Xiang Gang! - Day 1

After a few recent gig to Chongqing and various semester-starting meetings at SCCM, I finally have time to embark on the final chapter of my Chinese New Year trip. Guandong province's Hong Kong was our last stop before heading back to Sichuan this last february. We arrived in the morning and stayed for four nights, so the next four blogs should be a good guide if you want to get the most out of a five-day trip to Hong Kong.

Day 1
Because we entered Hong Kong from the mainland, there was an immigration process before we came into the city. Even though Hong Kong is officially part of China, there still is a different government, currency and language than the mainland. Therefore, before we took the train from Shenzhen to Kowloon we had to go through security checks, fill out immigration cards and wait in long lines before entering seemingly, another Chinese city. We got through customs and were in Hong Kong! Well, it was technically Kowloon, but you could consider Kowloon the peninsula half of Hong Kong. We bought MTR (Hong Kong's subway/metro) tickets at an computerized kiosk, waited about ten minutes for the next train, and we were off to find the Panda Hotel in the Tseun Wan district.

Hong Kong's hotels are much more expensive than mainland China. My advice is to do your homework and shop on the internet first. I was able to book the Panda，a four star hotel for only 400 hong kong dollars per night. We checked into our posh Norther Kowloon hotel, and we were off in the hotel shuttle to Tsim Sha Tsui then MTR to Hong Kong island. On the island we strolled around Central, checking out some cheap clothing shops, then ate at one at one of Hong Kong's famous diner-style restaurants.

The Peak was our first tourist trap of our Hong Kong experience. Hong Kong's Peak is located at the top of a small mountain where they have built a wok-shaped tower so you can get a view of the famous Hong Kong skyline. That area was also home to many junk shops, restaurants and a Madame Toussaud's Wax Museum. I thought it would be interesting to go to a wax museum featuring Chinese celebrities, so we planned ahead and bought discount tickets in the taobao.com (Chinese e-bay). I was impressed with the wax museum because it not only contained every Chinese celebrity in the last century (including a life-sized Yao Ming) but also had respresentations of most Western celebrities. We purused the shops and ate a small meal at Burger King (I hadn't seen one of those in a LONG time！）after that, is was about dusk, so we headed up five of six escalators to the top of the tower to check out the city lights. As you can see from the first picture in this blog, the view was pretty breath-taking. If walked around to the back of the Wok, you could also see huge houses on the hill, probably owned by Hong Kong movie stars we guessed.

The first day was a success. We checked into our hotel, learned the MTR system, saw most of Hong Kong island, including the Peak and wax museum. Coming up next...Lantau Island, home of the Big Buddha!

Shenzhen

Continuing my Chinese New Year trip, port-city Shenzhen was my next stop. It really was just a 'stop' because we flew there from Kunming enroute to Hong Kong. After shopping around for air tickets, we found it much cheaper to fly into Shenzhen, then take the train into Hong Kong. Not only did we save money, but got a chance to see another Chinese city.

Shenzhen the capitol of the Guandong province in Southern China. It's a moderate sized Chinese city (about 8.6 million people) and the second busiest ports behind Shanghai. As we drove into the city to find our hotel, I was first impressed by the towering skyscapers. Compared to where I live in Chengdu, the architects focused more on beauty rather than efficiency in their buildings.

Because I was in Shenzhen for only one night, I didn't have much time to see much of the city or surroundings, but I did get to eat the seafood. We took a taxi to the 乐园路 （le yuan road) and found a street lined with seafood restaurants. Each restaurant had an area outside the entrance with tanks filled with seafood of your wildest imagination. Pictured are just a couple items available. We also saw various sizes of shrimp, crabs, fish, some things I've never seen before and one place had live snakes. We couldn't eat everything, so we chose some shrimp, oysters and weird tube-worms things. Pretty tasty!

Stay tuned because next stop...Hong Kong!

Luoping & Nine Dragon Waterfall (罗平和九龙瀑布

Nearing the end of my time in the Yunnan province，we took a three hour train ride from Kunming to the farming town of Luoping. I was excited for this place because it contained the reason I wanted to go to Yunnan in the first place. Last year National Geographic magazine came out with a special issue featuring China. There was a picture inside with vast grasslands with sharp mountains poking out randomly. I had never seen anything like this in America and immediately wanted to visit the place in the caption.



The city of Luoping itself was not so accomidating. It was definitely a farming town, as we saw abandoned shops converted to grain and feed storage. Finding a decent hotel was the next almost impossible task. After holding our breath in the first few places we found a newly remodeled hotel for the bargain price of 80元/night. The next morning, after a breakfast of ersi we boarded a bus going to the rumoured natural spot. One vehicle change, endless potholed roads and a couple hours later, we were dropped off at what seemed like the exact spot where they took the photos for National Geographic. Unfortunately, this time of year the fog hangs in the valley until the afternoon, so my pictures didn't turn out so great. Still, the fields with limestone peaks jutting out were something you can only find here. We paid a couple 9 year old guids one rmb each to lead us to one of the peaks to get a better look. It was even more cloudy at the top of the small mountain, but the view of the patchwork farmlands was still very beautiful.



Our next stop on the Luoping tour was the Nine-Dragon Waterfall. By this time (around 12pm) the sun was out and starting to warm up. The area was a national park and it seemed this time of year most people had gone back to work as it was barren of tourists. The Nine-Dragon Waterfall got it's name from the nine different falls. However, as explained to us by the bamboo raft operator, there are actually ten now (due to natural causes). I found this place interesting because after the Nine Dragons, you can keep following a path to numerous falls behind it. If you get hungry along the way, you can find vendor selling local foods along the paths. I tried the pickled radish and local noodles; not bad. Luoping and the Nine-Dragon Waterfall are definitely a must see if travelling to the Yunnan province.

Stay tuned as we're off to Shenzhen and Hong Kong for the last leg of my journies.