Guangzhou, Macau and Hong Kong - 3 cities in the South

02.02.09


We arrived in Guangzhou by bus the 2nd. The city is situated by the Pearl River. It was quite strange for us to come down here after having been in the cold North of China. The temperature down here now is similar to the temperature in Norway during summer. In February! This is a weird feeling, but we enjoy it alot. We stayed at a nice hostel in Guangzhou, right next to the Pearl River. We visited the market, The Guangdong folk art museum, Shamian Island and walked alot during our stay there. The metro system in Guangzhou looked brand new, and it was awesome to use. We enjoyed it there.

04.02.09
After having spent a couple of days there we sat on the bus to Macau. After a warm busride, and some time spent in the waiting hall at the border, we finally set our feet in Macau. It is a compact, nice, multicultural city, with loads of history. And as historybuffs, we wanted to rediscover some of it. At the good Macau museum we got to understand more about this city. We also saw the old ruins of The Church of St.Paul, aswell as the Largo do Senado square in the city. Macau is famous for it's many casinos, so we dropped in at one, but it was to expensive for us to place bets there, so we just hung out and tried to learn. Macau is on the coast and facing the South China ocean. It was really nice to finally get to see the ocean. We don't get to see much of that in inland China.

05.02.09
After having stayed in Macau, we took the boat to Hong Kong. The trip took about an hour. It was overwhelming to come to Hong Kong. The city is very compact, with numerous huge skyscrapers. Finding cheap accomodation is not easy in Hong Kong, so we had to settle on a tiny room on the 15th floor in a shabby block. Even though we are used to taxi-dodging from the mainland, dodging pushy salesmen was even harder. The way they grab you and hold can be scary at times, but luckily, we survived. We walked the streets alot because this is a very expensive city, visited the Victoria peak, took the worlds longest escalator and visited the good Hong Kong museum of history. It seemed like a dynamic and multicultural city. We left Hong Kong by train for our next stop, Wuhan by the Yangzi River.

Guilin - it's getting warmer

28.01.09
We arrived by bus from Guiyang in beautiful Guilin. This is a city that is known for it's surrounding mountains. We saw the elephant trunk mountain. It is situated next to the Li River and is shaped like an elephant that has it's trunk in the river as if drinking from it. During our stay here, we also went by bus to a city closeby called Yangshou. It is smaller than Guilin and is called backpackers heaven by some. We liked the atmosphere there, and the fact that we did not have to pay to hike up a mountain there made us like it even more. In Guilin we had to pay to hike the mountains. Sometimes the price was as high as 50 yuan (approx 50 kroner or 5 pounds). Both Guilin and Yangshou has familiar food for people from abroad, maybe this is one of the reasons why so many come from other countries to visit these places. We meet many nice people there and had a great stay on both places. The 1st of February we took the night express bus to Guangzhou (Guangdong province).