As expected, no access to fb. But that’s what’s good about the blog, I still can post 🙂 So we left Hong Kong. However, I’ll be back before going home. In the meantime, one of the typical night shots of the skyline.
As planned we got to Guangzhou on Thursday around noon after taking the metro all the way to Lu Wo (Shenzen) and continuing with the train to end at the host city of the Asian Games 2010. It was interesting to see how the city gets ready for the event, everything being cleaned up nice and tidy. But of course only where the eyes can see…
The next morning we cought our flight to Guilin, which we explored in the afternoon and was extremly busy, as the 1st of October was the 61st anniversary of the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China. Thus many, many… well, literally millions of Chinese are travelling around right now as we do. A bit an unlucky timing, on the other hand it’s intersting to see the chinese way of tourism. Thus after wandering around in the city yesterday, where the moon and sun pagodas were amongst the highlights, today we went on to see the terraced rice fields close to here.
It was quite beautiful, although the huge masses of tourists were kind of disturbing. As you arrive in the potentially and probably formerly serene region, you get lost within hundreds, thousands of chinese tourists shooting away as much as they can and fingerpointing at everything they see. Be it local minorities as the Yao people or tourists from Europe.
Although I was kind of expecting it, it is still weird and I never was really relaxed, it’s kind of stressful. Therefore at the end the part which I almost liked most about this day trip were not the terraces but the wandering around a chinese village as the rest of the group was going through another prepared activity with bamboo boat rafting and a so called ‘long hair show. As we already are going to experience a bamboo boat to go to Yangshuo tomorrow we rather preferred not to pay another 70 Yuan to do that and see some women with exceptionally long hair do some freak show.
I’m looking forward to go on to Yangshuo, although Guilin is pretty nice. I expect to see that impressive scenery the region is famous for as we will hopefully peacefully drift on the bamboo boat without deafening guides and histerical folks around us.