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“Guangzhou is an interesting place and very famous for all the wrong reasons” |
We arrived by sleeper bus in Guangzhou. The sleeper bus was actually air conditioned but poor Cathal was still too hot. I slept fairly well apart from the constant talking of our co-passengers. It's fair to say the Chinese have an immense tolerance for noise. Even when a lady got on the bus at 4.20am and proceeded to talk incredibly loudly the other passengers slept through it. Not one that takes kindly to being woken up I crankily said "shutup" to no avail. Oh well.
When we got off the bus it was raining heavily and showed no signs of stopping. We took the subway to Shaiman Dao which is one of the islands in the city and passed by a medicine market along the way. There were all sorts of dried herbs and parts of creatures for sale. When we got to the island it looked just like Paris or London, all tree lined avenues and sculptures. This city was an Anglo-French concession after the Opium war and it has very European influenced architecture.
We realised as we made our way to the hostel that there were a number of baby clothes shops and several white couples. It turns out that this town is where visas are granted for Chinese adopted babies, so the place is full of Americans and their new daughters.
At the hostel we met an interesting Canadian lady who has a bead shop in Vancouver. She makes regular trips here as there's a huge bead and jade market. We went there with her and it was really amazing. So many pieces of jade and millions of beads of every shape, size and hue. With her expert help we bought a piece of antique jade for Cathal.
We also went on a trip along the river at night, and spent a happy hour checking out all the neon on the new buildings.
Guangzhou is an interesting place and very famous for all the wrong reasons. It used to have a very active live animal market where you could buy (generally to eat) all sorts of exotic animals, including endangered species. These animals would be displayed in cages piled on top of each other in a proximity that would never occur in the wild. It's in Guangzhou that SARS broke out, not that it's admitted officially. The offical line is that although 800 people died of SARS in Hong Kong, not one person died of SARS in Guangzhou. It's interesting that whilst we were there the WHO released their offical report which clearly mentioned Guangzhou. (We saw the report on a cable channel) Today the exotic element of the live animal market has been shut down, although you can still buy scorpions in various sizes, turtles and blue legged crabs. There are all crawling around in plastic basins on the street.
Our original plan was to head to Shanghai and then go to Japan, however now we are planning to include New Zealand on our trip so we are heading to South East Asia first. We applied for and got a Vietnamese visa and we're going first to Nanning and from there to Hanoi by train.
previous travel blog entry
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