Travel Journal : China 2007

The first map shows our routes in red and where we stayed in yellow.  The second map is a better view of the cities within China.

 

 

 

Entry posted by Tim Carlson at 6:53 PM | Permalink

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.

One thing that struck us the most was how pretty Beijing is - we were expecting Soviet-style construction and signs of communism everywhere, but were blown away by how many parks, trees, and beautiful buildings (both old and new) we saw.

Entry posted by Tim Carlson at 10:19 PM | Permalink

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).

Beijing traffic is unbelievable - we crawled for about an hour and a half just to get out of the city, then drove for another 2 hours to get out to Simatai.

The hike to the wall was steep, but we could see the wall the whole way, making it very motivating to keep going. The Great Wall is truly great - probably about 20 feet high in places and maybe 15 feet wide. 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!

What is so incredible about the wall is to see it undulating over hill after hill, thinking about the men who built it so long ago. What an amazing feat of engineering! The wall was so steep in places, we had to use all hands and feet! Parts of the wall have not been repaired, making it a very authentic, but difficult scramble over bricks and rubble. Tim and I sat down and ate our lunch between towers 6 and 7 - the whole time pinching ourselves that we were picnicking on the Great Wall! All in all, our Wall experience was everything we expected and more - so majestic and so beautiful!

That night we weren't quite sure where to eat (a little wary of restaurants from our previous day's experience), and we were very leg-sore and jet-lagged, so we hopped in a cab and headed for the main shopping district of Beijing, Wangfujing. There, we discovered a night market of food vendors that stretched for an entire long city block. Everything from squid to cicadas, lamb livers to exotic insects, we stayed on the cautious side and ate fried doughnut thingies and spring rolls. A fantastic way to enjoy the foods of Beijing without sitting down!

Entry posted by Tim Carlson at 10:45 PM | Permalink

We took our time getting up and getting ready this morning, sore from our Great Wall hike yesterday. And yes, we ate at McDonalds for breakfast, knowing it was fast and we didn't have to think about it much - we know we'll have many authentic Chinese breakfasts in the days to come!

After breakfast, we strolled around a huge grocery store across from the Beijing train station. It is so much fun to look at all their food offerings, looking at all they have in common with U.S. grocery stores, and pointing and taking pictures of all the cool, odd, and downright bizarre things they have that aren't anything like we've ever seen. It's also fun to try to guess the food item when there is no English on the package!! One stick of sausage had a picture of a cow (beef), the next had a chicken, and the next had a lion? We didn't know whether to try it out of fear or curiousity. We'll try it another time! Among our other findings were milk-in-a-bag, chicken feet ready-to-eat, donkey-hide gelatin flavor wild sour dates, and roasted ducks (with heads still attached!). We headed for the heart of Beijing - Tianenman Square and the Forbidden City. These are places of such magic and lore - 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. For dinner, another pass at the Dongcheng night market and another look at the crazy food offerings of the vendors. Forget the Minnesota "on-a-stick" claim to fame, these people put ANYTHING on a stick, fry it, and call it food!! Wow! I stayed with the fried ice cream and the lamb kabobs. We also ventured into the Beijing Olympic store to purchase some momentoes of the coming Olympics - three pins with different symbols of the Beijing Olympics.

Entry posted by Tim Carlson at 11:08 PM | Permalink

Today was our first of several "travel days" - days where most of our time is spent traveling to different locations around the country.

We awoke early this morning, left for the Beijing airport with plenty of time to spare, knowing the crazy traffic we were stuck in a few mornings ago. Our taxi just flew and we were at the airport in no time.

After we figured out how to check in for our flight, we spent our waiting time looking at all the shops and restaurants in the airport, eating at the "Flavor Tang" for breakfast and checking our email at the internet place.

Our flight to Lanzhou was uneventful and very pleasant - Air China is a very decent airline with great food and service during the flight. In Lanzhou, we found out we could only check in for our flight an hour ahead of time. Meanwhile, we knew the reality of the Chinese airlines is that sometimes, if they don't have enough people on the flight, they just cancel it. A huge sigh of relief came when those boarding passes were printed! It was also snowing heavily in Lanzhou when we arrived - the runway was not plowed, which we thought was a little ominous! It kept snowing the whole three hours we were there.

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.

It's quite a surreal town... You pass a huge nuclear power plant on your way in from the airport, and large Soviet-style buildings make up most of the town. Our hotel in town is quite ancient, but the room is pleasant, warm, and we get one channel of English TV. It kept snowing through nightfall, making our search for a "wangba" or internet cafe and food for the night rather treacherous. This is the first true snow storm we've been in on any of our trips - we hope it clears out of here because there are apparently really beautiful mountains and desert scenery beyond them!

If the storm doesn't let up, we'll beat a path toward Dunhuang in the morning - according to weatherunderground.com, it's supposed to be drier and warmer there tomorrow.

Entry posted by Tim Carlson at 7:50 AM | Permalink

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 taxi we flagged down outside our hotel proved to be a great asset for the morning - the lady who drove the taxi ended up taking us all over the area around the fort, and took us to the great wall and a huge gorge to boot!

The Jiayuguan fort was huge and beautiful - it was built in ancient times to guard the edge of the Chinese kingdom - we were drawn to it because of its stark beauty against the mountains in the background, that we could barely see through the fog. How many tourists get to see that fort with a fresh blanket of snow? We felt pretty lucky!

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).

After securing our bus tickets to Dunhuang, we ate at an amazing restaurant across the street from the bus station - we had fried apples in homemade caramel sauce which was so delicious, we were making noises which the waitstaff were wondering about!

The bus ride was about 5 hours long - and although it was a test of our bladder endurance, it apparently was much worse a few years ago before they built a wonderful new toll road linking the two cities. The scenery was fantastic as we rolled across the Gobi Desert and the mountains to the south of Jiayuguan.

We ended our evening watching children playing basketball outside a school (saying "hello" to us and then giggling like crazy!), eating steamed dumplings (again, saying "hello" to the waitstaff and the whole staff laughing like crazy!), and then collapsing into bed in the hotel across the street.

Entry posted by Tim Carlson at 9:19 AM | Permalink

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 debate about the best way to get to the dunes, we decided to rent bicycles and ride out of town to the base of the dunes (20 minute ride). We walked into Shirley's Cafe (recommended by our guidebook) and had a pleasant 2nd breakfast of eggs and toast, followed by a bike rental from the same place.

We rode out to the dunes and managed to avoid paying the 50 yuan price tag for the tourist zoo at the dunes, and rode east through the camel corral and a huge graveyard to get to a place east of the park where we could hike in peace.

What an incredible hike!! With only one bottle of water (oops!), we set out into the sea of sand which rose and fell before us. Within just a few minutes, we felt as if we had entered another world - it was just magic to hike along dunes where it was just us, the sand, and the sun. 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.

The evening ended back at Shirley's after a brisk (downright cold) bikeride back through the cemetary and the road back to town. At Shirley's, we had the most excellent fried potatoes and onions, chicken and cashews, and Dunhuang noodles - a local specialty - all washed down with really cold local beer. Mmmmm, beer....

Entry posted by Tim Carlson at 9:33 AM | Permalink

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.

Our taxi driver took a "through the desert" approach to avoid the tollway to the Dunhuang airport - literally driving on the wrong side of the road for a while and through a garbage dump to get there! Woohoo!!

Our flights to Lanzhou and Chengdu were uneventful. However, when we reached Chengdu, we had a most jubilant gate area for our Lijiang flight. What we didn't realize is that Lijiang (our final destination for the day - 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!

We took the CAAC bus into town from the Lijiang airport and then a taxi to the edge of Old Town. Lijiang has two parts - the new town (which is pretty much just like any other Chinese city) and the Old Town which is a UNESCO World Heritage site - it has charming, narrow alleys, canals, and ancient buildings. The charm of Old Town is that it is a total pedestrian zone - no cars, and thousands of Chinese tourists with their cameras and camcorders. It's so much fun to people watch here - if Lijiang is like Florida, this part of town is like Orlando. Not that it's annoying - it's beautiful and charming and in the shadow of some amazing mountains!

We ended the night with a late search for a hotel - finally ending up at the Red Lantern Inn in the Old Town - in a room with french doors and hardwood floors. The view from our room is out over the old alleys of Old Town.

Entry posted by Tim Carlson at 8:26 AM | Permalink

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!

After a leisurely breakfast, we made our way to the Black Dragon Pool Park north of the Old Town. This is THE place to photo the incredible Jade Dragon Snow Mountains - these are part of the Himalaya build up to the Tibetan Plateau. Wow. They are such beautiful mountains - and only 25 km out of town! The Black Dragon Park was a lovely place to wander and enjoy the spring weather they are having here in Yunnan province - all the trees and flowers are in full bloom! Each step along the path brought a new photo opportunity - either of the mountains, or the flowers, or the flowers and the mountains together!

After our stroll through the park, we beat a path to the bus station, where we could secure transportation to those incredible mountains. As soon as our minibus filled up, we were off! The drive was amazing as those peaks came closer and closer. There were two different meadows we could have visited - one with the world's highest-altitude golf course, and one with a chairlift to a higher-meadow view of glaciers. Which do you think we picked? The chairlift ride was beyond words - really, the whole afternoon was beyond words. Such verticality, such beautiful forest that smelled wonderful in the warm afternoon sun, and so many picture stops!

We spent a very long, lazy afternoon in that meadow, making the full circuit of the boardwalk around the meadow, taking pictures, and oohing and aahing the whole way. 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!:(

As evening fell, we walked the streets of Lijiang, stopping at a music store for some traditional Naxi music (hopefully - no way to listen to CDs before purchase), eating some delicious baked goods from a bakery (no, not chocolate filling - it's those sweet beans again!), eventually making our way back to Old Town. We ate a great dinner of pizza, beer, and fried rice at the Prague Cafe (yes, the food is that good!), and talked a long while with American students here in Lijiang studying for teaching degrees. Afterwards, we wandered the back alleys and canals looking for great photo ops and of course, a "wangba" - internet cafe - where the email might actually work tonight. No such luck.

Entry posted by Tim Carlson at 8:53 AM | Permalink

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.

Outside the bus station, we found a very friendly minibus driver and his wife who were saying "Qiaotou" which was the town we wanted to base our sightseeing from. 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!

As we approached the mouth of Tiger Leaping Gorge, we could see the amazing mountains to the west and north of us - snow capped and astoundingly beautiful. We did notice we were on the south side of the river, when all we had read in the guidebook said we should be on the north side, but our drivers kept insisting we were going to the right place.

It wasn't exactly the view we were expecting, but I think we would have had to 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.

Luckily, our minibus driver was kind enough (and it helped that we quickly learned the Chinese words for "photo stop please") to stop on the way out of the gorge so that we could take pictures of the mountains above the gorge - giving it the proper perspective it deserves. Driving back, we had gorgeous sunset lighting and the fields and farms were even more charming than before.

Entry posted by Tim Carlson at 7:33 AM | Permalink

Today was our last "travel" day of the trip - traveling from Lijiang in Yunnan province to Yangshuo in Guanxi province.

We awoke before the crack of dawn - and our poor innkeeper (sweet girl of about 25) woke up at 6:00 to give us a wake-up knock (no phone in the hotel room). The walk out of Old Town, Lijiang was sad - it was another blue sky day and the mountains were glowing with early morning sunrise light.

Our flights to Kunming and Guilin were uneventful - we were very glad we didn't spend too much time in Kunming or Guilin. We beat a straight path towards Yangshuo, a village about an hour southeast of Guilin. Yangshuo is famous for its "karst" topography - odd shaped rock (mini-mountains) formations that just stick straight up out of the ground. They are so beautiful and vertical. It was very misty and cloudy when we landed in Guilin and the clouds gave the karst formations a very surreal look. This is definitely how I imagined China to look. If there were a stereotypical picture of this country, this is what I would think of!

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.

After we found West Street, we managed to stumble upon a great hotel, fairly new, but clean and with an actual shower stall and toilet paper! Woohoo! We worked our way down West Street, found a cozy cafe with gelato for dessert after a great dinner. We only got about 6 hours of sleep last night due to our wandering around Old Town, shopping, and eating late, so tonight, we are headed to bed early! We hope to take in more karst formations tomorrow by bicycle!!

Entry posted by Jennie Carlson at 8:30 AM | Permalink

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!

After breakfast in the Drifter cafe - great Indonesian coffee - we contemplated the best way to get around and see the karst formations. We finally decided on the mode of transportation du jour - electric bicycles (scooters)! Wow, were they fun!! 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.

We headed south for Moon Hill, stopping to take pictures of the hundreds of karst peaks on the way. The limestone cliffs on the karst peaks held hundreds of little caves and crevices. 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!

We reluctantly turned our bikes back toward Yangshuo, knowing that our bike batteries were running low, and we didn't want to run out of steam in the middle of a country road. We made it back to town just fine, but the rental place had to nearly tear the bikes out of our hands - we had so much fun on those things!! Hmmm... do they sell these in the U.S.?

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!

Entry posted by Tim Carlson at 12:12 AM | Permalink

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.

Downtown Shenzhen is surreal - it's a "special economic zone" in China, which means it is a highly groomed city for big businesses. 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.

After passport control and customs, we caught the train for Kowloon and soon we were shooting away across the hilly countryside that is the New Territories of Hong Kong. Just a short walk down the street from the Tsim Sha Tsui train station is a wide, sweeping view of the Hong Kong bay - what an incredibly beautiful, sweeping view it is!!! The Hong Kong skyline is one of the best in the world, their architecture is truly an artistic passion!
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.

Entry posted by Jennie Carlson at 8:37 PM | Permalink

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!

Entry posted by Jennie Carlson at 9:11 PM | Permalink