Blogs from Zhaoqing, Guangdong, China, Asia

I spent an awesome holiday with my family in Zhaoqing on 2010 New Year Day. This is the second time that I visited Seven Star Crags and Ding Hu Mountain. The previous visit was made more than 10 years when I was a collegue student. The view is still the same, but to be surrounded by my husband and my daughter, I felt more joy and warm and the views seem more attrative. It is a pity that the visit to Ding Hu Mountain was escorted by heavy rain. But the rain did not lessen our passion of climbing the mountian and worshipping the temples. ... read more

We started our day off right: we all had a delicious McDonald's breakfast. Now, this may seem a bit unhealthy, and even a bit odd since we're in the land of Cantonese cuisine, but pancakes for the first time in months was the best thing to kick off a vacation... half-way through. The bus ride to Dinghu Mountain was about 30-40 minutes and took us far outside the city. We arrived at the next town over and had to walk through it before reaching the park. We opted to pay Y15 each for bus tickets around the park and were so glad we did. The distances our buses drove us--steeply uphill--made us extremely grateful for airconditioning. The day was hot and sunny with little breeze. At the first stop (Baoding Garden) we saw many replicas of ... read more

Wuzhou was a lively, prosperous city with plenty to interest the visitor: parks, a night craft market and a busy street restaurant scene. As we left we passed a sign for a snake farm, and Richard was off, like a rat up a drain pipe. Fortunately, the local council had seen fit to replace the snake farm with a new housing development. However, we did discover a beautiful and large temple complex along the same road. As we were by then loaded up and moving on, we decided not to visit it, and left disappointed at discovering this gem too late. (That it was atop an enornmous flight of steps and a long winding path had nothing to do with it.) We were quietly confident that the day ahead would produce its own harvest of treasures ... read more

After a pretty easy journey we arrived bright and early in Zhaoqing. We got our picture taken by a girl we'd been chatting to on the train and strolled out the main entrance straight into a massive chorus of 'HELLO!' from about 40 cabbies all vying for our fare. We approached cautiously when they were all grappling with each other and a gentle but firm tug of my arm led me into one of the waiting open doors. We sped into town and were dropped by the lakeside where a perfectly sychronised dragon boat team were practising for the upcoming festival. We were roughly where we expected the China Travel Service place to be. From various sessions of research I had discovered that Zhaoqing doesn't have any hostels at all and we needed CTS to help ... read more

So anyway, I got into Zhaoqing no problems. What a relief. At the train station I caught a cab into the city centre. I figured out how it is that Chinese people are able to drive on thier roads. They appear to follow two simple rules: heirarchy and scope of responsibility. There is one sentiment that pervades all Chinese transportational dialogue, most often vocalised through honking and yelling, which is "you must get out of my way because my car/truck/bus/ is bigger than your car/truck/bus" Its like one giant game of chicken. Although I dont understand any Chinese I see them all mutter under thier breath "C'mon, try me! I'll take ya!" The second rule can easily be described by the phrase "somebody else's problem" (thanks to Douglas Adams). It means simply that what is in ... read more