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After the arrival at the airport, I took the local bus to the hostel. This was also not the quickest way, but I can say I’ve seen a lot of Xiamen at night already. It was a small search for the hostel, because the description they gave on internet was not really extensive. Luckily the location (near the beach) and the people who are working there make up for that small bit of inconvenience.

I think I was really lucky, because the last weeks in Xiamen the weather prediction was not that nice. The temperature was high, but no sun. When I arrived this changed. The next days it was going to be sunny. Therefore, I decided to walk on the beach my first day in Xiamen. It was a nice walk along the coast, especially because the beaches are quite long and because there are palm trees everywhere. Around lunch time, I arrived at a small village, where there was a very expensive Chinese restaurant and a cheaper restaurant serving Mexican food. So it wasn’t difficult to choose. After lunch, I continued my walk along the coast and when the wind became stronger, I took a bus back to the hostel. That night, I walked around the main shopping street, Zhongshan Lu, but that was not really exciting.

The next day, I took a tour to a Hakka village. These villages are famous because of their tulous, which are (mostly) round earth houses. I was actually planning to go there individually and stay overnight in one of the tulous. However, when I came to Xiamen and immediately loved the place, I decided that I would rather have that as my ‘home’ for the coming days instead of all the hassles of going to a small place with my backpack and so on. And I was really glad that I did it, because now I was picked up at 7:30 (well actually they forgot about me and I had to take a taxi to the gathering point) and was dropped off at 18:00. The sightseeing on site took about three hours, but a bus is always a good place to sleep in. Normally also the views from the bus are nice, but the area is so full of houses that that didn’t really count this time. Of course, we only visited the tulous which are open to tourists, but during the walking bits between the different places, we could have a peek in other tulous where people still live in. It was good enough for me this time.

The third day in Xiamen I spend the morning on Gulang Yu, an island for the coast of Xiamen. That place was much more focussed on tourists than I had expected. But the buildings looked very nice. Most of them are from colonial times. It was weird to realize that I spend the last hours in mainland China in a place that doesn’t look Chinese.

Back in Xiamen, I went to a nice cafe where I am now writing my blog. It is weird to realize that these are indeed my last hours in China. In a few hours I will be on a night train to Guangzhou, where I will get on a bus to Macau. And Macau doesn’t belong to ‘mainland China’. So if everything goes well, I will leave China within 24 hours after having spent 3 ½ months here...

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