Xiamen, Hong Kong and Guilin

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We stayed a few nights in Hangzhou, which was a really nice place to chill out...although it was like an oven so "chill out" probably isn't the best way of describing it!! It was a really nice place, but after a few days, we had seen everything. So we decided to make our way south towards Hong Kong, but to stop off somewhere on the way.
We decided to go to Fuzhou, but in the end we discovered there's actually nothing there, it's just a city, so we ended up just walking around it for a few hours and then heading on to Xiamen instead, which is a really nice costal city, and alot cooler than Hangshou, thankfully!!
We didn't bother booking a hostel in advance as we said we could probably just rock up to one...typically the one place we decided to do this was really busy, and we actually ended up not finding it anyway as the directions we had were terrible. Thankfully we met some really nice Chinese people (in a fancy hotel!) who organised for us to stay at a cheap hotel, which was actually the same price as the hostel would have been! There we had our first encounter with a massive beetle thing!! Thankfully he couldn't fly so it was easy to squish it!!

The city was alot more Western than and of the places we've been to - a KFC around every second corner, a McDonald's around every other one! We even found a Tesco's, although it hadn't opened yet! We went to the beach there, the East China Sea, which wasn't exactly the nicest beach in the world, but we were glad of the cool breeze and water. We went to the island Gulang Yu another day, which had some more beaches and lots of windy streets and old European-style houses.
We also got to go out with some of the local people and we were guests at a really traditional dinner of seafood, at one of the local restaurants! There were plates and plates of everything seafood you can think of!! Unfortunately I (Therese) couldn't eat any of it (allergic), so Sarah got to try insects, squid, shrimp, and lots of different types of fish! We have some pics we'll add in later!

Next stop was Hong Kong. How different Hong Kong is from the rest of China!! It's even more different than London is to the rest of England. It was so multinational, very Western, very commercial, very expensive, all the big shops were there: Prada, Gucci, you name it. We stayed in Kowloon, which is a seperate island to Hong Kong island, but we were able to get a ferry across to Hong Kong for something like 5 Yuan (approx. 80cent). The first day we were there we went to Victoria Peak where you can get an amazing view of the city.
They have a lights show on Hong Kong island every evening at 8pm, best veiwed from the Kowloon side, so we caught that the second day, it was really spectacular!
We found our first Irish bar, Murphy's!! Very fitting!! There's a pic of Sarah outside it! We watched the world cup final there, it was good fun, even until 5.30am in the morning when the match finally finished!!

So we left Hong Kong to head to Guilin. We arrived at 5.30am by bus. The driver was a mad man!! Actually many of the drivers here are mad!! They drive on the wrong side of the road, even with oncoming traffic, they see no problem with swerving at the last second to avoid an oncoming truck or car, they slam on the brakes, and they beep at anything that moves, actually even if there's nothing in front of them they beep!! So we didn't get much sleep on that bus!!

Guilin is a nice city. It's famous for being surrounded by karsts, which makes it really picturesque. A karst is made of limestone and over years it develops into different shapes, making some of them really spectacular. One famous in Guilin is the Elephant taking a drink out of the Li River (the river that flows through the town). There are many famous ones around the country, and they have made stories about them e.g. there's one of Grandpa looking at the apple, a camel on it's back, a wife waiting for her husband, etc etc...for most of them, if you look long enough you might see a minor resemblance!! Ha we went to look for the elephant, we found the camel and we were pretty sure it was the elephant, until we actually found the elephant!!

We went on a tour of the Longshen rice terraces from Guilin. They were pretty cool. A must see really if you're in China!
Sarah got her hair done: cut and styled, with shoulder and neck massage all for 20yuan!! Like 2.50euro!! Pretty sweet!!

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