxi. We use the www.hostelworld.com site regularly to find places to stay. The site rates the hostels by availability, guest ratings, or price. It also gives us directions to find the hostel and lists all its services and facilities. It is a valuable resource and means we have somewhere prebooked when we arrive in a city and don't have to wander around looking for accommodation. Our little ASUS notebook is so great for doing this! How did we survive in the 70s!

The Koala hostel in Huang Shan Xi (the name of the modern city but Tunxi is its ancient name)is owned by the same people as the one we stayed with in Shanghai so we knew it would be very nice. All the staff are very young and can speak English and are keen to help out where they can.

Hong Cun- the previous posting was done as a day trip from Tunxi. Sorry we got our posting out of order.

The hostel was in Old Street- a street of old buildings that has been preserved for the tourists and is full of shops selling things Chinese tourists might like.

Through the hostel we booked a bus to Huang Shan- Yellow mountain. After an hour and a half we arrived at the entrance to Yellow mountain. At the hostel they had told us that the weather forecast was for cloud and rain and other travellers told us that accommodation and food on the mountain is very expensive so so we decided to just do a one day trip to the mountain.

The mountain has been a tourist attraction for 1200 years. Countless painters and poets have trudged around the range, seeking inspiration and bestowing the peaks with fanciful names like, Nine dragons, Taoist priest, Ox Nose, Fairy Capital and Hunchback. So being a national holiday you can imagine the people jam on the steep stone steps! Well it didn't rain and it was a hot sunny day so we have some great views although the pollution haze set in in the afternoon. It is a spectacular place and not for those who do not have ahead for heights!

A cable car took us up the mountain and then we walked about 5 hours up and down the various peaks and caught a second cable car down again. We are pretty fit as we walk everywhere so we had no sore muscles the next day. This man never had sore legs either!

The tour leader with flag and microphone headsets!

On the drive back we saw these drying in the sun, under the eaves of the houses or on the line with the washing.

Qingming is a Chinese festival to remember the dead. Tombs in the fields were decorated with these colourful fans and families were tidying up the graves.