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Published: March 19th 2010
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In the wildest dreams of my youth, I never imagined I’d be hiking through a remote village in the mountains of central China, but there we were … what a Chinese adventure we had.
Our trip to China began as we cruised up the Huangpu River on March 5th to the thriving City of Shanghai, a sprawling and crowded city of about 16 million people. It’s a city of many contrasts, in particular when you view the old ancient areas of the city against the modern skyscrapers. Capitalism abounds everywhere you look, although they refer to this as their new “Social Market Economy”. In more recent years, people are allowed to own their own business. Many of us commented that it appears China is moving towards a more capitalistic society (like America has been), while our current administration appears bent on destroying capitalism and taking more control … hmmmmmmm! At any rate, we toured this city last year, so this year took a more relaxed approach to prepare for our overland adventure.
We left Shanghai on the 7th and flew to the City of Guilin in Central China, a “village” of about 500,000 residents. Thus began our Chinese adventure.
Shanghai At Night
Fireworks Show for World Cruise We awoke early the next morning, and after a quick breakfast (of somewhat suspicious looking food) we drove up into the local mountains to visit a local village and view the mountain rice terraces. It was a rather rainy day so the visibility wasn’t great, but we could all see that it was a beautiful area. After driving for about 2 ½ hours, our guide informed us it would be a little more than a ½ mile hike to the village where we would have lunch and tour the local vendors. What he didn’t tell us was that this hike was mostly up steep stone stairs … muddy slippery steps at that! It was a stair master supreme workout, with NO WESTERN TOILET AT THE TOP … just a hole in the ground to squat at. You can imagine how happy I was at that moment. The Chinese beer helped!
Since our boys had all developed nicknames over time, we silly girls began to worry that if we didn’t choose our own names, the boys might do it for us. So we decided on “Chinese sounding” names. My name very quickly became “Wee Wee”, because “Wee Wee no like
Chinese toilets”! Evy became “Shop Shop”, and that she did … everywhere we went! Sandra just had to be “Click Click” because she takes more photos than anyone we’d ever seen!
After a nice lunch, more Chinese beer and more silliness, we all headed back down the many stairs we climbed to return to our private mini-bus. We had a nice drive back down the mountains, stopped at a “Tea Spa”, where they make the tea and you can actually take tea baths then took a nice evening boat ride around the four lakes in the City of Guilin. The Chinese seem to love colorful lights. All the buildings were decked out in neon lights and the lighting around the lakes and on the bridges was really quite beautiful.
Our tour the next day of the Li River was I think the highlight of our trip. The topography in the region is really interesting, with small limestone mountains all around in beautiful and really different formations. This is actually one of the most beautiful areas in China. We were lucky also to have pretty good visibility on our voyage, which took us about 5 hours down the river
Wait a Minute
Are we having fun yet? to our destination to Yangshuo, a really charming “village”. We did worry quite a bit about Pooty’s continued strange behavior. They served lunch complete with Chinese beer on our cruise, but Pooty just had to sample the local “Cobra Wine”. Yes, this jug of wine actually contained a nest of snakes … Cobras no less, and he actually paid for this opportunity! I cowered in the corner and couldn’t even watch! But I survived to the end, and then went on a therapeutic shopping spree with “Shop Shop”! We checked into a local hotel (with a VERY HARD bed), ate a quick dinner (more Chinese food!), but then went to see a really interesting show overlooking the Li River. This show was designed by the man who designed the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony and was quite a spectacle, out on the water with the mountains lit up as the back drop. It was quite cold out, but worth the effort to be there.
For our last day, we drove back to the City of Guilin, paid a visit to the beautifully lit “Reed Flute Cave”, had yet another Chinese lunch, and then flew to the City of Hong Kong
to rejoin our ship… and a welcome sight it was! Real toilets again! This week I’m most grateful for American toilets!
Hong Kong is a beautiful and thriving city which includes a relatively small portion of the Kowloon Peninsula in China, and about 266 islands, including the Island of Hong Kong. Hong Kong officially rejoined “Mother China” in 1997 and since then has operated as a “Special Zone” with a one country, two systems policy designed to ease the transition and keep the economy thriving. The British and European is still apparent as is the traditional Chinese culture. It’s quite a remarkable city and quite the shopping Mecca! We had a lovely couple of days wandering around, and then it was time to depart China and head for Vietnam.
I’m told that some people at home heard on the news and/or saw on YouTube about our little “collision” departing Hong Kong. We had clearance to leave and had left the dock and started to proceed forward, when an errant ferry boat driver decided to try and scoot in front of us. He then decided he couldn’t make and since we were much bigger than him he proceeded to
turn around in front of us … not a good move. Our Captain saw this coming, threw the engines in full reverse and pulled to starboard so we just barely clipped his antennae mast. Very little damage and no one on the ferry was hurt but we did have to anchor at the end of the harbor and fill out paperwork before continuing on. Apparently someone on shore had video that ended up on YouTube! If you google “Cruise ship collides with ferry in Hong Kong” you too can watch!
And so our Chinese adventure ended as we sailed off finally to visit several ports in Vietnam.
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Dick Turbiville
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Wine for Pooty
Bruce, I read about the snake wine just in time. It's your lucky day! I'm saving my last bottle of grackle wine for you. It's a '97, I believe; made from unfortunates found floating in our pool over the years. Buck a shot. Hurry back. Dick T.