Hello from China - Into the eye of the Dragon - Gulangyu to Shanghai

Well, we arrived safely in Xiamen, China last Monday (18 June) and yes it is true - travelling in China ain't easy. (Just wait for our blog on Beijing where we are now!!!) Virtually no one speaks any english (at least where we landed ) and there are very few signs in english. But just when you need help some one with enough english just seems to come along and get you out of the predicament.

For example - Our guide book says - "turn east at the entrance of the airport and walk to the bus stop to the city". Which direction is east???? It's dark, it's late, no signs - do we go left, right or straight ahead? A good samaritan (who speaks english) comes to our rescue. "Are you going into the city? Us - yes, to the ferry. "Follow me, I'm going on that bus too". Us - Yay! (btw - east is to the left!)

It costs 1 yuan (15c) to go on the bus - our smallest note is 100 yuan ($15). The bus driver doesn't change notes and everyone uses e-passes. Our good samaritan, Rossalyn (or something close to that) gives us the 1 yuan each we need for the fare. She also wrote the address in Chinese of the hotel we wanted to go to on the Gulangyu Island. How lucky can you get. Good thing she did because we wouldn't have found it otherwise!

We had a good flight from Bangkok to Xiamen with Air Asia. We flew over on a small aircraft and there weren't many people on board. We paid the express boarding fee and managed to get exit row seats with plenty of leg room. During the flight we lashed out on a tub of noodles and coffee from the budget style menu.

Gulang Yu Island is a chinese tourist destination just off Xiamen city - a small chinese city with a multimillion population. Every 15 minutes during the day hordes of chinese tourists invade the island desperate to get into the many seafood restaurants and kitch souvenir stores.

We walked around the island in a few hours and the retreated to a local restaurant that we frequented for the next few days - the main reason being they sold cheap beer (Snow Beer at 5 yuan - $0.80) and served delicious dumplings. On our last visit they offered us fried spring rolls - what we got was in the accompanying pic, yes, it was offal snags all cut up! This meal is rated 2nd worst meal Rob has ever had - the worst being Hianan Chicken Soup.

Another thing we noticed when walking around the island were the concealed speakers blaring out piano classical music! Some of them were concealed in plants, some in rocks. As you walk past the music starts up.

The seafood restaurants served up some of the usual delacies such as fish (fresh and dried), shrimp, octapus, stingrays, eels and a whole lot of shell things some of which were quite large and spread their striped bodies all over the plastic tubs they were kept in. Some predominant dishes were shark fins - dried or spongy freshish. It would appear that the smellier they are, the better they tasted to the locals!

The stone fruits are in season. For breakfast we would get fruit from the local market - peaches that dripped juice when you bite (something lost in our fruit at home) - mangos, plums, grapes, nectarines, cherries, rockmelons and of course watermelon. All the fruit is really cheap too! - so we've enjoyed tucking in.

Walking around the island and Xiamen city we soon discovered that the chinese use the same street names in different cities just like the Vietnamese. One street name that particularly stuck out is FUXING LU - lu meaning street. Every city has a Fuxing Lu (again wait for the Beijing blog for more on this interesting topic.)

Booking our train tickets from Xiamen to Shanghai turned out to be easier than we had expected. At the bus stop we managed to communicate to some person who didn't speak english that we wanted to go to the train station. There were several buses, so we wrote down the numbers and we were off. Thanks to the internet we knew which train we wanted to book. When we got to the booking office we saw a woman in an Information booth who has some chinglish ( another miracle!)- she wrote down the booking details and we were of to the booking window asking another woman who had no english to book our soft sleeper berths. After the usual grunting on both sides we had our berths booked.

Later on the train we found that the woman had not booked any other people into the vacant upper berths , so we had the whole compartment to ourselves for the 25 hour journey. We were the only foreigners on the train and therefore a real novelty. 25 hours is a long time on a train, but we had our dvd players and a bunch of latest release movies to pass the time.

We arrived in Shanghai South railway station at 10pm. Fortunately, on the train we met a guy from Hangzhou who was an IT sales person with reasonable english. He let us know that the station was a fair way out of town and a taxi was the best option - It cost 52 Yuan (about $8). So we arrived at the Shanghai Hikers Hostel at 11pm - here we have a good double room for 180 yuan (about $28) and a lot of services for travellers not found at Chinese hotels.

Our first excursion in Shanghai took us to the famous Bund area - found this to be disappointing (except for the under river tunnel with its wild psychedelic light show!). Thought that the Bund would be all outdoor restaurants and interesting things, instead its all bank buildings and commercial buildings. Several old buildings, like Peace Hotel, have been left closed and abandoned. The other major problem was that because of the heavy (really heavy) air pollution you can hardly see any of the buildings - as you will see from the photographs.

Nanijing Rd and French concession were chockablock with expensive and glitzy shopping centres. One thing we did learn is that there is a ferry that goes from Shanghai to Osaka in Japan for US$150 return (website is www.shanghaiferry.com ?? ). Probably the cheapest way to get to Japan. No, not this trip, but something to think about. If we just had the time.

Had an interesting Korean meal in Nanijing Rd one night - consisted of various things in our bowls of white coloured soup that we had difficulty in identifying, but they tasted ok and we're still here to talk about it.

The Chinese government crackdown on fake goods is really starting to show - many touts want to take you to concealed back rooms in shops to show you their illegal wares - DVDs, handbags, shirts, golf clubs, etc. Things can be bought at bargain prices, but we weren't ready for major purchases at this stage of our China trip.

Managed to book our train to Beijing without any hassel - but we almost missed the train because of bad advice from our hostel about taxi booking times. Once again a miracle saved the day as we managed to flag down a cab on the main road who managed to get us to the station to board the train with 5 minutes to spare!

Next blog will be about Beijing.

Bye for now
Rob & Donna
xxx

ps
Thanks for all the comments -

Phil and Barb - not sure that we have the TAB account details with us I'll have a look and will email you if we have them. Congratulations on the new grandson.

Adel and Craig - good to hear from you, we will let you know about the train.

Robyn and Gene - are you home yet? How was the Silvermine?

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