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A few months ago I reserved a 2008 Smart Fortwo. I’ve been interested in them for several years, and even considered selling them, but I think I’ll be happy to just own one, particularly when I just spent $3.30 a gallon in Wisconsin last weekend and have been commuting over 50 miles per day for the last year or so.

So today, Smart was in Minneapolis with several Fortwos and allowed test drives for people that have put down deposits. I was impressed, to be sure. The cars they had were all Passions, which is the higher trim model. The base model is the Pure, which doesn’t have AC or a radio, etc. The Pure will be under $12k, the Passion will be under $14k, and the Passion Cabrio will be under $17k

The quality and feel of the cars was really good, especially considering the price. The seat was amazingly adjustable, and there was lots of room for a car barely over eight feet long. Trunk space is limited, but it would fit quite a few bags of groceries, or a few small bags for a weekend trip. It’s also quite comfortable for a small, cheap car.
Power was also surprisingly good. The Smart has 71hp, but since it weighs only 1800lbs, it’s surprisingly quick. Certainly not sports car quick, but it’s clearly economy car quick.

One area that I’m not so sure about is fuel economy. Smart will only say that the goal is a combined 40 MPG. That’s good, but nowhere near the economy of the first gen cars. If that means an EPA 35/45 that’s pretty good, but 40/50 or better would really make it a no brainer for me. Half the price of a Prius, and almost the fuel economy sounds like a winner for a commuter car, my primary need.

If I buy a Smart, it will be the first new car I’ve ever owned, but I think that this is a car, for me, that actually justifies a new car purchase.

Smart hasn’t announced much more for numbers, and the available date for the cars is no earlier than January, but could be a lot later… Overall I’m excited about the prospect of owning and commuting with a Smart starting next year.

Internet access was not as easy in China as I had expected, and I was unable to post any updates during my trip. This might get a little confusing, but I will be writing several updated about various legs of the trip and back dating them to when I should have written them.

As a quick teaser, the trip was incredible. The experience was absolutely awesome, and having three weeks to explore the country was also amazing. I am glad to be home again, and I think that the length and experience was the perfect length for me.

A few statistics from the trip:

People involved: 7 (Fritz and Rain, Peter, David, Rick, Brian, and I)
Photos I took: 1296

Total number of photos taken by everybody: ~4500

Provinces visited: 5 (Beijing, Henan, Shaanxi, Sichuan, and Guangxi)

Cities Visited: 7 (Beijing, Ye’Xian, Pingdingshan, Louyang, Xi’an, Juizhaigou, and Yangshuo)

Total flights: 7 (On Northwest, Air China, and Hainan Airline)

Methods of transport used: 12 (International flight, Chinese domestic flight, hard sleeper train, hard seat train, subway, Tour bus, inter-city coach bus, city bus, taxi, private car, mini-cab, bicycle, foot)

Highest elevation visited: 3500 meters (11500 ft) at the Juizhaigou airport

Highest elevation hiked: 2900 meters (9500 ft) in Juizhaigou park

Animals added to my list of animals I’ve eaten: 4 (rabbit, yak, scorpion, sea horse)

Here is a list of my entries in chronological order:

Pre-trip – Pre-trip entry

Beijing – with photos

Ye’Xian – with photos

Pindingshan to Luoyang – with photos

Longmen Caves – with photos

Juizhaigou Arrival – with photos

Juizhaigou Park – with photos

Yangshuo – with photos

Final Days in Beijing – with photos

Humorous sightings while in China – Entry coming soon

The train journey from Guilin back to Beijing was an interesting experience. In China, most people travel by train, and many large cities have only recently built airports. I traveled in a “hard sleeper” which is normally the most luxurious manner to travel by train, and so has the more affluent Chinese. None of them speak english, however, that’s still a rarity in most of China. They were all friendly, and the older couple on the bottom bunks was very nice, offering me their table to write on and such.

For people traveling by sleeper in China, there are three rows of bunks. The bottom bunks serve as seats for people when they are not sleeping, and the top bunks have the least headroom, so the middle bunk is considered the best, although I actually preferred the top. On one train there was a shelf at the top to place bags and keep them nearby, and the vents for the AC are up there, so that person can chose to close them and boil everybody else. There’s also nobody climbing up you bed.

So I spent 26 hours on a train traveling about 1100 miles up through China, with very little ability to communicate with anybody on the train. It was a unique experience to say the least, but not nearly as difficult as one might have imagined. I did have the luxury of movies, music, and recorded TV shown on my PDA phone to keep me entertained, as well as my camera to record what I could of the passing country-side.

Here is the route that I believe that we took through China. We started in Guilin, and then traveled through Changsha, Wuhan, Zhengzhou, Shijiazhuang, and into Beijing.

When I arrived in Beijing, with no phone, no Chinese language skills, and no real way to communicate, It was very nice to find Fritz waiting at the station for me.

We headed back to the hotel he had found, and settled in.

Monday June 4th was our last day in Beijing, so the last chance to pick up trinkets and such. We ended up eating lunch at McDonald’s, were I had my only opportunity to use an Asian Toilet, with a sense of urgency. That was an interesting experience.

While wandering about, we saw an interesting site, while in the Beijing subway there was a guy holding his daughter, about 3 years old, over a trashcan, while she was peeing… Diapers are not the norm in China, even in Beijing. I felt it best to not photograph this site, despite the oddity of it.

While wandering around and shopping, we also stopped at a street vendor where we sampled some unique cuisine, deep fried seahorse and scorpion. For the record, they both taste like burnt bacon.

I ran out of deodorant at the end of the trip. Most Chinese do not wear deodorant, so it is not easy to find. I decided I needed it when we got to the airport, and my though was that they would have more Western stuff there, since it’s an international airport. It turns out that the only deodorant in the place was $12US Calvin Klein at the duty-free shop. Of course, you can’t just buy stuff there, you pay for it, and then they hold it until you get on the airplane, which was still a while off. To help spend the rest of our Chinese money, we bought several waters and juices at a vending machine at the gate, to make sure we were prepared for the flight. When we boarded, they made us leave the bottles, because of the “american laws.” Nice, way to mis-interpret the laws, jerks. I chugged the juice and left the water, which turned out to make for a very full bladder on the plane. Oh well.

The flight from Beijing was also delayed by two hours. This was a problem since we had a two hour layover in Japan and needed to clear customs there before heading back to America. As it turns out, we missed our flight that connected through Detroit, and got a direct flight back to Minneapolis instead that required us to hustle through the airport to catch. That flight was actually delayed to allow us to catch it. In the end we arrived in Minneapolis two hours earlier than planned, got aisle seats on the long flight, and got travel vouchers from Northwest, so this was clearly the best late flight I’ve ever experienced.

Tuesday May 29th – This was a travel Day. We all flew together from Juizhaigou to Chongqing (population 7,500,000) and then separated. Rain and I had a flight to Guilin (pop 600,000), while Fritz took Rick, Brian, Dave, and Peter back to Beijing for their return to the U.S. Fritz then planned to spend some time in Beijing and Tianjin (pop 10,000,000) where he had lived previously visiting old friends and revisiting his old stomping grounds.

Rain and I, however, were headed to Yangshuo (pop 60,000) for several days of vacationing there. Yangshuo is a popular place for backpackers in China and is fairly westernized. while it’s popular with westerners , apparently it’s also popular with Chinese tourists who want to visit a western area and see foreign tourists.

When we arrived in Guilin, we had to take a bus to the bus station in town (20 Yuan), and then get a bus from Guilin to Yangshuo (17 Yuan.)

We arrived in Yangshuo and had to find a hotel. Rain, as usual, did the negotiating, getting us a cheap room in the Friendly Host Holiday Inn across the street from the bus station. It was a decent room, but it wasn’t until we checked out that I realized just how cheap the room was. My share of the room for 4 days and one half day was $17.77. That’s $3.80 per night. Wow.

This area of China is famous for it’s Karsts, which are amazing mountains. Look at the pictures to see what I mean. The entire area along the Li river that connects the two cities is filled with the Karsts. It’s even on the 20 Yaun note.

On Wednesday, we rented mountain bikes and ventured out into the countryside. It was incredibly hot and humid, and since I’m not in the best shape of my life, the ride was that much harder. Luckily the area is mostly flat. We biked out to a place called Moon Hill that is a karst with a hole in it. Of course you have to climb to the top up steep and uneven stairs. After the biking this proved challenging. In one of the more humorous bits of entrepreneurship I saw in China there are several women at the bottom of the hill with coolers. each follows a person or group up the mountain with the idea of selling you a drink at the top. Every time I stopped, she fanned me, and encouraged me on, or made fun of me, I’m not really sure. Once at the top, I gave in and bought an overpriced can of 7-Up for an entire dollar! The outrage of it all! Actually the fanning and such was easily worth the money, The view from the top was amazing.

        
We biked back, showered, rested and then headed out again. This time we headed to the Yulong river. It thundered a bit, and I was afraid (for my camera mostly) that we might get rained on, but it stayed dry.

On Thursday I did some laundry at the hotel and lounged about for a while. In the afternoon we took a riverboat cruise that originated near Yangshuo. Most of the cruises go from Guilin to Yangshuo and are a bit longer. Ours was in a much smaller boat and was a “cozier” trip than the big river boats. The trip was only 40 Yuan (a little over $5) and was an incredible bargain. The trip was really, really beautiful.
That night we had Yangshuo beer fish. This, along with dog meat, is what the area is famous for, apparently.

Friday was another easy day. We walked down to the Li River and watched the river traffic and people along the river. At about noon the cruise boats from Guilin come in. It’s quite a zoo as all of the boats jockey for a landing position. These are not small boats and there are a lot of them.

Another thing that the area is famous for is the cormorant fishing. People use cormorants (big diving birds) to catch fish for the. The actual fishing is at night, so during the day, older guys pose for photos with the birds. Interestingly, the two older guys there kept giving their money to another guy. It almost looked like he was their pimp, but I imagine that they were actually renting the birds and had to pay a share to this guy.

 

We also watched a kid spend at least an hour with his bike in the river cleaning it. It was a little refreshing to see since most Chinese do not particularly value cleanliness like we do.

The funniest site, however, was the dad who chased after his daughter’s shoe, which had fallen into the river. As he ran along the wet steps on the river, he slipped and fell in. He wasn’t injured, and a fisherman retrieved the shoe for him, but is was certainly America’s Funniest Home Videos style funny.

We also witnessed a good reason to not use unsealed chopsticks while in China. Two woman rooted through the trash from the tour boats pulling out anything of value. This mostly meant chopsticks and bottles. I assume both were reused, and it’s not clear how well the would be cleaned before reuse…

As we wandered around the town it started to rain. I believe this was the only significant rain we had during the three weeks there. I had hoped that this would cool things off a little, but that close to Vietnam I guess it stays hot all summer. After that Rain headed back to the hotel for more Chinese TV, and I got a massage. It was a two hour massage including a foot soak and massage for the grand total of 80 Yuan (about $11) There is something to vacationing in countries like China…

Friday also brought more lounging around town before heading back to Guilin. Rain and I each had a train out of Guilin to our respective destinations. To really see more of China I decided to take the train back to Beijing, which was a 26 hour ride. Since I was the only person on the train who spoke English, it was an interesting time.