Flowers, Skyscrapers, Malls, and Clouds in Hong Kong
What a great day in Hong Kong!! We only had one day and had to keep telling ourselves "We'll be back, we'll come back here!" because we were so tempted to run around and try to see everything. It is such a fantastic city - great energy, beautiful views of mountains and skyscrapers, and warm climate (at least on the weekend we were there!).Our hotel room was on 21st floor with grand views of the city skyline - it was so much fun to wake up, open up the curtains, and survey the skyline from our bed! After breakfast, we leisurely wandered through some of the shopping streets in our hotel's neighborhood, busy with many people shopping on a Saturday morning.
It was so much fun to just wander through grocery stores and down entire blocks of cute little shops.Due to some great advertising in the subway, we discovered the Hong Kong Flower Show was taking place in Victoria Park (kind of like their Central Park) that weekend - entrance was cheap and the flowers were amazing. It was so cool to see all the familiar flowers in full bloom, and quite a few exotic flowers we had never seen before. The colors and varieties were amazing! We don't usually "do" flower shows, so we said we would go in, take a few pictures and leave - only to find ourselves almost 2 hours later still enjoying the colors and smells of the show!
We also spent a fair amount of time enjoying the airconditioning in a few of the Hong Kong malls - we ate a tasty Japanese meal in one mall, Tim purchased some great shoes in another, and we sampled the Chinese music at a Hong Kong record store at yet another.
In the late afternoon, we wandered through Central, and made our way to the Central escalators, the longest series of escalators in the world. They go down in the morning rush hour and up in the evening to take people back to their apartments in the hills. It took us a good 30 minutes of escalatoring to get to the end - passing great neighborhoods, shops, and restaurants along the way. And yes, the handrail going faster than the foot belt is still a problem here too!
Our nighttime plan was to take a few night photos of the skyline and enjoy our last night in China. We had very high hopes of taking the Peak Tram up to the top of Victoria Peak and catching a few pictures of the city through the clouds. However, even after 45 minutes of patient waiting, the clouds never did part and all we could see were a few close-by street lights. So disappointing, but it was cool to watch the clouds blow over the top of the observation deck!
Oh well, we did catch some great glimpses of the skyline on the way down. We quickly made our way across the bay - it was getting really late! - and found a great photo spot on the promenade along the harbor. We oohed, aahed, and shot our memory card full! It was so hard to get ourselves to start moving back to our hotel - as soon as we got back, we'd have to pack and start getting ready for the long journey home. It did help when they started turning out the building lights (around 11:00 p.m.), it was like Hong Kong was going to sleep. Goodbye China!
Our late night last night took its toll and we were moving very slowly this morning. The plan was to walk from our hotel in Shenzhen across the Hong Kong border and catch the train into Hong Kong central. 
It was all so clean and new - skyscrapers and Starbucks galore! We found a great little bakery with some fantastic breakfast pastries, and yes, we did enjoy a latte from the Starbucks next door. It was our only Starbucks visit the whole trip, and it was quite fun to sit and watch business life in China go by over the steam of our coffees! We even, for research purposes, walked through the Wal-Mart in downtown Shenzhen - not exactly like what we have at home, but definitely had that trademark smiley-face!
We arrived at the border, and after a little shopping at the border (people shop in Shenzhen because prices are higher in Hong Kong), we started the crossing over from mainland China into Hong Kong. Even though Hong Kong is now part of China, they treat the border like you are going to a foreign country. U.S. citizens don't need visas for Hong Kong, but they do for mainland China - we still aren't sure how Hong Kong is part of China, but it didn't feel very much like we were in China anymore.
We purchased an Octopus card at the Hong Kong station after taking a ferry across the harbor to Hong Kong island - the cards are proxy cards that work on all forms of transportation in Hong Kong (so cool!). After finding our hotel and cooling off (the temperature was in the upper 70s with sweltering humidity), we made our way to the great shopping area they call Times Square near Causeway Bay. They had a great food court in this mall, with a supermarket that sold everything from Belgian waffles, to sushi, to gelato. We snacked our way through that place! Off to the Temple Street night market in Kowloon, we shopped our way through the flee market, purchasing a couple great finds - beautiful Chinese shirts, coins, and of course, a little red Mao book.
The morning dawned cloudy and misty, much like the day before. Tim had been sick during the night, so neither of us slept very well and we didn't get out of bed until 10:00 that morning. It felt good to take things a little slow and relax for a little while - this is vacation after all!
At first Tim and I were a little wobbly on them, but after you got the hang of the accelerator on the handles, they were a lovely way to zoom about the backcountry roads around the Li river.
The mist and the clouds lifted a bit enough for us to see way into the horizon - THIS is China at its best! I don't think we could have picked a better place or day to scoot around like the locals, passing water buffalos in rice paddies and orange groves that smelled like heaven!
After a quick snack and coffees, we took motorbike taxis to the bus stop with buses headed back to Guilin. Our flight was supposed to leave around 9:30 p.m., but after checking in for our flight, realized, it was delayed by 2 hours. The wait was long and hard - we were so glad we didn't have a connecting flight! Wearing down our iPod batteries, we finally landed in Shenzhen at 12:30 a.m. and took a most terrifying taxi ride to our hotel about a half hour away. We fell into bed so tired, but with huge smiles on our face from the day!
Today was our last "travel" day of the trip - traveling from Lijiang in Yunnan province to Yangshuo in Guanxi province.
After a run-in with a rude hotel tout, we tried to orient ourselves in Yangshuo. Apparently, our orienteering skills are off because we took about a 2 mile tour of greater Yangshuo, through all the back alleys and side streets, looking for the area of town they call West Street - where the majority of hotels are. I am very glad we got lost - it gave us a glimpse of the daily life of this city and the outlying farmlife. It is so much fun to watch people pedaling bicycle carts full of produce and talking on their cell phone at the same time. We also passed many farmers with their oxen in the rice paddies, working on their crops.
Another great day in Lijiang! We awoke again to crystal blue skies and warm weather (probably about 70 degrees for the high?). Today, our plan involved walking around Old Town Lijiang, getting a few good minutes of video, breakfast at Prague Cafe, and finding out how to get to Tiger Leaping Gorge. Tiger Leaping Gorge is about 2 hours outside of Lijiang, on the backside of the mountains we visited yesterday - the Jade Dragon Snow Mountains. The depth of the gorge is 3900 meters, and supposedly is the deepest gorge in the world (I'm not sure about that...). Many people hike the gorge in about 4 days, but because we were pressed for time, we decided to make a day trip out of it instead.
We hopped in the minibus (we were the only ones) and off we went. Through gorgeous fields of many colors, bright green, bright white - everything was in bloom. You could smell the warm crops baking in the sun - it was such a pleasant ride!! We had to go up and over a pass to get into the next valley over from Lijiang, so much of the road was tight switchback turns - and crazy passing vehicles on each turn!! They have nerves of steel here!
trek for a few days to get those views, and honestly, we had such great scenery yesterday, I think it far surpasses what we would have seen on a trek of the gorge. We ended up walking out about maybe 2 miles into the gorge on a paved, national park trail (Tiger Leaping Gorge is a World Heritage Site, so it's like visiting a national park) to the middle rapids. The gorge is so deep, you can't really see the mountains at the top. What you can see are the mountains downriver, the rapids, and steep sides of the valley.
Our first full day in Lijiang - and what a day it was!! Days like this can be described as perfect - perfect wandering, perfect breakfast, perfect mountains, perfect weather! Our french doors of our hotel room flew open to clear blue skies and sun. We wandered around Old Town looking for a breakfast place and discovered the gem that is the Prague Cafe. Yes, not exactly your authentic breakfast, but this place has amazing food, very nice servers, and excellent coffee!! One of our top ten favorite breakfast places of all time! They even had a very cute kitten wandering the cafe while we ate - and I got to hold it and play with it - and let it get up to my elbow!
The ride down the chairlift proved even more photogenic than the ride up, so we snapped away even more!! We went through three camera batteries today! Our only disappointing moment of the day was the drive away from the mountains - packed in a minivan with 10 of us, several people on laps, no chance for pictures!:(
Today was another of our travel days - we reluctantly left Dunhuang, said goodbye to the Gobi Desert, and flew off toward the south of China. Our flight out of Dunhuang left a little after noon, so we slept in, and fixed our clogged sink...Tim is a regular McGuyver - our sink was so clogged with sand from our socks, he used a safety pin to unclog the stuck drain plug.
and our stopping point for the next few days) is like the Florida of China - all the Chinese go on vacation here. In the waiting area before the Lijiang flight boarded, people were playing cards, laughing, and obviously enjoying their vacation. It felt very good to not be the only tourists on the flight!
What an amazing day!! You don't get too many days like this in your life - the kind you never want to leave, and you will try to remember every minute on those bad days when 7th graders are going nuts!
Today was our "dunes" day - the day we planned to head out to the dunes around Dunhuang. We had a lovely, slow morning, taking a very weird shower in our "stall-less" shower and eating muffins in bed (first breakfast).
After a few photo shoots and video documenting, we just sat for about an hour in complete silence taking in the scenery around us. The wind was strong and blew sand into every crevice in our bodies!! At the end of the afternoon, towards sunset, we reluctantly turned our bodies back toward our bikes and town, and headed down. We felt like kids in a playground as we "hiked the ridgelines" and wondered what angle the slopes were to each side of us (it had to be at least 60 degrees and over 100 feet down). It was a magic day when you feel like the beauty of God's creation can't help but be louder than your own voice.
We awoke to much clearer skies after yesterday's snowstorm... however, it was still cold enough that the inch of new snow was still beautifully wrapping everything in a white blanket. It was really fun to see the camel statues lining the road to the Jiayuguan fort covered in snow!
The drive to the Great Wall was so foggy, at times, you could barely see the road ahead of us - as the sun came up and melted the snow, the fog grew thicker and thicker. Our taxi driver took us to the first pillar of the Great Wall on the edge of this huge, cavernous gorge. The museum at the edge was interesting, but entirely in Chinese, so we're not even sure what the name of the gorge or even the name of the area was called (it wasn't in our guidebook either). 
Today was our first of several "travel days" - days where most of our time is spent traveling to different locations around the country. 
Our final destination tonight was Jiayuguan, a small town in the middle of Gansu province (big enough for an airport) where there is a cool Ming dynasty fortress and the end of the Great Wall. We landed through heavy clouds and snow, and realized that Jiayuguan was getting just as much snow if not more! Our taxi took us to the fortress - our guidebook said there was a cool hotel at the fort. No one to be seen at the fortress complex or the hotel there, so we had him take us back to the center of town. 
I can't explain the feeling of standing in the place where I watched tanks roll when I was in 8th grade. Tianenman Square was filled with people - Chinese and foreign - all impressed with the surroundings, Mao's mausoleum, The Hall of the People's Heroes, and the Chinese National History Museum. It all recalled pictures in my mind of a more strict period of communism in this nation's history, but today, the countdown to the Olympics betrayed their past. Quite a sight to see! 
We ventured into the Forbidden City, the ancient compound of all the Chinese emperors from the Ming dynasty onward. It was huge and magnificent - and under construction!!! The main throne rooms were covered with scaffolding and the sound of jackhammers and saws could be heard throughout the area. Oh well, they're getting ready for 2008... and we saw just about all the royal bedrooms and side throne rooms that we wanted. It was bigger than I imagined, and very grand!
One more sight on our list for the day was a church in the main shopping district of Wangfujing. It stood by itself amongst all the shops and stores - an ancient church which was still operating today, despite the communist crackdown on churches. It was very cool to see pictures of services and sunday school classes. We stood in front of the church until darkness fell and the lights of the church began to glow.
Today was our "Great Wall" day!! Of all the places in China that have called to us for our entire lives, it's the Great Wall (who didn't "ooo" and "aaah" when they heard their 7th grade geography teachers tell you that it's visible from space?). Our guide from the day before set us up with a driver and also asked us if his girlfriend could accompany us for the day to practice her English. We departed from our hotel with Violet and our driver for an incredibly slow drive out to Simatai, the portion of the Great Wall we were headed to (on the advice of our guidebook).
We climbed up onto the top and started making our way west along the wall, passing tower after tower. At one point we had to cross a river on a suspension bridge made of wood planks and one support piece of steel running down the middle - like the kind people fall through in the movies!
All in all, our Wall experience was everything we expected and more - so majestic and so beautiful! 
After 15 hours of flying we landed in China, safe and sound, although we had skipped Sunday, March 11th entirely because of the International Date Line. Our first few hours in Beijing found us scratching our heads - not only did the first ATM eat our credit card, but we wandered around central Beijing looking for our hotel at 12:30 a.m. We found it, and just in time, we collapsed into bed with only 6 hours to sleep before we met our guide.
The next morning our guide was waiting for us in our hotel lobby - Kong Lin was our local contact for the day, showing us around Beijing and hitting some of the sights we knew we might have trouble getting to. Our first stop was breakfast in a very authentic Chinese-style cafe, where the soup was cream of wheat poridge and steamed dumplings that you could taste until lunch. Kong showed us how to access the subway and we were off for the Beijing zoo, the Peking University Campus, the Imperial Gardens, the Summer Palace, and the hutong neighborhoods in central Beijing. 
For lunch, Kong took us to a restaurant outside of Peking University where we ordered beef and pork dishes. However, when the food arrived, we realized that it was not part of the pig we were used to eating - we're not quite sure what it was, but tendons and cartilage were included! Pretty tough to eat, but if you chew hard enough, it breaks up and you can swallow it - Kong was laughing pretty hard at our attempts to swallow it! We stuck with plain rice for the rest of the meal.
