The road leads through China again

I am filled with many impressions, great experiences and lovely moments. My time in Japan has come to an end. It was a sad departure from some dear friends and a special country but I entered the chaos of China with a new big smile on my face. The story of Japan is mostly written in my diary after I wrote you about my great homestay in Kobe. The story starts from the great Shikoku trip where I was one of the 'wave-catchers' (cool surfers) for the first time, to meetings with strangers that were helping me to find a job on a farm, being warmly welcomed by 'old friends', attending a charity concert with a special 'mindful woman' who works with orphanages in India, meeting Carina and talk about our different worlds in Japan to another camping trip around Biwa-ko and along the coast to Yokohama and into the mountains of Nagano where I ended up on my wwoof-farm. I stayed at the farm for one month. It was a truly precious month. A lively life with a warm young Japanese family and other volunteers in a cosy small house ...the apple farm ... A month I will try to write about later. The end of my visa in Japan made me move back to where I arrived in Shimonoseki. I visited one great Japanese friend in Nagoya, said goodbye to another great friend from Hong Kong and moved on to Kyoto where I met up with Carina and Sam, my neighbour from the old days in Hove. My last days I spent in my Japanese home! In the company of Michiko and 'Otosan' (Tohru). The talks at breakfast, during the days or late at night will stay with me as a very warm memory. The last weekend also Carina came to Kobe and we gave a presentation about our trip and had an amazing farewell party. With the most beautiful hitchhiking sign I set off on Sunday morning to get with three rides to Shimonoseki. Utopia 2 left this time for Taicang (Shanghai) and I said goodbye to Japan. This time I was alone on the boat among the Chinese and Japanese passengers, I was on the way to a new challenge in China. In Shanghai I met with the father of a friend from Belgium. He briefly introduced me the world of advertising, a creative field, a new inspiration and an eye opener. I walked the streets of this big city for two days and left for the south of China to meet Ed, a German hitchhiker whom I met through the digihitch website. We missed our first appointment at the train station but he found me in the streets of Guangzhou, another very big city! We set off together on the Chinese roads, some of great quality some are comparable to Russian ones, aiming to reach Laos or Vietnam. Hitchhiking in China remains not the most easy thing. It is hard to make yourself understood, people watch you as you are an alien, surround you or take you to bus stations, they do not know the concept of hitchhiking. However we made it from Guangzhou to Shaoguan, Lianzhou, Hezhou and are currently in Guilin. We spent our nights under the stars with campfires and the guitar. I am by now at ride number 108, have some holes in socks, pants, underwear, sleeping blanket,... but I am still very happy ...the road is mine, the feeling of freedom is great. The China I see has many sides. The extreme poverty on the country side to the big cities where mega screens light up the nights. It is hard to grasp and even harder to describe.

I managed to put up some pictures of the middle part of my trip on flickr, please find them here http://www.flickr.com/photos/18567670@N06/