Christmas Holidays

As I mentioned before, for Christmas we got given a surprise 12 day break. We made the most of it and planned just over a week of travel. Naturally we wanted to escape the winter so we headed south, first to Guangzhou and then to Hainan.

Leaving early on Saturday the 23rd, our bus took 7 hours to get to Guangzhou. We had been told 5 hours, but the roads were awful. Half of the road had been dug up and the other half felt like it needed to be. What made up for it though was the scenery. We passed through two mountain ranges, the first was just outside of Lanshan. I
knew that the mountains were pretty big, and we'd seen them at Wang Nian Qiao but these just kept on going. It looked almost alpine, if you ignored the fact that the forests were bamboo, not pine. I also didn't realise that we live only about an hour from the border with Guangdong. We're a lot further south than I had thought. anyway, the views were spectacular, and if my window had not been held together with sellotape, I'd have opened it to take some pictures. The second mountain range was well into Guangdong and was similar to the landscape in Yangshuo. Very cool.

When we finally reached Guangzhou we were met by Kristy and her husband, classmates of a colleague at school. She took us to our hotel, and made sure we knew where we were in the city. We took them out for dinner to say thank you.

Our hotel was pure quality. Her company uses it for business and we got a special business rate. It was 5 star and it showed. Wow. We were on the 24th floor and had a great view over a plaza right in the centre of the central business district. Great service and a fantastic breakfast buffet. I'm hungry again just thinking about it... And it all cost only around 40 quid for a twin. Still, that's
almost a third of my monthly wage for 3 nights.

I really liked Guangzhou. It was a real 'big' city. If felt 'normal'. Changsha was still a Chinese city, just with 7 million people. Guangzhou seemed much more cosmopolitan. It is also pretty green. There were loads of trees everywhere. That really surprised me. It was also very clean.

We mainly relaxed here and did big city things like shopping and eating western food. Over the course of the holiday we ate Chinese (obviously), American, Indian, Italian, Russian and German food.

The German food was the best. It was in a restaurant called 1920 on the riverfront. I could have been back in Vienna, it was amazing. This was where we celebrated Christmas. We drank Hefeweizen by the litre and ate the best German food I've had in a long time (and that includes actually in Germany). Serious quality. That day had been a bit stressful for me. My Chinese bank card refused to work in any cash machines and got blocked leaving me penniless and I only managed to speak to my family for 5 minutes at an outrageous rate, but that place turned it all around for me.

We managed to do some sightseeing there, including Yuexiu park, a great place where the first three photos were taken. Yuexiu park contained the big red Zhenhai tower which was an old lookout post. It sits atop an old section of the original city wall which now has strange trees with roots that look like something out of the film 'Alien' growing all over it. It was nice to see a well-cared for park, to see big trees and to hear birds. There are no birds in Lanshan.

One of the other big sights I saw was the Museum of the Tomb of the Nanyue King - an
absolutely amazing museum sited over the original tomb of this king who died more than 2000 years ago and was discovered intact a decade ago during building work. You can go down into the tomb itself and there are halls displaying all the burial goods that were left with him. Given their age, the artifacts are so beautiful, so intricate and so well preserved. I loved it.

The other was the Chen Clan Academy - a temple built to honour all the members of the Chen family in Guangdong and which acted as a kind of school for anyone sharing the surname. The decoration on this place was amazing. I took loads of pictures. Apparently each scene tells an actual story.

We left Guangzhou after 3 nights for Sanya in Hainan on Boxing Day, spent 4 nights there, then returned on the 30th for 2 more nights in Guangzhou before going home to rest and recuperate. The other posts tell the rest of the story. all
that's left to say is that we had a great time!