Category: China

China, Fujian

Temples, Cats, and Gardens

Joel

We decided to try and get the most out of Xiamen by hiring an English speaking guide to take us around to some of the more famous sites around Xiamen. Her English wasn’t great, but she was very nice and helpful. She initially tried to help us get some credit cards registered with WeChat so we could be included with the prevailing currency system in the area, but we had no luck getting them to work later in the day when we had tried to use them.

Our first stop, which we could walk to from our tower apartments, was the South Putuo or Nanputuo Buddhist temple. The South Putuo Temple is located on a small mountain range that rises on the island. There are good views of Xiamen from the peaks. It is also next to Xiamen University.

After visiting the temples and being caught in another monsoonal downpour, we hiked back to the hotel via a back alley, dedicated to cats. It contained a cat museum and all things cats, as well as lots of interesting little restaurants and market stalls. The alley stretched for blocks and took us the whole way back to our hotel. It was definitely a far more interesting way to traverse that part of the city.

In the afternoon we caught a public bus to get through the mountain tunnel to the other side of the small mountain range on the island under the temples to reach the Xiamen Botanical Gardens. The bus we caught was very was modern, clean, and well air-conditioned – but too crowded to offer up any seats. I was actually offered one towards the back of the bus by a young man, but it looked too difficult to get myself back there. Must have been my age,

Xiamen Botanical Garden covers around 4.5 square kilometres and is full of hills ranging from low to high with different garden displays with lakes and babbling brooks throughout. Of course, we decided to set off for the highest peak where a desert cactus display and lookouts could be found. It was quite a climb and a bit of a maze to find – although worth it in the end.

China, Fujian

Xiamen Island

Joel

Xiamen is a beautiful place, on an island overlooking Yundang Bay that has a sizeable nearby island occupied by Taiwanese. Xiamen is hip, modern, and touristy – but devoid of westerners. There are plenty of trendy malls and shopping areas, but they cater for Chinese tourists. It is hot and humid, but a nice breeze continually drifts in off the bay. Xiamen has an interesting history as a British-run treaty port between 1842 to 1912 – formerly under the name Amoy.

In the evening we took a long walk on a footpath along the coast until we reached Zhongshan Road Pedestrian Street, which was closed to all but foot traffic and full of restaurants and trendy shops. Dining can always be challenging because it can be difficult to read the menu and you are never 100% sure what you are eating. Nevertheless, I managed to get some tasty chicken dish with mushrooms and greens on rice. It was good but had a few too many bones to navigate.

China, Fujian, Guangdong

Choo Choo China Style

Joel

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.

China, Guangdong

Tropical Guangzhou

Joel

As it turns out, the hotel in Guangzhou was about as nice as I experienced while in China. It was very comfortable and provided us with a luxurious and massive breakfast spread every morning. There were no problems accessing various internet sites which were often blocked in other parts of the country.

We had our luxurious breakfast buffet at the hotel before heading out to try Guangzhou’s metro subway system. There appeared to be lots of good designs ideas copied from the Hong Kong and Singapore subway systems, which made it very easy to navigate. We easily made it to The Museum of the Nanyue King of Western Han Dynasty – a tomb that was only discovered in 1983 and contains 2000+ year old artefacts and burial remains. The archaeological site was preserved as found (minus the relics) and you could walk around in the different rooms they discovered. The artefacts were on display in the accompanying museum – including the sarcophagus and coffins of the king.

While in there, we had our first taste of monsoon rains, but it soon let up long enough for us to hop the subway to the beautiful Chen Clan Ancestral Hall and its modern art installations. The buildings were over 100 years old and beautifully designed with many courtyards and interlocking walkways. Although mostly more modern creations, the exhibitions were designed and crafted using traditional Chinese techniques. It was definitely one of the highlights of Guangzhou.

After returning to the hotel, we tried out the pool, visited my travelling companions in the luxurious hotel suite the were upgraded to, and then headed out for another local Chinese dinner. Unfortunately, this dinner was not nearly as tasty as yesterdays.

China, Guangdong

First Night in China

Joel

I caught a reasonable non-stop flight from Perth to Guangzhou on China Southern. It was the longest flight I have ever taken without changing timezones: 8 hours. Guangzhou is more or less directly on the same longitude line as Perth Australia, so it was a straight north shot. I found myself sitting next to a polite and friendly elderly man who seemed to be getting deported from Australia for some reason. He had a letter in his hands from the airline stating that he was financially responsible for his deportation. I pretended not to notice. He seemed to be British and heading to the U.S. to see his daughter who was living there.

Once we arrived on the tarmac in Guangzhou, the plane had to taxi endlessly around the perimeter of the huge new airport. It got stuck in a queue for 15 minutes while waiting for a gate and then finally pulled up to one. The only problem was that the section of the airport we pulled up to had obviously not been finished yet, so we all had to exit down stairs to catch shuttle buses to a completed part of the airport.

I was easily able to get a local SIM with a local Chinese phone number with access to data for my time in the country. I eventually found an ATM to get some Chinese currency and then found the express bus to my hotel. Unfortunately, it had to make 3-4 10 minutes stops at various parts of the airport before finally venturing down the highway express to central Guangzhou. In all, it took 3 hours from touchdown to hotel arrival where my brother and his family were waiting.

My first impression of China was that it appeared to be a very modern and well cared for country, but by the time I got checked into the hotel, I must have been photographed hundreds of times along the highway and for each purchase I made at the airport – as well as for immigration – which I also had to be fingerprinted for multiple times. I guess a welcome to China experience.

Overall, it was an exhausting trip and an endless wait for the people waiting up for me at the hotel for dinner, but we headed out to find a nice dinner and ended up at a fabulous local restaurant where we had ourselves a banquet of excellent Chinese food.

China, Kathmandu, Nepal, South Korea

I shall go to Korea.

Joel

Or should I say, “I shall go to Korea if I can only get through China on the way!”

Eventful day, starting off with another strike in Kathmandu that left all the roads deserted of cars – but not people or rubble (put there by protesters to hamper vehicular traffic). After our Air China flight finally took off, we flew right past Mount Everest, mostly shrouded in clouds, on our way to Lhasa, Tibet. It’s so tall that it pokes straight through the top of the clouds!

We started our descent into Lhasa with warnings about turbulence and then the pilot suddenly announced in Chinese that it was too dangerous to land there so they were going to skip it and fly straight to Chengdu. Many were cheering and I thought it was someone’s birthday, but then they translated it into English. Skipping a layover sounds nice, but that meant we arrived here two hours early and I was left with a total of seven hours to kill without being allowed to go anywhere. I’m not sure how many on the plane were being disadvantaged by the decision, but they were remaining quiet.

Once I arrived in Chengdu, I had to face immigration without a Chinese visa. They were actually very nice about it, but they did confiscate my passport and tell me I wasn’t allowed to leave the airport terminal. At one point I had 5 Chinese officials escorting me around. I get the impression they don’t deal with too many transient visitors. The Chengdu airport is huge and full of empty gates and there are very few people who appear to be using it. Even so, they forced our plane to park way out on the tarmac with 90% of the gates empty and forced us to bus in. I managed to squeeze some Yuan out of an ATM so I could get some dinner after finally finding out how much it was worth so I knew not to overdraw or underdraw my account.

When my passport was confiscated, I immediately expressed concern about how I was going to get it back (as I have never been asked to surrender it before). I was assured by an official that whenit came time to check-in for my midnight flight, the passport would be waiting at the check-in desk for me to pick up and the flight staff would know about the whole situation.

Normally the earliest you can check-in in person is about 3 hours before your flight takes off, so I had to waste many an hour shuffling around the huge empty terminal as it closed more and more shops in the evening. So I finally get my chance to check in and I get to the check-in counter. Of course, the staff know absolutely nothing about it. Furthermore, they are unable to check me in without a valid passport so I was completely stuck. As it turns out, my passport was not at the check-in counter, but sitting in an immigration office about 300 meters away – behind a security zone, which required a passport and a boarding pass to get through, and next to the emigration queue that also requires the same plus a valid visa from the Chinese government.

Nobody at the check-in counter knew what to do about this conundrum until I quietly mentioned that I actually had two passports (which I never disclosed to the Chinese officials, but then again, they never asked). This got everyone excited because it provided the partial solution to the problem: I was now able to get my boarding pass, which allowed me to get through security and closer to the immigration office.

In the end, I was escorted through security by an airline official straight to the immigration office that held my other passport. They were able to get the managing Chinese official to come out and he very nicely went to great lengths to expidite my acceleration through the final emigration line – even going so far as to actually fill in immigration forms for me so I could legally leave the country I was denied access to visiting in the first place. Now my passport has a Chinese emigration stamp even though I was never technically in the country.

I don’t know if I was their first ever transient passenger, but they obviously need to grease the wheels on their processes… But maybe its just the Chinese way of conducting business. Other countries usually provide a last-minute-escape route for transients only there to catch connecting flights which you usually find just before you get to the immigration desks. This just keeps you in the emigration holding zone in the airport and allows you to circumvent the issue – although I have heard Canadians complaining about having to go through U.S. customs when trying to simply go south of the USA.

Everyone was always very nice, polite, and respectful in this episode, as you always are when dealing with government officials, and nobody ever suggested or even implied that I had ever done anything wrong, but…. what a circus!

Fortunately, I made it into Seoul as scheduled and was able to negotiate the extensive train and subway network with my luggage to find my hotel.

China, Hong Kong

A billion here, a billion there

Joel

From one future world power to the next, I find myself chillin’ out in Hong Kong for a few days. What a relief it is to be here! What a contrast Hong Kong is to Delhi and Cairo.

It’s nice to go from watching where to step constantly (continually avoiding hocked phlem and pools of urine on the pavement) to surfing the spotless state-of-the-art subways and treking the spectacularly steep hills of relatively clean Hong Kong. This is certainly one of the world’s great cities.

Hong Kong probably has the nicest airport I’ve ever come across. It’s huge, and we landed at one of its most distant gates, but I was able to get from the plane into my hostel room (over 25km away) in less than an hour. I don’t think I waited more than two minutes for anything, hopping on moving sidewalks, airport shuttles, escalators, getting my temperature taken to make sure I didn’t have SARS, on through customs, through the baggage claim, onto a high speed train (that is so fast and smooth it feels like it’s levitating) into the city, onto a free hotel shuttle bus, and a then quick 1/2 block jaunt down to my cheap accommodation. The temperature taking, incidentally, consists of walking briskly past a heat sensitive camera with everone else. On large flat panel screens you see an alien view of everyone, color coded to reflect each body temperature. If someone had a fever, I suppose they would appear a different color and get yanked by security to the side. To get back to the airport, you actually check in with your bags in the city at a sleek train station and they take care of the rest. It is probably the most distant check-in from your plane you’ll ever find.

Hong Kong is very high tech in many ways. The whole city is wired for broadband. There is free Internet access in many subway stations and at the airport. I’m writing this blog at the central library, which has 500 such free terminals available on its many different floors. There are also mysterious containers whizzing over my head on the ceiling and into walls at either end of the building. I can only assume they’re full of books being sorted.

The public transportation system here is fabulous with probably the best subway system I’ve ever been on. There are illuminated maps on the walls of each rail car with flashing lights that show you exactly what station you’re at, which direction you’re going, which door you’ll need to exit from, and what connections you can make from the next station. In each of the underground stations there are very clear maps showing all the subway exits and where they surface so you can plot the best one for where your headed. They’re all assigned letters and have signs everywhere pointing the way.

Much of Hong Kong runs on smart cards these days. These are credit card sized cards that contain a computer chip you can store information on. You can use them here to purchase all kinds of things, from subway trips to bus trips to parking meters to restaurants to stores, etc. You just juice them up with cash at an automated terminal from time to time. The best thing about them is that you don’t even need to remove them from your wallet to use them. You just wave your wallet within close proximity of a smart card reader and it automatically registers where you’re coming from or going to or deducts whatever payment you’re trying to make. You never have to wory about fumbling for change.

Hong Kong is also very safe, and you can wander pretty much wherever you want, day or night. The neighborhood I’m in seems to be busy with shoppers every day up until midnight. Nobody seems to notice a Westerner like myself wandering around. This is especially nice after visiting India and Egypt, where touts were continually trying to herd you into their stores (honestly or deceitfully), never taking “no” for an answer.

Probably the worst thing about Hong Kong is the cost of living here. I’ve been here on business a few times before, and most of the people I met had to commute an hour to find reasonably priced real estate. And that’s before and after working 12 hour days and on Saturday mornings (which seem to be the standard office hours here). The cost of food and accommodation is quite pricey too — which is part of the reason I’m only stopping here for a few days.