We were very lucky to avoid the worst of the winter shock Asia had been suffering in the weeks leading to Chinese new year and only experienced one snowing day, before temperatures started to climb steadily, reaching a very comfortable 15 degrees.

After 10 relaxing days I said my farewells and left for Japan, where I was meeting with a few colleagues for skiing – a traditional event running in the fourth year.

After nearly eleven months traveling non-stop together, this was actually our first time “separated” for more than an hour!!

Being famous for such diverse things as spicy food, pandas and gorgeous mountain lakes, the Sichuan province is a very popular tourist destination among many Asians.  We have always been a big fan of Sichuan restaurants in Singapore and were keen to verify their authenticity for ourselves!

Together with Yang Ke’s mum we took a direct flight to Chengdu from Wuxi’s own airport and installed ourselves in a very cute apartment discovered on airbnb

How by fate the apartment was in proximity of a popular food street – first stop of our city tour
The street’s architecture is inspired from previous dynasties and there is some interesting street art, but all of this is just a pretext for the real highlight: The Food.

[See image gallery at 2young2simple.debraaf.eu]

The great advantage of these street markets is that food comes in snack-size portions, allowing you to savor a wider range of options. Nevertheless we barely got to the middle of the street before being full and were forced to switch to other activities. But no worry, Chengdu has loads of impressive sights to fill your time between lunch and dinner.

Jinsha, a massive archaeological site of the ancient Shu kingdom (around 1000 years BC) has only recently been discovered. A part of the original site and many of its very well preserved artifacts (lots of ivory and gold) can be visited in a modern museum, which also includes a large and quiet park.

[See image gallery at 2young2simple.debraaf.eu]

After so much culture it was time for a food break. A friend of Yang Ke’s mum invited us to a posh Hotpot restaurant (ShuJiuXiang), another famous specialty of Sichuan.

Whats makes Sichuan spiciness so particular is the devilish combination of spicy chili and mouth-numbing pepper, called MaLa in Chinese (mouth-numbing spicy), which assures you a high body temperature even in the coldest winter.
After receiving the hotpot-broth filled to the brim with chilies and peppers, we took out a whole bowl of those before even daring to try a spoon. Of course it remained very spicy, which we had to cool down with sour plum juice.

The main reason for many to come to Chengdu are the cute and chubby pandas, native to Sichuan province and surrounding area.
The best way to experience them is with a visit to the large panda breeding and research base in Chengdu, giving birth to around 100 pandas every year. It is a large zoo-like area with separate outdoor camps for different aged pandas and indoor facilities to get a glimpse at newborns and babies. Some of the areas for adult pandas are pretty large and the lazy pandas can be difficult to spot, but there are also lots of smaller spaces where the less camera shy ones spend hours munching on their favorite bamboos. As bamboo is quite low on energy, pandas have to spend half of the day eating, while sitting on their fat butt and will spend the rest mostly napping or slowly strolling around.

The pandas have quite different characters, some being more shy and individual, others more playful and curious. They seem usually rather lazy, dosing in trees after eating  but you can also spot some playing with each other

Next up was (you guessed it) more food! You would think that after one food street you have seen it all and everything else will just be copies of the same things, but not in Chengdu!
We ventured to another popular food street and spent another dinner just snacking from one stall to the next.

[See image gallery at 2young2simple.debraaf.eu]

My favorite sweet snack is this delicious pineapple rice combo:

Another cultural highlight of Chengdu is the temple of WuHou, a royal advisor called ZhugeLiang who is considered the embodiment of intelligence and wisdom in China. He lived during the Three Kingdom period, a very dramatic era which still inspires many movies and TV dramas.

A worthwhile day trip is the visit of the ancient town of HuangLongXi (Yellow Dragon River), a pretty little historic town of the Qing dynasty (1700 years old), named after the river flowing through it. In summer it must be an even more charming place to meet and drink tea in one of its many small streets.

We concluded our visit with the highlight for Yang Ke and her mum, the transformation into a beautiful opera singer.
At the backstage of an actual Sichuan opera house you get to choose your preferred figure among a huge selection, from little princess to funny clowns and serious generals.

Most of the time goes to the makeup, creating the very expressive face through many layers

The one hour waiting is definitely worthwhile when you see the results:

After being on the road for so long this was also a good chance to repack our bags, store items we no longer needed and resupply ourselves for the European winter.

From the start we tried to optimize our luggage to be as light as possible and never ever regretted it. A key strategy is to get yourself a backpack one number smaller than you actually think you need, which forces you to keep all those extra sets of clothes at home and prevents you from accumulating too much rubbish (souvenirs) during your travel. Like most long-term traveler we spent quite some time looking for our favorite backpack, a companion you will spend hours carrying on your back while searching for your next hostel, squeezing it into chaotic buses and zipping/ unzipping it a thousand times.

The large majority of back packs available are developed with hikers or mountainclimbers in mind and for many reasons not very suited for normal backpackers like us.  Luckily there have been a few initiatives over the last 2-3 years from passionate individuals to plug this hole in the market, which often got their products on the ground thanks to Kickstarter & co.
We quite quickly decided on the Tortuga backpack (www.tortugabackpacks.com) which, at least on the paper, won against its competitors in a landslide. The only point I was hesitating for was its bit smallish volume of 40l but (cf. key packing strategy) that worry remained unfounded
Now, after 6 months of traveling, we are still as happy with our tortugas as ever and appreciate all its advantages:

• Full-length zipper along the whole front, to allow easy access to all your stuff
• As all openings are by zip you can lock them all with standard locks. Great to deter the little thefts during plane transport or in the hostel. Always found it very unsatisfying that particularly the cheaper accommodations where you might need a safe, dont have one, whereas the expensive well-run hotels where you don’t really need one, they have a safe for you
• Well padded compartment for laptop
• Size is maximized to be still permitted for cabin carry-on! Didn’t consider this so important in the beginning, but we used it quite a bit. Usually we would bring one tortuga with us to the cabin, containing the more valuable items, like electronics, and in airports/airlines with bad reputation we would even bring all bags along. Great to have this flexibility

But instead of jumping into action and take the next plane to a remote island or the deep Amazonian jungle, we opted for a ”soft-landing”.
Ok, it wasn’t fully a choice, but it turned out to be a good thing. Yang Ke still had an exam end of April she needed to study for, and I also could time my next exam to the same period. We therefore decided to spend our first four weeks with Yang Ke’s parents in Wuxi, China, studying while spending time with the family and enjoy the pleasant spring weather.
After the last weeks in Singapore were pretty rush in getting everything prepared, saying good-bye to all our nice friends and colleagues, arranging visas and clearing our apartment, we didn’t really have a lot of time to think about the travel itself, apart from the vague plan to fly to Peru and sometime later continue to Chile (after we had to change our initial plan last-minute – Yang Ke can tell you more
Sitting then in the plane to Wuxi after everything went pretty smooth, we finally released a huge sigh of relief, looking forward to a relaxing study-time, with enough time to sort out any remaining to-dos and do a bit of travel planning and reading.

And we had a very pleasant time indeed. Yang Ke’s parents took great care of us, not only with delicious and healthy home-cooked food but her mum had also scouted everything in advance for us, from the best study places to organizing us a monthly gym-membership.

We developed somewhat of a daily routine, containing with some variations a morning visit to the neighbouring hill + park combined with a Tai Chi session or walk up to the summit (1668 stairs in total!), some reading in the morning, lunch at home, a swim in the gym in the early afternoon, study-session in the afternoon/evening, dinner outside.

We had a few cooling days with some crazy temperature changes, but mostly very nice spring weather with all trees in full blossom

Coming down the mountain from another side comes with the comfort of a cable-car and nice views on a pagoda and Wuxi’s skyline.

We spend our last week in Shanghai where we both had our exam. As mine was the style of a project, which I had four days to prepare, we settled-in in a nice hotel, which became my study-place for the whole four days. Initially I didn’t plan to venture out much, as the exam was supposed to be very time-intense, but after the first day I felt quite comfortable and started to slot-in more breaks and get more sun-exposure. Discovered that our hotel actually had a great location, just next to a huge park 中山公园 , which was perfect for having a walk but also for admiring all the activities of the locals, from calligraphy painters over kite-flyers to Tai Chi groups and all kind of other dance groups.
Despite so much activity it never felt too crowded and I found myself a quiet spot to do my own Tai Chi session. After my first session I immediately got into a chat* with some older locals who took the time to give me advice and do a long Tai Chi session together.
The surroundings of our hotel also had a few nice streets and restaurants to explore, which made for nice-breaks. I think overall I enjoyed the stay so much that I became very motivated for my exam

And then our stay already came to an end, much too quickly. After good-byes in Wuxi, we headed back again to Shanghai to catch our flight to Peru, with stopover in Toronto.

[* whenever I refer to “chat with locals” this usually implies understanding of at most half of the conversation and includes a lot of guessing, hand-signs and misunderstandings]