Yangshuo

We finally uploaded some pictures from our trip to China & Hong Kong. Check out the Picasa Album China Hong Kong.
We spent almost our entire time in China in the Guangxi province. After a few days in Nanning a big city, where we didn't see a single foreigner for days, we went on to Yangshuo one of the more touristy places in China. As Yangshuo is the best (at least the most popular) place in China for climbing we decided to make it our home for the coming three weeks. We enjoyed great climbing in a beautiful karst landscape, made friends, enjoyed great food, but also experienced a flood in the area, weeks of rain and we didn't see the sun once in 2 weeks.
Hong Kong was a very interesting experience where you can spend 20 min just to get across the street, because you have to walk around the corner get into a building cross the skybridge into another building get down again out of the building through a subway and so on...

After super humid China and super busy Hong Kong we decided to hit the beach next, so we are finally going to Thailand!!

Chinese Censorship

Short: Chinese censorship sucks.

Long: Due to Chinese internet censorship we could not access any blogspot.com/ domain. Which of course means that my blog is censored in China which means I could neither view nor update it. That sucks, no they suck, the Chinese government sucks. They don't give a shit about freedom of speech. If somebody could voice his opinion - just block the whole site. Blogs are bad for Chinese people, block them! Facebook is bad for Chinese people, block it! Websites where you can post pictures (picasaweb, etc), bad! block 'em! Wikipedia site about the People's Republic of China very bad! Chinese citizens could learn the truth about their government, block it!

and while we're at it: just in case they didn't block anything: everybody using a computer in an internet cafe is required to show his ID so all his activity can be traced.

Now they should have everything covered. Except for knowledgeable geeks how use a VPN or a proxy.


Apart from the totalitarian regime that controls China and executes more people than the rest of the world put together every year (thousands every year and guess what they don't tell anybody how many and who they kill. I wonder why...) we had a great time in China. It's a beautiful country with extremely friendly people.

We spent quite some time in Yangshuo, Guangxi province which has great climbing. And then went to China's beacon of freedom: Hong Kong. A cool place where the people still live their freedoms but which will probably be made completely a part of China in a few decades. For now it runs under "one country, two systems" which gives them a lot of autonomy.

Around the World Trip

It has been more than two years since my last post, which of course is due to my life being completely boring during that period of time ;) Well now I'm up to something interesting again: a trip around the world.
After finishing my studies Alexandra and I left to travel the world for an entire year. We started a month ago with a flight to Bangkok, we initially intended to travel to Cambodia overland, but in the end we booked another flight to Phnom Penh, Cambodia. We did this in order to avoid the trouble caused by the Red Shirts in Thailand.
We stayed in Cambodia for more than a week and had a very good but extremely hot start. It was the hottest time of the year, just before the rainy season started. Extremely hot and humid and almost no difference between night and day! Incredible, we spent the whole day sweating and running from one place to another hoping for it to be cooler never resting always running (not literally!) from the heat, then when night fell in we thought it would finally cool down, but it didn't.
Cambodia is a interesting country with very nice people who have a shocking recent history: From 1975 to 1979 Cambodia was ruled by Pol Pot an the Khmer Rouge. A frightening regime that enslaved the whole country to work in the rice fields and killed more than a quarter of the country's population in only three years. Lots of them were killed and buried in mass graves all over the Cambodia, but even more died of starvation and hard work.
We also visited the Angkor area, which is one of the biggest ruins on the planet. In its heyday it was the biggest pre-industrial city in the world home to roughly one million inhabitants. Beautiful and fascinating.

Then we took a boat down the Mekong to Vietnam. Much cooler here. Traveled south to north in Vietnam. Currently we reside on Cat Ba an Island at the Ha Long Bay, a beautiful place were we climbed the first routes on our trip and the first place where we stay a bit longer, settle down a bit. Our backpacks are quite big and heavy because of all the climbing gear that we brought along - it feels good to put it to use so we didn't carry it around in vain.

Shortly we will be heading further north to Sapa where we plan to cross the boarder to China, which was not part of our original plan. But the opportunity arose and that's the whole beauty of our travel experience - we are free to go where we want to, whenever we want to.

Update: We posted some pictures on my flickr account. Here is a link to the set Cambodia & Vietnam