China Adventures – Pre-coronavirus

Now that term was over, I had a week to prepare the flat for Lauren to come and visit. Ever since I found out that I was moving to China to take this job, Lauren said she was going to come out and visit me, and we would have a grand Chinese adventure.

Finally, she was able to afford to come out, and we were able to plan it with the idea that I would fly back to Shenzhen at the end of the trip, at the same time that she would fly home. But that’s the end of the story. The beginning was procrastinating cleaning the flat until the day she arrived. And I also managed not to pack for the trip away either, because I can’t work unless I have a deadline, and the deadline for packing was still a couple of days away.

Lauren was arriving at a stupid late time on Friday, because time zones mostly, and an incredibly stressful for her layover in Chengdu (see this link for my adventures there with my parents) and I had arrived at the airport before her flight even landed, due to the fact that if I’d tried to arrive later, the metro would have stopped running and I’d’ve been stranded somewhere in Shenzhen and it would have been quite difficult and more expensive to get to the airport.

After picking Lauren up, it was time to get back and get ready for bed, as she was tired from long distance travel, and I was tired because it was past my bedtime. It didn’t stop me from nattering Lauren’s ear off in the Didi on the way back, and she was game enough to make it seem like she was listening, even if she was nodding off a little bit.

The next two days were days of chilling. we got our nails done; I took Lauren to Brew, my favourite pub in all of Shenzhen, because of a) the light show, and b) it was Western food. And while Lauren was in China to experience some parts of the Chinese culture, including the Chinese New Year, and probably Chinese food, she also wanted to see what I did and where I would go and what it was like in my part of the country. While I don’t get my nails done regularly, I thought it would be nice to have pretty nails for our adventure. On Sunday, we went for a walk in the local park and we got a massage. I let Lauren go first, and I took the second lady that became available. And boy, am I glad I did. It was the most painful massage I’ve ever experienced, and the way the lady was acting, it was quite possible that my back was an entire mass of knots and that there wasn’t any unknotted muscle left. She pressed very hard and had very pointy elbows. Lauren had expressed concern about the massage because of her back and it not being what it used to be, despite operations, and if her lay were to press too hard, she would have to speak up. Luckily, she didn’t have my masseuse. And luckily, I don’t have back problems.

At some point during this time, Lauren asked me what I knew about the coronavirus. I said I hadn’t heard of it. It was barely in the news at this point in the UK, and it wasn’t even a thing in China at all. But she was a little worried about it, and because we were going to Beijing, which is known for its poor air quality, I took my mask along. It was a good job I did, too.

After a weekend of ‘splorin’ my hometown (so to speak), it was time for the adventure to begin for real. We flew from Shenzhen to Huangshan and the Yellow Mountains.

Because we were flying for a few hours, we landed late-ish at night and were taken to a hotel close to the airport, to begin the adventure proper, proper the next day, which also happened to be my birthday. Lauren had been a gem, and had carried various gifts’n’bits from my parents and relatives over, rather than try to rely on the Chinese postal service (my mother had sent a parcel at the beginning of December and it arrived on New Year’s Eve) and she also brought balloons and bunting to decorate the hotel room with. Birthdays are a very big thing for her, and I appreciate that (even if I didn’t seem to because I was overtired at the time).

First order of the day was a little gift from the hotel to say “Happy Birthday.” It was a nail care set, of which I’m very appreciative, because my nails are always pretty bad when I haven’t got large acrylic and paint on them. Our hotel for that night was also upgraded to the best one in the area of the Yellow Mountains that we were staying in, paid for by the company we were travelling with, as a gift for my birthday as well, which was very nice.

Second order of the day was Xidi village, which is a very old village, where the residents still live according to their traditions, and in a traditional way. Lauren got squicked out by the killing of a chicken, and all the corpses of chickens and fish being dried out around the village, but honestly, watching it, there wasn’t much if anything to see. Luckily for Lauren we arrived a couple of days after the ceremonial pig-slaughtering, but there was still blood on the floor where it hadn’t been washed away by the weather yet.

However, they did still have Wi-Fi at the local shop and café type place, because everywhere needs Wi-Fi, right?

very large arch built by a high-up governor for the emperor
balcony for the girl to choose her husband from without being seen
hanging fish to dry
hanging meats to dry
carving in the stone
wood carving

The residents were all getting ready for the Chinese New Year, which meant cleaning their houses, although a few were practising their very specific crafts and selling them. A young teenage was very confused when we asked to see his feet, but that was because he was using a traditional warming method, which looks like an old wooden bath with a raised seat. The person sits on the seat and in the basin below they put hot coals and a grate and rest their slippered feet there to keep them toasty. It was very warm and I was tempted to try and join him, because, as Lauren had laughed at me a couple of days earlier, I was finding 20°C in Shenzhen chilly, and the weather in Xidi was hovering closer to 5°C. I was cold.

We also saw where the women still do their clothes washing in the stream that runs through the village, as shown by the bottle of clothes soap affixed to the wall next to the very precarious steps that lead down to the stream. Unfortunately, I wasn’t quick enough on the ball to get a photo of that, but we did see other villagers drying their crops for future use, and making the most of the sun, as it was a nice day and the rest of the week was forecast to be rubbish.

We were ushered out of the village quickly and to our surprise the driver came to pick us up. We had hoped for a bit of time to wander around and maybe pick up a souvenir there, but we hadn’t explained this to Jerry, our guide, and so we didn’t and were instead whisked to the Bamboo Forest and Mukeng Village, which happened to be a very exciting place, where the film, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, was filmed. At least, the scene where they zipwire across a bamboo forest was. I don’t know. I have yet to see the film, but I am planning on seeing it at some point now. Since I’ve been to the live set. Mukeng Village was similar to Xidi, except it was half way up a mountain and more difficult to get to, and they produced tea. I saw my first tea plant, and honestly, it looks like a little box hedge. And that day was the day they were washing their bedding. Which held a lot more fur than in the hotel. It was interesting and it seemed like a nice simple life that they had there.

Once we were done here, it was time to venture into the Yellow Mountains proper, and go to our hotel. It was mid-afternoon, which we thought was a little early, but Jerry reminded us about the hot springs and we got excited.

The hot springs were what they said on the tin, and we were lucky that they were open, because the week before Lauren flew out, we had been told that they were closed because there was no water in them, since there was a drought in the area and there hadn’t been enough rain to fill them up. It had rained since, but not all the pools were full, so they weren’t at full capacity yet. We decided to try the “Ore” pool first, which we thought looked somewhat low on water, but by this point we were up a mountain at four-thirty or so in the afternoon and only wearing swimming costumes. If it was warm, we would lie in it just to warm up.

It was full of little balls of clay. We stepped in it and shrieked a little when we sank up to our knees, much to the amusement of the family that were already sitting there. I, being me, manged to get the little balls in my unmentionable areas, forgot about it, and caused a potential slipping hazard when I went to the toilet later and they all spilled out of my swimming costume (except for the five or six that somehow managed to make their way into the lignin of my costume). We got our revenge though as we got to laugh at the next hot springs goers that came along.

There was also a Lemongrass Pool, yellow and smelling of lemongrass, a Rose Pool, with rose petals, a mixed flower pool that was a toasty 41°C (all the others were around 37°C) and too hot for Lauren, a Chrysanthemum Pool, a Red Wine pool (not drinkable I’m afraid), a Ginseng Pool, and a Milk Pool, where we channelled our Inner Cleopatra’s and then got talking to some very curious Chinese children. With their broken English and my broken Chinese, we were able to have a limited conversation but I really like it when we can make those sorts of connections.

After two hours of sampling all the pools, save for one, we were very pruney and rather hungry, so it was time to head back to the hotel and dry up. Lauren, because she is a star, had brought a cheeky bottle of prosecco with her and we had that before dinner. It was just as well; dinner was a little disappointing. There weren’t many options; just the hotel we were at, and maybe another hotel across the valley and further away than we wanted to travel, so it was the hotel restaurant we went to. Then when we got there, the waitress didn’t like that we ordered a load of dishes and said we were only allowed to order four. So, we did, and then I burned all the nerve endings in my mouth because of how spicy it was. However, the fried rice was delicious and we gorged on that along with the bottle of red wine we’d bought for dinner, so much so that we took the wine with us back to the room to finish while lying on our beds and rejoicing in their softness. After all it had been a long day.

The next day we were up early as well, because we had to go up a mountain to look at some amazing views. We had been under the impression that we were walking up the mountain, which would take three hours, but when we got there, Jerry bought us tickets for the gondola. So that’s the way that we went. Even going up the hill in the gondola was pretty incredible and I got excited by the small amounts of snow that I saw while on the way up. At the top of the mountain, as soon as I could scrape enough snow together for a micro-ball, it was thrown at Lauren.

Monkey rock!
Closer up!

The views were absolutely stunning and genuinely the photos do not do the mountains justice. It turned out just as well that we went up in the gondola rather than climbing the mountain as after only a couple of hours of being up the mountains, the clouds came down and we could barely see ten feet in front of us. We retreated for a tactical hot chocolate and Jerry advised us that we would be unlikely to see any more that day, and in his experience, it would start raining quite heavily in short order. So we beat a hasty retreat back to the gondola, and realised that we were happy not to have eaten at the hotel where we’d had the hot chocolate, because we saw all the porters carrying everything up on their shoulders. They were aged and the packs looked very heavy and Jerry told us that they were paid a pittance, but they’d rather work than fade into old age, and they were still trying to support their families. It looked a horrible gruelling job and they had very little chance to rest. Apparently, the pay was based on the number of loads they carried, so they just had to keep trudging up the mountain.

Because the day had been cut somewhat short, Jerry offered to set us up at the hot springs again and we sprang at the chance. This time, I took my phone with me into the pools in a waterproof casing, and it was a good idea, because we also decided to try the fish pool. They had those fish that eat your feet but you could sit in the pool and have them eat all our dead skin.

By the gods, they tickeled. And we had a lot of dead skin to eat with us. It was akin to torture having to stay very still so as not to scare the fish away so that they could do their jobs, but also the urge to twitch the tickle away was incredibly strong. We also sampled the other pools again as we had to make sure they were just as good as the day before, then returned to the hotel for another evening of slightly disappointing food. I decided to take some of it away with me, as there was no way I could finish it and Lauren was a little underfed, because the noodles that were supposed to be for both of us contained meat.

The fish had done their job though; our feet were silky smooth, and our legs felt smoother too, even though neither of us had shaved. It was great.

Day 3 of the adventure proper was a travel day; it was time to head to Beijing. This was the day we found out about the coronavirus from Jerry. This was the first time it was mentioned to us beyond what Lauren had told me. But it wasn’t concern at all. It was just that there was this virus that people were getting. There was no suggestion of any sorts of precautions being taken on the train when we got it, even though we were the province over from Hubei.

But first, we had requested that we have a chance to go souvenir shopping, because we hadn’t had a chance yet. Jerry took us to his friend’s tea shop where we had the tea ceremony and sampled the tea so that we could buy some for our families, even if I couldn’t deliver it home for a while. Luckily it would be good for a couple of years because I asked and checked. I was appreciative that we had gone to this place, because the lady’s family owned the tea farm where she got the tea and it was a thirty-minute drive from the shop to the farm. The shop was in the old part of town, which also included a famous bamboo carving shop, where Lauren and I got some lovely bookmarks. And we saw an ancient pharmacy that was around five hundered-ish years old. And we were finally taken to a famous artist’s shop and no joke, the artist looked like he had stepped out of a Chinese film set a hundred years ago. He looked great and I was awed by the quality of the paintings in the shop.

Chinese old man stereotype in the flesh! But I didn’t want him to know I was taking a pic
several hundred year old pharmacy

Once we’d finished there, we had a bit of free time to explore the old town before we had to go to the train station. There I found out that my suitcase was broken – one of the wheels came off, and that the oily noodles I’d saved from the night before had leaked all over the bottom of my hand luggage bag. Luckily, they hadn’t soaked into much. The worst casualty was my face mask, that I wanted to wear in Beijing if the air pollution was really bad. The bag and the mask stank of oil. I was able to use a plastic bag to protect the rest of my stuff from the oily bottom, so that I could tend to it once we got to the hotel after a six-hour train journey

The journey itself passed well enough and we were met at Beijing train station by Tracy, our new guide. It was too late in the day for us to eat even, since the restaurants were shutting early due to the Chinese New Year, so we had instant noodles in the hotel room, after a quick drink at the bar, so that we could have an early night for our first big day in the capital of the People’s Republic of China.

The next day, we met Tracy for an exploration of the Temple of Heaven and the Forbidden City, but the first thing that she did was give us face masks, because of the coronavirus. She wasn’t too worried about this, but the company wanted her to be better safe than sorry and we agreed. So we wore them, and instantly disliked them. Let me ask, do you know what the smell of your stale breath is like? It’s not nice. And it’s something that both of us got used to very quickly. The worst part is when you take the mask off for pictures, then have to put it back on again, because after a time you go nose blind to the smell, but taking if off re-sensitises you.

The Temple of Heaven was a beautiful temple, and very old. It was a sacrificial temple, where the emperors of the Qing and Ming dynasties would come annually for their prayers for good harvests. It is one of the oldest buildings built in the column style that it was, and it is all entirely symbolic. There are 12 columns for the 12 signs of the Chinese zodiac. It is also unique in that while made entirely of wood, no nails were used at all in the construction of it. It is typical of China, in that it was not in very good condition and got meticulously restored in time for the Beijing Olympics in 2008, where it played a somewhat important part.

Once we were done there, we headed for Tiananmen Square to see Chairman Mao’s mausoleum and also the Square itself, but it was all closed off, as there were government buildings there as well, and the governments was in session, having lots of important meetings.

The Forbidden City and Summer Palace were just as awe-inspiring and a second film was added to my “To Watch” list; The Last Emperor.

This was where Tracy left us, but we wanted to see the temples and pagodas on the man-made hill behind the city, made because it was good feng shui to have the river (also man-made) in front and the hill behind. The views from there showed off nigh-on the entire city, and although the day was very clear, you could see the famed pollution, lying as a layer of brown before tapering into the blue of the sky

After this it was time to head back for lunch, as we were to see the Kung-Fu show that night, and we hadn’t eaten since lunch. We were so hungry by the time we got there, we attacked the sunflower seed provided to us by the restaurant, and to our great surprise, we really liked them. I introduced Lauren to the joys of fried pancakes, and she was given the largest fish I have ever seen as her meal, and my duck nearly didn’t come. When it did, it came with precisely half its head, just the same as the rest of the duck was sliced in half. However, it was a most delicious duck.

I nearly didn’t make it into the Kung Fu show. Due to the efficacy of my hat at keeping my head warm, it was a little over the accepted temperature allowed into the theatre, but a couple of minutes de-hatted and I was good to go, even if we did have to spend the entirety of the show marinating in our own stale breath smell. It was an incredible show, and the few pictures I dared to take did not do it justice, so I gave up and just enjoyed the experience instead, especially their fantastic feats of acrobatics and fighting – which, to be fair was most of it. I was surprised that the majority of the speaking in the show was in English rather than Chinese, but of course, it was for the tourists so it made sense and did enhance the show as such.

The next day was truly an early start as it was a long way to the Beijing Wall, and we wanted to beat the crowds. And so, we did. We were also told that the Forbidden Palace had shut and so we had been lucky to have gone the day before.

The Wall is awe-inspiring in a way that words cannot capture. We were there on a beautifully clear day, and could see the Wall for as far in either direction as the mountains would allow, including a watch tower on the sleeping man’s chin.

To get down from the wall, we could have taken the cable car back, but there was a faster and more fun option; tobogganing. While the signs said not to stop, it was unavoidable as unfortunately, we were caught behind a slow person who kept holding up the line of people behind them. But it was still fun when we did manage to get up to speed. On the way back from the wall, we had our first bit of coronavirus related bad news. The Terracotta Army in Xi’an was shut and so we wouldn’t be able to go and see it. We were also told that the Wall had stopped letting people on at midday that day, but because we had arrived at ten, we’d been okay.

We also stopped at a small rural town, to see the marketplace and see a little bit of more common China. We saw a lady selling bagsful of sunflower seeds, and on mentioning to Tracy that we’d discovered them and liked them the day before, she bought us about a kilogram of salted sunflower seeds and 500g of plain ones. I still have some plain ones left. Yes, a month later. There were a lot of sunflower seeds.

For the rest of the afternoon, Tracy had arranged for us to have a massage each, which ended up with the both of us having our feet bathed in “medicine” by the masked masseuse. It looked like tea. It could well have been tea. It was interesting to say the least and the massage itself was much gentler than those in Shenzhen.

After the massage we headed out for food, but because tonight was the night of the New Year and the big New Year show was on, everywhere shut very early. The only place that was still open by the time we stirred ourselves after the massage was McDonald’s. but we had the evening of TV and once again some spectacular feats of gymnastics and other abilities by Chinese people in the show. We also had sunflower seeds and cards and it was a very good night, even if the food was subpar.

TBC

Hong Koming – Only a Minor Sidetrip

A mere two days after we’d returned from Guangzhou, with just enough time for me to procrastinate packing, and for Lucy to retrieve her passport from TeachTEFLInChina, we set off for her final adventure; three days in Hong Kong. After the success of arriving in Guangzhou late at night, we were doing the same for Hong Kong, and it worked well. Arriving in the middle of the day had caused us to take an hour at least to get through immigrations; this time it was hardly longer than twenty minutes.

Our first day, we headed to Ocean Park, which was an aquarium, theme park, and safari park all rolled into one. I somehow managed to get zero pictures of the rides (including upside-down ones – something that was lacking at Disneyland Hong Kong) I did get many of the animals, so here’s a dump of them.

Marlin and Nemo
Dory
Bubbles!
Scar
My squishy!
This crab is one of the giant ones, a Japanese Spider Crab and it was huge!
Bad angle, but it’s a Hammerhead Shark
Baby golden snub-nose monkey
Parent golden snub-nosed monkey
Red panda!
Albino wallaby
Giant salamander
Walrus
Arctic foxes
Cabybara
Bare-faced currasow
Toucan
Poison Dart Frog
Green tree python
Sparkly piranha!
Pink-toe tarantula
Tarantula’s home
Macaw!

The park was split in two, on either side of a mountain, connected by a train that went through the mountain, or a cable car that went over. We obviously opted for the cable car, and I realised that I was no longer as saccharine about floating over a hill as I once was, although I did fairly quickly manage to relax, my heart rate didn’t come to its resting rate until I was on an awesome rollercoaster.

Because it was a Friday, Ocean Park was actually pretty quiet, compared to everywhere else we’ve been and we thought it was because it was a Friday, but it was a pretty common theme for the whole weekend. Its possible that due to the weeks of protests beforehand, there were fewer tourists in general, or we were just lucky in the places we went.

Ocean Park took up the entirety of that first day, and, like Chimelong in Guangzhou, we didn’t get to see it all. At least we didn’t get rained on this time, except for on the water ride when we both got pretty drenched.

Once again I was limping, however as my blister had migrated from the heel of my foot to the side of the heel and was developing into a blood blister. Because of my fun feet fatalities (at least, that’s what it felt like), we headed back to Mongkok, the shopping capital of Hong Kong, and quite by coincidence, our home for the week. We wanted to go to a Chinese food place, since Lucy would only have sup-par takeaways when she got home, but we managed to find a Japanese food place instead, and it was actually one of the best meals we’d had in a while, despite our successful foraging at Mark’s and Spencer for lunch.

Day Two we started out by going to the Sky Tower, which you can only access by tram, which while currently undergoing upgrades, looks very old fashioned, and I managed to only get some pictures on my phone, which at the time of publishing was not cooperating, so sorry about that. But the pictures from the tower are across the commercial sector of Hong Kong and the shopping district as well.

Next up we wandered around a church like wot you see in Europe before making a late-in-the-day decision to head to Ngong Ping, aka, Giant Buddha, accessible only by cable car. Lucy and I thought, as the ride drew to a close, that we were supposed to have just taken our seats and any photos should have been taken from those seats, but because we were the only two in the Gondola, we wandered around as we saw fit to take the pictures we wanted, including far off photos of the giant Buddha.

Although we managed to sneak our way up to the Buddha after it had officially closed, we were not so lucky at the next-door temple, and so we got a closed-door photo of it. But otherwise, it was also an interesting trip.

Sacred cow!
Close every door to me…

Because we had tiny appetites and had shared a pizza to the point that we both felt like we were about to burst, we weren’t particularly hungry for dinner so we just at raspberries and called it a day, although I did find my favourite foreign cider in the world (Somersby) and then had an adventure trying to open the bottle without a bottle opener. After a fateful failure in India, I did not use my teeth, but instead spent ten minutes with my flat keys prying it open. It was as good as I remembered, and just what I needed.

Our third day in Hong Kong dawned slowly for us, the same as the previous days, and for once, this was not the ideal, as the fish market that we had wanted to see in Aberdeen only ran in the morning, so by the time we got there, it had already finished for the day. However, a nice old lady coerced us into a boat ride on her son’s boat, and then proceeded to tell me in great detail about every single one of her three hundred (or thereabouts as it felt) children. Her son, during the tour was fascinated with telling us the prices of everything that we could see from the boat, including flat prices per month, how much the fancy yachts cost, and the price of a plot of land at an overcrowded cemetery. However, without any tutelage, he was able to work my camera better than I can.

Little old man on his skiff
Look how good we look!
I just gave him the camera and he knew how to use it!
Dragon Boat race practice, at the back of the Jumbo restaurant
The race typical takes place in May
Dragon boat storage
Sea eagle, with a fish in its claws!
Graveyard on the hill
Disused boat repair yard
Crane and egret, on the same boat

After yet another supposed-to-be-Chinese-but-ended-up-Japanese meal we ended up at the Avenue of Stars, which I’m sure is fascinating for Chinese and Hong Kong-ian people, due to them all being stars of the Chinese silver-screen, but held little interest for me, as I barely knew any of them.

Bruce Li
Jackie Chan’s hands
Lady Film Strip

However, seeing the Sky Tower from the other side, so to speak was interesting and I was happy enough to sit there and watch the sunset, seeing how the colours of the river/water change, and the lights come on, on the “traditional” boats (the sails were for decoration and tourists; they were actually powered by motors).

And then Lucy was leaving and I had twenty-four hours left in Hong Kong during which I did nothing before I came home for my European leg of this crazy year of adventure.

For those who are concerned, despite the fact that this was the first weekend that the protests in Hong Kong expanded to the airport and started to become violent, we saw literally nothing save one sticker about it, and one MTR line had a live news feed. But at no time were we near any of it, and we saw nothing in regards to it, which in my opinion, was the best thing we could have hoped for.

Guangzhou(nly) a Train Ride Away

After the whirlwind of the end of term, we only had one day to recover before Lucy and I headed on our next adventure: Gunagzhou. And it was an adventure indeed. We did a lot; we went to a safari park and saw pandas, we saw really big Buddhas, I took a sneaky picture of a man, I found The Dress, my feet died, we ate actual Chinese food. And I took several hundred pictures.

We hit a snag right from the off. I’d tried to book a train the day before as we knew that the trains to Guangzhou get fully booked regularly, but when we got to the station, the booking code was not legitimate and even now, I haven’t received confirmation of booking, although that might be because I cancelled it. So we had to buy tickets all over again. We were at the station at around 2pm. The next train available was 9pm. We had a lot of time to kill. We were both pretty hungry so now that we had our tickets, we headed off in search of food, and we found an Italian restaurant. We ordered food and abused the bottomless drinks situation. I had an utterly delicious carbonara that I inhaled until I was full and then ate very slowly. We also shared a garlic bread, and after a couple of hours, we both just about had enough space for a pudding. And we were on holiday after all. We wandered the shopping mall for a while after, as many tables had been filled and emptied in the time we sat there. We found massage chairs and both of us made the mistake of enjoying the first massage so much, that we got a second one, and it hurt a lot. The chairs did very deep massages, and two was too much. But hey, you live and learn. We found a Swedish shop which was very dangerous and we both bought too many souvenirs there. And finally, we got the train to Guangzhou. Once there, we got a Didi (Chinese version of Uber) to the apartment we were renting as we were too tired to try and deal with the Metro. It was a very cute little apartment, with just enough room to swing a kitten, but it had everything needed.

The next day, our adventure started for real. Lucy had found a safari park and after slow start, we went there. the park was insane. It was incredible. We saw so many animals and so many baby animals. They seemed to have a great breeding programme across the board.

We saw pandas, tigers, white tigers, giraffes, hippos, bears, elephants, chimpanzees, monkeys, mandrills, ostriches among others. So let’s have a look at some pictures.

We didn’t get a chance to see everything there, partly because it was just so big, and partly because about half way through the day, the heavens opened (there was the minor issue of a typhoon hitting the coast and weren’t far from the coast) and while neither of us minded getting wet because of how warm it still was, we were concerned about our technology – cameras, phones etc. We didn’t want them getting wet. We must have spent about an hour cowering under the insufficient protection of two umbrellas; Lucy’s and one of those used in the UK to shelter our weak bodies from the sun, before we made a run for it and found ourselves in one of the gift shops. It was doing a roaring trade in floor-length-extra-large macs. Of course, Lucy and I had to get in on that, as we were both of a stature to have room to spare in these coats, under which we could shelter our technology and still see the rest of the park. And so we carried on, but the time spent sheltering from the downpour meant valuable time wasted not seeing the animals. However the damp tiger cubs were cute.

By the time we got kicked out of the park and got back to the Airbnb, we were cream-crackered and just wanted to go to bed, so we did.

Day two saw me making possibly the biggest mistake of the trip. Instead of wearing my slightly damp trainers, which we tried, tested and proven not to give me blisters, I decided to opt for my sandals, which I knew weren’t all that nice on my feet, but I hadn’t realised how much they bullied them. I was regretting the choice before we even got to the Metro but I was foolish and stubborn and so ignored my feet. By the end of the day they were hotbeds of agony, with enormous blisters on the bottom of my heel, and I was limping.

But my woes aren’t important, the tourist spots are. The first place we went was Guangzhou Museum, hosted in Zhenhai Tower.

The tower dates back to *checks Google* 1380 even though it has been destroyed and rebuilt five times during its history, which makes me think of the Only Fools and Horses bit about the broom. If the handle and head have each been replaced a number of times, is it the same broom? But anyway, it had a lot of exhibits, that were very interesting, and a lot of silver ornaments, as well, because silver stuff was very important to do with the growth of Guangzhou and general trade in China too.

Clock face
Clock butt
Clock side
Carved from ivory, I believe
Scaled down model of Guangzhou
Very old lion
Bonsai tree
Fan made from silver and other fancy stuff

Then we walked to the Temple of the Five Banyan Trees. Not sure what those trees are but they must be important, since the temple is notable for them. I think I found all five of them, but since I didn’t know exactly what they are, I just found five trees in the courtyard that looked the same.

We had two for one day, as the next stop was yet another walk to Guangxiao temple. En route, I found The Dress. The Dress was the dress I’ve been looking for since I arrived, that I can wear to my friend’s wedding in August. There have been many contenders for the dress, two of which I actually bought, but I wasn’t completely confident with either of them. And then I walked into a tiny little shop full of beautiful dresses and the little old lady started basically throwing them at me, calling them all beautiful, and trying to convince me to buy more than one. I tried on maybe five of them, including one with pockets, before I found the one that fit beautifully (the little old lady knew my dress size just from looking at me) and was just gorgeous and I knew I had to get it. There aren’t any pictures yet, because I’m not going to wear it until the wedding, and because these are available to everyone on the interwebs, I’m not even going to describe it. All will be revealed in a few weeks, once the wedding is over.

There were many very large Buddhas all decked in gold, some fat and laughing, some thin with big earlobes, and it was really interesting to see the Chinese people paying their respects, donating foodstuffs to the temple and generally worshipping Buddha. It was also not the most comfortable experience, as we weren’t there to worship. I don’t know Lucy’s religious affiliations, but mine definitely lean more towards atheism than any other religion. But we paid our entry fee same as the others and our respect towards it was in the photos that we took, even if one particularly sanctimonious woman told us off for taking them

Twins guarding the entrance to Guangxiao Temple
Rooftop guard
Thin scary Buddha
Fancy roof coverings
So. Much. Gold
Sometimes, 40x zoom provides a beautiful image like this
Monk doing his monkly things

The next event was our first proper misadventure of the trip. Following Google Maps to Chen Clan Ancestral Hall, took us to what felt like a dodgy back alley of apartment blocks, and we walked around in circles for a few minutes, although by this point, my feet were weeping in their fabric prison, so we gave it up as a bad job, and decided to head back to the Airbnb so that I could change my shoes, and we could regroup before heading out for food. Google was able to take us to the nearest Metro station and lo and behold there was the Ancestral Hall. There were only 45 minutes until the Hall closed, but we thought that was better than no minutes. But when we got to the ticket gate, they needed our passport or ID card to let us in, which of course neither of us had, because we are sensible tourists and had left them at the Airbnb where they would be safer than in our bags while we were touristing. So we didn’t go in and instead sat on the square outside the hall, listening to a small child play the violin incessantly.

After I worked up the courage to stand again, we followed our original plan, and spent a blissful hour with my feet in the air before I whimpered as I stuffed them back into my trainers so we could head out to Canton Tower.

The tower really is beautiful at night, and was one of the highlights although it was by far the biggest tourist site that we’d been to, and both of us were uncomfortable by the numbers. We were also hungry, so we headed away from the tower to find some food, and it gave us some better perspectives of the tower, since while it is impressive up close, taking pictures is easier from further away.

The next morning was the day we left, but we wanted to see one more thing; the Sacred Heart Cathedral, which was the closest tourist attraction to our Airbnb, so it was a short walk there to find it closed, because that’s what happens to Christian cathedrals on a Monday. But still the outside was pretty impressive and really quite incongruous in the middle of a Chinese city.

Then we were on our way home to collapse and sleep as we were very nearly touristed out.

(Be)Guilin Adventures

Karst – limestone and other soluble rock has dissolved over time to form a pretty landscape

Two weeks ago, we had a funky holiday situation. We had a bank holiday on the Wednesday, but so that we could have Thursday and Friday off, we worked both Sundays either side of it. They were very much not fun and none of us liked working them. But, we did have four days off in a row, and Hannah, the teacher of my KC class invited me to go to Guilin with her. I knew nothing about the place but I did know that I wanted to explore China, so I said yes.

This is going to be another picture dump post, but I will have some paragraphs of writing to explain some stuff, because we did a lot in those four days.

Bear in mind however, that I don’t necessarily know a lot about some of the things we saw, as the package was booked by a Chinese person on a Chinese website, so the tour guide only spoke Chinese and I, despite my best attempts, do not yet speak enough Chinese to understand a single word. This was obviously shown to me yesterday, when, on the train, I made a friend. She wants to improve her English and help me learn Chinese, which, yes please, but she said a sentence to me, and I didn’t get a single word from it. Then she told me what it meant – it was a sentence that I had literally just translated on the Chinese learning app I was using, (the reason she spoke to me was to ask what the app was called) but because she spoke at a normal speed, I didn’t catch it. The app talks much more slowly and clearly – it also tells me that I speak Chinese well, whereas Hannah, and my 6-year-old students drill me in pronunciation because I just can’t get it right.

Anyway, point being, I took pictures but don’t always have context behind them, because despite Hannah’s best efforts, she just doesn’t yet quite speak enough English to explain everything that was going on.

Top speed on the high speed train – average was around 250kph
These were a lot brighter in the brochure; having been weather faded they were a little disappointing
Prince’s Palace – vassal palace of the Ming dynasty. Called Jing Jiang Wang Fu in Chinese
Dusty old vase – probably very expensive (Ming Dynasty and all) especially as this photo wasn’t technically allowed
130 year old osmanthus tree
Poem etched onto the side of the Solitary Beauty Peak, extolling the beauty of the local area*
Taking the primary test**
The Silver Caves, absolutely beautiful***
Alcohol storage, always important
I think this was called the Ice Fall, for obvious reasons
Fishies
This rock is famous for having a hole in it, I think…
Me!
I tried being a cormorant fisherwoman
The Romance Park, where I saw the most spectacular show****
If you look carefully, you will see that the real life rocks are the same as on the money, which makes this a very visited spot in China, and the bit Hannah wanted to see the most
What isn’t shown is the depressing amounts of plastic rubbish on the river banks and islands
Traditional music in a rural village*****
Their traditional garb (and me in mine – I went full gap yah on this day)
Traditional weaving, photo very not allowed, but I’m a ninja
The Rice Terraces of Longji******
Our beautiful hotel room
Baby nellies playing in a full river
It was chucking it down, but I’m a Brit and a bit of water never bothered me, much to Hannah’s surprise.
This is called Elephant mountain due to apparently looking like an elephant’s trunk…I’m not really seeing it to be honest
Still raining, still not a trunk

*Lots to say about the Solitary Beauty Peak at the Prince’s Palace; it’s located next to the Li river, and the shape of the mountain amplifies the effect of the wind there (it was pretty windy). Inside the mountain, there is a prayer cave of sorts, with a bunch of Chinese holy men carved into the walls, each one representative of a couple of years, about 80 years apart, starting around 100 years ago, and heading into the future by several years. You pray at the one who represents the year you were born, except that due to my unhelpfully being born before the Chinese New Year occurring in 1993, I had to pray at the 1992 man. The peak is a deeply spiritual place, as Guilin is one of the earliest and longest settled places in the country. Also the mountain symbolises the sun, light and therefore yang, while the river is representative of the moon, dark, and yin. Fun fact: Feng Shui literally means wind water. Make of that what you will.

**Entrance test thing. I can’t remember it exactly as it was explained, but basically, anyone who wanted to, could take these tests and the more you passed – in a sliding scale of difficulty – the higher up in government you could be appointed. They were a kind of intelligence test and in theory, and according to this site, in practice too, allowed anyone, be they farmer’s son, fisherman’s son etc., to become a government official simply by passing these tests. this is especially so since schooling has been mandatory for boys for hundreds of years (sorry girls, just like the West, we weren’t allowed until much later). The palace extolled these exams a being some kind of near perfect system, but I sense a little bit of propaganda at play. of course, I could be bitter since I failed the test, due to the tiny issue of not speaking, reading or writing Chinese.

***The Silver Caves – my pictures are not great, due to my not being a professional photographer and the flash/not flash choice presented their unique difficulties. However, the caves are some of the most spectacular places I’ve ever seen, expertly lit up in a rainbow of colours that emphasise their beauty. I’ve never had my jaw literally drop open before I entered one of the main caves in the system (of which most is naturally formed, but to create a better tourist site, connecting tunnels have been excavated, and as such we were underground for around two and a half hours walking through the caves); I thought it was a literary trope, but here, my jaw fell. Words failed me, except the non-word “Cathedralic.” I felt the awe I feel when entering a Gothic cathedral and was stunned by the sheer natural beauty of these rock formations, made over hundreds of thousands of years. Any camera could not do these caves justice, although I certainly tried, in my limited way, having take over a hundred photos. Those here are the best of them, and even they aren’t all that good.

****The show. First of all, apparently, it’s okay to take pictures and record during the performance so initially I was distracted by all the screens, but I personal chose not to take any pictures, so as to enjoy the show to the fullest, and I am so glad I did, as I got to fully live the experience, rather than through a screen. The show was amazing. I didn’t understand much of it, but I didn’t need to, the story was acted through the performances, and there was some English subtitles at times. Throughout, I had goose-bumps. I cried at a woman’s athleticism, as she stood on pointe on a man’s head, while a platform moved up and down below them. Although this was for me the highlight, along with men running along walls, the rest of the dancers and performers were also exemplary. The visual effects were stunning and there was a full waterfall on the stage for part of it, with water effects in the audience as well. The costumes were beautiful and reflective of many aspects of the local minorities’ cultures as well as Chinese traditions, and I feel truly privileged to have experienced it.

*****We stopped at a rural village that seems to have been preserved to be a tourist spot, but apparently, it is also a minority ethnicity in China and the inhabitants still live and work there according to their traditions. They are historically silversmiths and their (presumably, although it could potentially be daily) ceremonial garb reflects this, being heavily draped in silver. They also showed us some traditional music, a use for their silver combs that is not combing their hair, but rubbing the back of it, along with oil into the back and neck. Supposedly, it’s good but it looked like it left bruises as well. We sampled their tea; I liked it, but Hannah didn’t, finding it too bitter. My biggest complaint of China being that everything is too sweet, perhaps this is understandable. This is one of the occasions were I probably missed a loaf of context, because “wo bu shuo zhongwen.”

*******The rice terraces are silver in the spring, green in the summer, golden in the autumn, and under snow in the winter (we were at a pretty high altitude). However, the true silver is only achieved when the sun shines on the waterlogged paddy fields. We were there while it was cloudy and overcast, so while some of them were silvery, the majority just looked muddy brown.

These are just a few of the ~800 photos that I actually took over the 4 days of holiday (I blame my parents since I got the photo taking thing from them), so no doubt I have missed some stuff out, but it does cover the main attractions we went to, and I am sure that of those 800, there are many many duplicates, that I just haven’t yet got around to sorting through any more than picking these out.

I am a bad millennial as well, since while I tried all the local delicacies, I didn’t take any pictures of them, except for the snails on my phone, and since said phone has had a system update, I cannot find the photos on there to lift them off and onto my laptop. So I’ll describe it here. I ate snails (French are better since they are drowned in garlic rather than chilli flakes), rice noodles (noodles made from rice), bear fish (very tasty but goddamn bones), and bamboo rice (nice, but does taste quite woody).

Guilin was such an amazing trip, even though it was only four days long, there were so many things to see and do, you could easily spend at least a week there. I had a great time, despite spending the majority of it somewhat clueless and I had some excellent experiences, which after all, was one of my reasons for coming to China: to have an adventure.