It was time to leave Guangzhou and head off to our next city. This was my very first foray into bullet train commuting. I purchased 1st class tickets, but my travelling companions only received 2nd class tickets, so it was interesting to see the difference between their seats and mine. Their 2nd class seats were more like airline seats while my 1st class seats were nice and wide and comfortable. We had to take two trains. the first was a relatively short ride to the Hong Kong suburb or Shenzhen. Shenzhen had a massive train station where we navigated our way to our much longer train to Xiamen. There was enough English used on the trains and throughout the train stations to make the journey easy.
The bullet trains were extremely comfortable and smooth and almost always precisely on time. The scenery was often spectacular. The trip had numerous beautiful sections with lush green mountains and big valleys and plenty of long train tunnels. This train usually cruised at around 200km an hour but our first train peaked at over 250kph a few times. The train stations were huge, but easily enough navigable.
We arrived in Xiamen late in the day and were taken to our rented apartment in the Xiamen Twin Sea View Towers expecting to find a nice multi-room apartment. Instead, we found a single room crammed with two king-sized beds for three adults and two children. Knowing this was not going to work, I immediately got on my phone to see what other accommodation options might be available nearby. In the end, we were able to score a second apartment a few doors down for a super cheap rate. I was able to live quite comfortably and could have stayed much longer.
Xiamen appeared to be a very trendy Chinese-hipster type town that is not used much to cater to Western tourists. We headed down to find a tasty dinner in a nearby hawkers-hut, but nobody seemed to take cash at the shops: just WeChat and AliPay. With only cash and Western credit cards on us, we have had to get other people with WeChat accounts to pay for us after we paid them in cash. It was a very odd system, but showed the overwhelming size of the local Chinese economy and lack of significance Westerners were to them!
Xiamen is right on the coast and our apartments looked out over the water and can see parts of Taiwanese territory. There are bike paths wrapping around the island we are on and it looked like there would be plenty to do.
