Day 1: Guangzhou is HUGE!

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Location: Guangzhou
Date: Saturday 31 March 2012

Boy, what a day! I'm really impressed with Guangzhou. If I had to sum it up in one word, it would be MASSIVE. The city is big, the buildings are big, the population is huge. There are 11 million people in Guangzhou, which is about half of Australia. It's a cross between the grandness of Las Vegas, the sprawl of London and the scrunch-togetherness of Hong Kong.

I began the day taking advantage of the free breakfast at the Jianguo Hotel. It was included in the great price of $61 per night I got on Agoda. The hotel is high-class, with a 5-star rating but in other countries it might only be 4-star or 4.5-star. The breakfast buffet is delightful, with a mixture of Asian food (congee, noodles, dumplings, buns) and Western food (eggs to order, French toast, cereals, hash browns). I made sure I filled up on food so I wouldn't have to bother with lunch today.

I decided to head for Yuexiun Park near Guangzhou station. Instead of taking the subway, I wanted to go via bus to see a bit more of the scenery. This had worked well on previous trips (eg in Dubai where I saw how the workers really live), so I asked the hotel concierge for a bus number and headed off.

Before going far, I was interrupted by a phone call from home. At this point, I should explain some of the technical preparation I made for this trip. I before leaving Australia I purchased a China Unicom prepaid phone card online from 3G Solutions, who received good reviews on Whirlpool. This meant that I already had my mobile number before starting the trip and had it installed in my (somewhat old now) iPhone 3G, with APN settings. The phone also has an annoying habit of wanting to talk with iTunes when a foreign SIM is inserted (as I had discovered on a New Zealand trip, which forced me to visit an Internet cafe), so I had that done before I left.

On this this trip I also took a wifi-only iPad, which works nicely on the hotel and airport wifi, but is less useful when out and about. Fortunately, I pre-loaded tiles in the Maps app and had also loaded Maps With Me, which allows maps to be downloaded for off-line use. So, I dashed back to the Hotel lobby to have a Skype call with the family. It's just fantastic what technology can do! I had no a problem using Skype here in China, and have only noticed access problems with Facebook and the pictures on Wikipedia.

I boarded Bus #256 for Yuexiu Park and marvelled at the sights on the way. This place is just HUGE! The roads are wide but they have also built roads on top of roads, going to 3 levels with train lines in some places. There are a few brave bicycle riders, but this is clearly not a place for bikes. Not so much due to safety, but rather because the place is just so darn big! Pedestrian crossings here seem to be a waste of paint because they aren't respected by drivers and pedestrians are too wary to cross when cars are coming. Bicycles appear to have the right to drive the wrong way down one-way streets and to totally ignore traffic signals. There are a lot of electric bikes, which have the disadvantage of being totally silent and therefore sneak up on pedestrians.

There aren't many blocks in the city compared to Sydney, but each block is huge. The ground-floor typically has either big banks or really small shops that specialise in building pipes, exercise equipment, furniture, safes, etc. I even found one block with nothing but pool and water filtration supplies. Above the shops are Hong Kong-style apartments all crammed together with washing and trinkets in the windows.

The journey was so eye-opening that I stayed on the bus to the end of the line. This was inspired by an excellent post I found online while searching for an English bus map (which I could not find). The posting suggested picking a bus route and just staying on it to the end, then riding back to the central bus interchange. Each trip is only 2 Yuan (about 30 cents), so you can get several hours of touring for a very small cost.

As the bus wound around the city I followed along on my map, occasionally referring to the iPhone GPS to find my location. Each bus stop is clearly named in English, making it easier to follow. The bus soon went across a bridge and I feared we would head out of town, but it then stopped and everybody got off, so I followed. We were in Zhudao Garden, on the West side of the Pearl River. As luck would have it, GD Greenway path number 6 happened to go through this spot. The Greenway is a series of paths where people can walk and ride bikes. It gave me a great vantage on some of the huge apartment blocks that reached up to 30 storeys. The blocks were so massive that there would have been 20+ apartments on each level, making them as populous as a large hotel. I also passed older-style blocks that looked fairly dilapidated. They all had bars on the windows, and in one case a brick wall toped with shards of broken glass, but I have always felt very safe here in Guangzhou. There is a notable presence of security guards, but I haven't seen anyone I would identify as police. (There was a guy with a shotgun and bullet-proof vest, but he was guarding some people carrying coin-boxes for vending machines, so that doesn't count.) Actually, there are little one-person booths every few blocks, which might be local police but but they hardly seem confronting.

As I walked along the Greenway, I noticed that I was getting a few stares from people. I'm not offended by this since I'm a foreigner and it's only natural for people to stare at people who are different, but realise I've seen very few foreigners in my stay so far. Even at breakfast there were only a couple of Westerners, and they were German. Maybe it's because I don't hang around the standard tourist areas, or more likely that Guangzhou isn't a big tourist destination unless you're coming from other parts of China. It reminds me of my visits to Japan, where I sometimes forgot that I was a foreigner, since everyone I saw was Japanese.

After the walk I returned to the bus stop, faced with the choice of taking the same bus back or taking a different route. Somebody had told me that a lot of young people in China speak English, so I asked a late-teens fellow for advice. He tried to explain the bus route but then had to hop on a bus that was just leaving, so I hopped on too, not knowing where it would go. The fellow, who turned out to have a Western name of Terrence, invited me to sit down and even introduced me to a friend of his. We struck up a conversation and he invited me to hang-out with his friends. I gladly accepted and we got off the bus and met two others. Only one, Yuki, could speak English. It turns out that his friends often get together on the weekend and today they were shopping for some baby clothes for Yuki's sister. I showed them pictures of my family on the iPad and got friendly.

They then took me through Liwanhu Park, which had been recently restored to look like an Asian version of Venice, complete with canal and bridges. We visited the Liwanhu Museum, whose collection on Chinglish signs was more interesting than the exhibits!

After a while we said our goodbyes and I headed to the subway to finally get to Yuexiu Park, home of the famous Five Rams statue, which is the symbol of Guangzhou. It was, indeed, an impressive statue and I managed to convince somebody to take a picture of me from a particular angle that has me kissing a 10-metre tall ram. Capitalism also seems to be alive and well in the park, with several gift stores selling miniature reproductions of the statue. (Yes, I bought one!)

I headed back towards my hotel via subway. This involved 3 changes of train lines, or 4 if you count a strange switchover between trains on Line 3 where the doors opened on both sides of the train and the whole trained disgorged and reloaded its passengers in under a minute. It would make Sydney's CityRail jealous.

The trains were so crowded on this Saturday night that they had people on bullhorns urging people to get on trains (although I actually have no idea what they were saying). The subway is fast, efficient and very safe due to doors along the platform that open when the train arrives, as done in Hong Kong and Singapore. It puts the Sydney train system to shame. The fares are very cheap, too. The 30-minute trip from the airport was only 7 Yuan (about $1.30).

I got off at nearby Citic Plaza, hoping to find some shops or a supermarket. I needed some sun-tan cream for my riding trip and had neglected to pack anti-perspirant, which had already made my first day uncomfortable. The weather has been quite pleasurable, about 22C, but the people I met kept complaining about the heat - water bottles are a frequent sight. I found a pharmacy that had both and spent the most I had the whole trip - 178 Yuan ($27).

While surveying the shopping centre for something to eat, a person engaged me in conversation. Turns out he is an English teacher and he spent his honeymoon touring Australia. I've quite enjoyed having the occasional conversation with people!

I managed to find some restaurants in "Back Street" and was faced with a selection of fast food, Japanese or pizza. I opted for Chinese of course! A decent food court-style meal cost 21 Yuan (about $3).

I decided to walk through a nearby park to get to my hotel, hoping that it would be fairly safe at night. Not only was it safe, but I found it populated with dozens of people line-dancing to Chinese music and riding on a variety of skates. There was s 5 year-old on inline skates and 20-somethings on nothing more than a couple of wheels under each foot, like mini-skateboards. So, sat down to watch and wrote this trip diary on the iPad (I'm getting better at touch-typing on it).

All-up, a wonderful day with serendipity adding to the enjoyment.

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