Macau, Big Buddha, and the Misty Mountaintops

After a few days in Hong Kong, I fell completely in love with the place. Walking around, I kept getting butterflies in my stomach because of how excited I was to be there. The contrasts are amazing — you can shop for a live chicken and for a suit at Prada on the same block. Overall, the city seems light years ahead of mainland China in most respects, especially technology. People everywhere carry what are called Octopus Cards, which allow them to breeze through subway turnstyles, use a vending machine without carrying change, and hop on and off several different forms of transportation just by quickly passing their wallet or purse over the card reader — pretty cool stuff, if you ask me. Hong Kong is a very wired city as well; several restaurants offer customers free Internet usage while they're eating.

One of the compulsory activities while in Hong Kong is a trip on the crazy-steep funicular to the top of Victoria Peak for a view of Hong Kong Island and Kowloon. Luckily, it was a pretty clear night and the view was unbelievable from the top. In traditional Hong Kong fashion, they've build a few malls at the top of the peak which seemed ridiculous to me but popular with everyone else. While I was shooting photos, part of the city fell under what seemed like thick gray smoke, which turned out to be a solid wall of rapidly approaching rain. I quickly hid under a pagoda with about fifty Chinese people as the most intense rainstorm I've ever seen flooded the top of the mountain with water and didn't let up for almost an hour. The view a few minutes before the rain struck:



Sam had the next day off (and needed a new Hong Kong visa in her passport) so we went to Macau which like Hong Kong is technically part of China, but requires a trip through customs. The hour-long ferry from Hong Kong to Macau was brutal: Sam threw up twice, despite not being the seasick type, and I almost joined her. It was like being on a really poorly designed roller coaster for an hour.

We finally made it to Macau, which was formerly a Portuguese colony given back to the Chinese government in 1999. Its official languages are Mandarin and Portuguese, but the majority of the people speak Cantonese. The city is looks like a mid-sized Portuguese town, except it's filled with Chinese people and a plethora of casinos, which creates a really interesting cultural mixture. Sam and I hit the town by foot and wove our way through the black and white cobblestone streets to the remains of St. Paul's Cathedral which was almost completely burned down, leaving only the facade. We had a nice lunch of fresh seafood, and tried free samples of the various local specialties as we went from store to store. Unfortunately, the specialties were dried salted fish and sweet peanut candy, an absolutely terrible combination. We stayed into the night, then jumped on the return ferry which was subdued in comparison to the first one. Upon our return, Sam force-fed me Kowloon's finest street food, "fish balls" and ridiculed my gastronomic abilities as I struggled to finish. Lucky for me, they were out of squid-on-a-stick, Sam's first choice.

The next day, I ventured out to Tung Chung, the farthest metro stop from Sam's, to see the Big Buddha statue, built in 1993. What it lacks in historical significance it more than makes up for in sheer size. They should have named it "Amazingly Huge Buddha Statue!!!" because this thing was gigantic. After a few hours of walking around enjoying the scenery, I boarded the rickety bus which weaved through curvy roads along the occasional cliff back to the metro station. After a grocery store dinner and coffee at the excellent and popular Pacific Coffee Company, I headed back to Sam's for the night.



My last morning in Hong Kong was spent enjoying Sam's amazing view for the last time and eating the delicious area specialty Dim Sum at her local restaurant. The restaurant was busy, smoky, and buzzing with locals, almost like a Denny's mid-morning on a Sunday. As my first-ever Dim Sum experience, it seemed like a pretty authentic one. Here's a shot of the view from Sam's and one at the Dim Sum joint:





In order to get up north to Yangshuo, I first had to get out of Hong Kong on a short commuter train to Shenzhen, the neighboring city in the Chinese mainland. Another trip through customs and I was out into the very commercialized city, which was declared a "special economic zone" by the government a few years ago, allowing the city a unique ability to trade freely on a global level. Despite it being one of the richest cities in mainland China, the place was still home to stray dogs, people eating out of trash cans, and hookers as far as the eye could see. I spent a few hours eating conveyor-belt sushi and shopping in a local mall, where I bought a shirt for two dollars at the wonderfully-named store, Y'Pay More. The night bus to Yangshuo was the first of its kind that I'd ever seen: instead of seats, there were bunk beds filling the bus from top to bottom, which made for a really fun ride.



In the morning I arrived in Yangshuo, located in a valley between bizarre and beautiful mountains, and was approached by a guy named Robert hawking hotel rooms. After seeing my room and bargaining down to a reasonable rate ($12/night for a double with a bathroom and shower), he immediately busted out the beer and started trying to get me drunk so I'd go on his package tours. He did a good job apparently, because after an hour of bothering me while I tried to ignore him, I signed up for two days worth of trips. I realized pretty quickly that I paid way more than I should have for both the room and the tours — at least double the standard price around town. I felt like an idiot for getting scammed with the oldest trick in the book (get 'em drunk!), so I moped around town all day wallowing in my own stupidity. Here's a view of the bustling center of Yangshuo, where most of the town's streets cross:



The next day, I was in much higher spirits and decided I'd better make the best of whatever expensive tour I paid for. A guy met me in the lobby of my hotel and said, Hello. Robert send me. Get on. and then pointed at his motorcycle. I hopped on the back and we shot through the crowded streets, where we stopped to pick up a mountain bike. The old saying says that you never forget how to ride a bike, but I never thought I'd have to re-learn in crazy Chinese traffic. I managed to navigate as my new guide and I rode out of the city into the gorgeous countryside outside Yangshuo. We headed for Buddha Water Cave, about an hour's ride south, where my guide dropped me off with a local guide, a delightful 16-year old girl named Snow. She informed me immediately that she had never seen real snow, or left Guangxi province for that matter, and that it is just a name so don't ask about it. Noted. She and I wandered through the muddy rock cavern, which had room after room of beautiful stalactites. Snow would occasionally give me her insight and wisdom about the cave: this rock look like turtle, she would say. We ended up in a room with a huge lake of mud, where I was instructed to take a mud bath. I handed her my shirt (giggling ensued) and jumped in. I lost my sandal in the mud and spent 10 minutes searching for it, much to her amusement.

After cleaning off the mud, I was back on the bike riding through the countryside passing alongside fields of rice, water buffalo, and people using old-fashioned farming equipment. The farmers bodies were a cross between burly and emaciated, and they looked seriously overworked. It made me appreciative and somewhat embarrassed to have worked relatively easy jobs compared to the brutal rural life that these people are used to. We got back into town, I jumped onto the back of the guide's motorcycle, and we blasted through town to a restaurant where my choices were pig's feet, chicken's feet, and pig intestines. I opted for the surprisingly bearable intestines and vegetable stir-fry, which I asked for extra-spicy to try and compensate. At dinner, I calmed my stomach with spaghetti at a western place and chatted with the four waitresses, who were students taking a break to work for the summer. We huddled around their school textbook and I helped them with their English pronunciation, which they seemed to really appreciate. One girl's mother and grandma were at the restaurant to proudly visit her at her fancy job in a western cafe — they wanted a photo with a westerner, and I was the guy. I made sure to get one on my camera too:



This morning, the second day of my wacky adventures with Robert the tour guide, I walked downstairs and an old man was waiting outside for me with a bicycle and a wooden cart. He instructed me to get in the cart, and pedaled me across the city where I was handed off to some ladies that pushed me onto a loaded bus. The view along the way was incredible — par for the course in Yangshuo:



I arrived an hour later in a some town halfway toward Guilin and was greeted by a lady who walked with me for a bit, then handed me off again. The whole day was like a Chinese relay race, with me as the baton. This time, I was sitting in the back of a strange motorcycle cart thing along with several big bags of grain. I was able to hang on tight enough to shoot some video:



Then, they dropped me off at a restaurant where they gave me some fried rice with chicken before getting pushed into another motorcycle cart along with six other foreigners. We hung on for dear life and ended up at the riverside, where we boarded a boat to take us up and down the river. The scenery along the river was incredible, and was definitely a highlight of my trip so far. We stopped at a little island where a handful of people hawked trinkets and food. One lady wanted foreigners to take pictures with her and her two gigantic live birds (her business must be suffering because of bird flu concerns), and this guy on a water buffalo asked for one Yuan (roughly 12 cents) to take his picture:



After the boat ride, I headed back to Yangshuo using similar forms of transportation to those in which I arrived. So far, I'm really enjoying Yangshuo despite paying too much for these crazy tours. The great part about sketchy tours like this is that you never know exactly what to expect, which makes them a lot more fun. Plus, I got to ride on a motorcycle for the first time, which was a ton of fun.

Until next time,
Ryan!

Photos updated: Hong Kong, Macau, Yangshuo

Now that I'm using public computers, the ol' blog gotten a lot more difficult to update. From here on out, pictures, videos and stories may be lacking and somewhat infrequent. Thanks for understanding, and as always, thanks for reading.