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Published: November 11th 2009
Watch your head!
Benxi water caves. An other place "designed for people of chinese size" :o)Dandong, Benxi, Dalian, Shanghai
Got freedom back in China
DANDONG
After our nice but restricted trip in North Korea (NK) it was lovely to arrive to the other side of the Korean - Chinese border, namely the town of Dandong. We arrived by train from Pyongyang (pity that it was a Russian train and not a Korean one, but whatever... )and we spent the night and next day in Dandong. The two countries are separated by a river, half of the bridge is Korea, half is China. China made a real touristic site from the closedness of NK, you can buy Korean goods near the shore (there is a huge commercial activity - both black and white - here, NK imports around USD 2 billion worth of goods from China officially). There is also a half bombed bridge on the river, which you can walk till the middle of the river, achieving the closest possible spot to NK. Well, we did not walk this bridge and did not buy any more Korean goodies, as the experiences of the prior week were satisfying enough, if not even more.... One more funny item on the border: NK has
Colourful cones
Enlighted view of stone formations, impressive. Maybe a bit overdone with the various colours, but Chinese people like colourful, vivid scenes. I like it too. built a lunapark on their side of the river to show to the curious chinese/westerners how happy life is there. However, we could see from the train that nobody uses this luna park, it's just decoration. They also have decorative construction cranes and other equipments on their shore, which never actually work, but might give the impression that NK is happy and booming. They are so naive.
BENXI water caves
After Dandong we headed to Benxi, which is a middle of nowhere mining town NE China... there is nothing there except for a watercave in the neighbourhood, this was the sole reason for our visit. So we hunted a taxi to bring us to the caves, which were impressive enough thanks to the colourful .lightings on the various stone formations, but the best part was the section which we visited by boat (approx 30 min trip, not bad). The chinese really like to give fantasy names to everything, most of them are called "heavenly" or "charming", so all the formations got their own names, sometimes really funny.
DALIAN
The weather in Benxi was really cold, did not move from around 0 C even during the day,
Top bunkbed on the night train
Yes, we got the top bunks from Jinan to Shanghai, as these were only available. On Chinese trains there are 3 bed levels, lower, middle and top bunk. Funny but actually we think the top is the best as people dont climb over you :o) so we decided to immediately proceed towards the south. We spotted Dalian on the map as a nice beach town and thankfully there was a bus departing the same day, hallelujah, go to the sun! After arrival we realised that the summer season was over in Dalian, as it was quiet empty, however the prices were still reflecting the high season and we did not find a youth hostel there, so after one night we decided to take a ferry to further south. But during the day we visited the probably most interesting tourist site of Dalian, being the German district and the Russian street. The buildings there were built in European style and the atmosphere felt a bit like at home, so we strolled around for some hours, passed the local market, where we had street food again, yummie... If someone told me 2 months ago that we would eat street food most of the time and would not have any stomach problems, I would not believe it. But actually, this is the case. We have street food 1-2 times a day and really no issues, and the prices are great. We can have lunch below 1 EURO, try
Futuristic cable ride
A view from the cable car under the river in Shanghai from Bund to the business district. There were many screens and effects, approx a 10 min ride. to do it in Europe.... no chance.
Sunny SHANGHAI
After the night ferry we immediately took a day train to Jinan, from where we continued by night train to Shanghai. We did not originally plan to visit Shanghai, but logistically this was the most convenient. And we did not mind at the end, as a temperature of 25 C was welcoming us there! Finally we could change to flip flops and T-shirts... so great feeling.
We only spent 2 nights in Shanghai, first day we wandered around the city, visited the skyscrapers (Koen, we took a picture for you with the new HSBC building, which is still under construction... impressive!) and some other touristic sites but we did not overdo it. We ended up in park eating watermelon :o). The funniest part in Shanghai was the small cablecar that brings you from one side of the river to the other side under the water. They tried to make this trip special, so you can see every kind of lightshows, screens, looks futuristic but in a bit old fashioned way. We liked it though! Next day was a real adventure. We decided to visit one of the watervillages
Especially for the Belgians...
Atomium... eat your heart out!!! ;o) By the way, this is the Shanghai TV tower. near Suzhou, so we went to the bus station to buy a ticket. Well, the guy said he could not give us a direct line ticket, we had to change in a town, which was all right for us. When we arrived to this town, we bought an other ticket to our final destination and waited for the departure at the gate (in China you board the buses as you do boarding at airports normally, strange system but it's well organised, so you have a good chance to catch the right bus, which would be difficult if you only had to rely on the destination boards in the bus window written in chinese.... especially if you are not going till the final destination...) So we were waiting for our bus, but at the end it did not depart for some reason (looked like we were the only humans trying to get to Lushi). A lady approached us (aquaintance of the bus staff) and guided us to a local bus and then left us alone. What could we do, we took this bus and had no clue where it was going to. When we arrived to the end stop we went
Koen, this is for you!
The new HSBC building with double towers is currently being built. The top floors will be occupied by Carlton - Ritz hotel. WOAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH! to the bus attendant (they have this too in China, not only the driver) and asked her how to get to Lushi as apparently we were not there yet.... then she pointed to some pedicabs near the bus telling us this is the way to continue our trip... hahahaha... so we had our first pedicab experience which was quite funny,the driver (pedaller) was riding as a maniac between cars, trucks, bicycles and other means of traffic... we made it to Lushi at the end. This was a nice small touristic village, houses with white washed walls, dark roofs and small canals in some areas. We strolled around in an hour or so (off tourist season) and from here we caught a bus to Suzhou, the town of silk production. Here we had time to visit the silk museum which gave us an overview how from silk worms you can get to the nice silk dresses. It was interesting, best part with the worms, they live on mullberry leaves (for the Hungarians: faeper levelek). From Suzhou we went back to Shanghai for our last night there before departing to HuangShan. Ah yes, before I forget, Shanghai will be the venue for
the World expo in 2010, so there is a lot of construction going on there.
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Patrik
non-member comment
Atomium rules !!!
Fewer balls and not nearly as shining... try again ;-) Do like the fondue though, any chance of bringing one home? Not that I don't like the gulyas every time, you know I do, but you should definitively share these cultural experiences ;-)