So, when I traveled around southern China in September, I wrote a pretty detailed account of my trip. I became very busy since then and it has been taking up space on my harddrive and doing little else. No Longer. Here is the first piece.
I arrived in Hongkong around noonish, and hectic does not begin to describe the location of my hostel. Chungking Mansion is a 17 story apartment complex, broken into four blocks each with its own pair of elevators. The ground floor is devoted to money exchanges, samosa stands, and cellphone accessory stores. There are few Chinese people to be seen, and inhabitants are largely Indian and Nigerian.
The building must have at least twenty hostels, all of which have their own touts looking for people with luggage to bring in. One pitchman even went as far as to give me the wrong floor number when I asked how to get to my hostel, as if I just wouldn’t notice. My room in the hostel is a very decent sized closet, roughly 6ft/8ft if you include the bathroom. That said, it is clean and relatively cheap, and comes with a private bathroom and in-room wifi and air conditioning. Honestly, I couldn’t ask for more.
As I have recently discovered, I am in desperate need of a tailor. I know this, because every ten feet I walked outside of Chungking Mansions, a new Indian fellow would tell me and then kindly offer to help remedy my problem. They were rarely impressed with my professed poverty or my lack of desire to haul formal wear a thousand miles across China and back.
I will say that, were I of the shopping persuasion, Hong Kong would have been a great place to free myself from the burden of having money. Many have described Hong Kong as one big shopping mall, and while that is an exaggeration I can see how people would get that impression. The sidewalks are crowded, messy places, and wholly unfriendly to pedestrian use. Luckily, woven through the city’s center is a string of pedestrian walkways. Many of these walkways actually run through shopping malls, with is great in that you pray for even momentary breaths of air-conditioning after walking around for a couple hours, but crappy in that it made me want to sucker-punch the next person I come across wearing Burberry. People shouldn’t be allowed to look both entitled and emo. It is like their marketing department took the villain in every 80’s highschool movie and made them watch Requiem for a Dream 12 times, and then photographed them.
From Hong Kong, I went to Guangzhou. The less said about Guangzhou, the better. It seems like a great city to build a factory in. I did a run with the local hash runners, which was nice. I won too, though it hardly counts. Great group of guys, but they didn’t really run. 90% were walking the whole way. Afterwards, the bash was at this odd restaurant where the menu consisted of emus and ostriches and crocodiles and the like, and the entrées are displayed in a small zoo. The run itself was a bit odd too, because we saw many homeless families who appear to live in the park we were running through. I do mean families, too, living with kids around little campfires with plastic jugs of water and maybe a hammock. They seemed as surprised to have an American bounding through their ranks as I was to happen upon them.
I grabbed a sleeper bus out of Guangzhou to Guilin. The beds on the bus were a cozy five feet long, and curled in such a way as to make sleeping on your side highly uncomfortable. I got a decent amount of sleep, but was surprised to find that I had to unexpectedly switch busses. In a half-asleep daze I forgot my hat and compass, but managed not to lose anything more vital than that.
Guilin was a bit disappointing, honestly. The area features this amazing Karst Topography, giant rock pillars and bulges jutting out of the otherwise flat ground. Unfortunately, the city has a shocking dearth of street food, or even restaurants or coffee shops. Really, its a travesty. I was in town only a couple hours in between my bus dropping me off at 8am and my 19 hour train ride to Kunming at 5pm. I saw a couple parks and really walked my feet off, but the lack of eats, or just places to sit down, hurt the whole experience. I will have to return to Guilin on the way back from Kunming, but I will keep my trip as short as possible and instead go quickly to backpacker-Mecca Yangshou, an hour to the south.Next, on to Kunming.
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