Warning!: This is going to be one LONG post. I hate doing that, but still going ahead and doing it, like with many other things in life.
Mainland China, Hongkong, Macau are the countries I visited with my husband recently.
We did have a good time but just had to brave the cold, speak sign language and survive by grazing grass. Yeah, we belong to the vegetarian species. But what the heck, we are alive AND we set foot on the Great Wall of China. According to some Chinese tradition, we are now heroes! So much for the title! Totally worth it?
Here's the proof (no, not photoshopped. I would have chosen to be at least seen in the photo, in that case!)
If you're thinking that its such a boring photo, let me whet your appetite with this one:
THAT's what it took for us to get one small tick against one wonder of the world!!!
We started the trip at
Shanghai. We saw all the standard tourist spots like the Bund, Shanghai art museum, People's (Renmin) square, Jing'An temple, Jade Buddha temple, Yu garden and went on the mind-numbingly boring Huangpu river cruise. In Pudong, we went to the Oriental Pearl tv tower
and the Jin Mao tower. I know, all you can hear is, blah blah, mundane stuff, blah blah. That's all it was. Yu garden was quite interesting though and of course, the X'ing Guan photography mall, a 7-storey mall dedicated to cameras and camera accessories.
More than the city, we enjoyed visiting
Suzhou. We chose to travel by train and it went as fast as 282km/hr. Not so fast, apparently. Took us 30 minutes to reach there from Shanghai Raliway Station. It was a nice little town. Travelling by bus from anywhere-to-anywhere costs only 2 Yuans. We experienced what it feels like to be a foreigner with every single living being staring at us like we were aliens. Kids would nudge their parents to take a look at us. Duh! However, we wandered around happily here. The only tourist spot we went to was Tiger Hill. And if I don't mention the hogging we did at an Indian Restaurant called Namaste, it'd be unfair. We spent a fortune to get there by taxi and ate like never before.
The next flight was from Shanghai to
Beijing. Wow, what a blend of old and new. While on one hand it oozed tradition, culture and heritage, on the other, the modern skyscrapers kept bringing their economic strength and commercial success to the fore. Our very helpful guides filled us in with a lot more than we could take, mainly because while they were proudly narrating their history, our present was making our future look bleak. Yes, I am referring to the -13degree Celsius!!! But it was an experience to remember forever. We visited the Tian'anmen square, Forbidden City, Chinese medical centre, Temple of Heaven, Pearl free market, Summer palace, Ming tombs, Jade carving factory
Great wall badaling section, the Chinese Silk museum and the Bird's Nest 2008 Olympics stadium. It is built on the coveted Dragon line. We also learnt how much everyone there loathes the Dragon Lady. We had traditional Chinese lunch. We met some very interesting people and noteworthy amongst those is a lady called Dolly. She was 50+ and travelling alone and had more stories to tell that than we would have liked to hear. All about her daughter living in the US, her maids, her Louis Vuitton bags (she claimed it was not bought from the fake market in China. Yes, that's a huge attraction for tourists and locals alike. Replicas of famous brands of bags, watches etc.), her Pashmina shawls, her pets, her cooking, her travel experiences.. Phew!
Our adventure spirit got the better of us and we decided to take the train from Beijing to
Xi'an, in Shaanxi province. We took the Z19 train. The berth was comfortable but we were subjected to the music of 2 men snoring throughout the night. We visited the Bell Tower, Shaanxi Museum and yet another Indian restaurant called Delhi Darbar. We also saw the City Wall, Big Goose Pagoda, Silk factory, Terra Cotta warriors factory, Terra Cotta warriors, Hot spring, Bangpo museum and the spectacular Tang Dynasty Show. A picture of that is a must:
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| Yummy spicy Tofu rice I gobbled in Macau |
From Xi'an, we flew to Hongkong. We decided to visit Macau first, since its only a 45-minute ferry ride from Hongkong. Luckily, we met 2 of our colleagues in Macau and spent the day with them. It was a nice little island with lots of casinos, lots of food. Portugese egg tarts were a speciality there. We went to the Senate (Senado) square, the ruins of St. Paul Cathedral all by walk. Our colleague Guy decided to get adventurous and try the Macau beer. My husband had hot ginger coke!! As Guy put it, "now it feels like we are travelling..:) ":
Next day we spent in
Hongkong. More people spoke English here. There were more food options for us here. Yummy bakery stuff. There were trams on the roads. As for tourism, we went on the famous peak tram, Repulse Bay, Tan Hui temple, Stanley market, took a Sampan Ride at Aberdeen, went to St John's Cathedral, Hong Kong park and went on yet another cruise called the Star Ferry Harbour tour. Of all those, we found the sampan to be very.....cute?
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| The Sampan |
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| Star ferry: HK to Kowloon |
There are ferries plying between HongKong and Kowloon islands every 5-10 minutes.
We decided to take one and go to Kowloon. We saw the HK Shopping districts (Nathan road), Golden Bahunia Flower, Man Mo temple and the HK Space and arts museum there.
With that, we came to the end of our China tour. In spite of writing a novel of a blog, I feel I have not done enough justice. But this is the essence of it all. One thing both my husband and I noticed is the fact that in spite of being a thickly populated country, the public places are clean, you are not taken for a ride by taxi drivers. We just clicked photos of the address (in Chinese) of the place we had to go to and showed it to the taxi driver and commuting was never a problem. All in all, it was a rewarding experience.
